A gym fanatic suffered a near-fatal heart attack on a night out after becoming addicted to the effects of taking a cocktail of steroids. Ryan Harriss, from Harlow, Essex, collapsed on a night out with friends six months after first taking the performance-enhancing drugs. Once in hospital, doctors discovered the then 22-year-old's heart had swollen to the point it was much larger than normal, and his blood pressure had gone off the scale. They warned Mr Harriss he would die if he continued to place his heart under the strain of taking the drugs. There and then he vowed never to touch steroids again. Mr Harriss first began the drugs after seeing how well they had worked for friends he trained with at the gym. While he had been working hard, he wasn't seeing the same results as others. It was when friends told Mr Harriss that he would never achieve the results he wanted without the help of steroids, that he experimented for the first time. 'My metabolism is apparently really fast, so I shed weight really quickly and it makes it really hard to maintain muscle mass,' he said. 'There were guys around me who didn't seem to be trying as hard as me but were getting much better gains. 'I didn't even think about it. My next pay cheque that came in, I went to a friend of a friend and I ordered them in. 'For most of these guys, they suffered no problems at all.' After starting taking anabolic steroids, Mr Harriss admits he became addicted to how his body reacted. 'The difference was instant,' he told MailOnline. 'I started noticing the gains immediately. You are supposed to do steroids in courses, but I saw myself getting bigger and bigger. 'My arms toned up, my chest and back muscles were more defined and I went from a pretty average body to hench in a few weeks.' Determined to get bigger and bigger, he began to up the dosage.