A screenshot of the email exchange was soon widely circulated on the Misc sub-forum of Bodybuilding.com, and Ronnie’s deadpan reply quickly became a popular catchphrase on the website and various other bodybuilding forums.
It also inspired a number of humorous images.
Spread
The catchphrase soon came to be used as a way to mock the commercially successful Cell-Tech product line, deemed by many members of the Bodybuilding.com forum community to be over-hyped and relatively ineffective for its price.
Due to the naive nature of the question and Ronnie’s sarcastic response, the catchphrase was often employed by Misc forum members to give troll responses to unsuspecting members requesting honest workout and nutrition/supplements advice.
This often lead to confusion among new members not yet in on the joke as to whether Cell-Tech was a legitimate product or an illegal substance similar to anabolic steroids.
Because of this, forum trolls often supplemented the joke by making references to “cycling” and “stacking” Cell-Tech, like one would steroids.
The catchphrase gave birth to a variety of images mocking the Cell-Tech brand, usually in the form of photoshopped photos of Ronnie Coleman and other professional bodybuilders holding or using the product (bearing the catchphrase or some variation of it as the caption), and humorous before-and-after images depicting healthy individuals becoming obese due to frequent use of the product (largely because of the product’s purported high-sugar content) or displaying no visible difference at all.
The catchphrase and related image macros spread to various other bodybuilding and fitness forums, such as Testosterone Nation and Anabolic Minds.
Decline
As is the nature of catchphrases, its use rapidly declined once it reached peak popularity, estimated to be 2006-2007 (judging by its prevalence in archived forum threads on Bodybuilding.com).
To this day the catchphrase is still quoted on weightlifting forums, but is generally frowned upon, and the meme lives on mostly through the “dat dere X” (X referring to any arbitrary object) phrase being a standard part of casual bodybuilding lingo on the Internet (e.g. “dat dere protein”, “dat dere corn bread”, “dat dere gyno”, etc.).
