Are steroids a long term thing?

You can..

You can always stop when you want to and maintain pretty well with proper diet and training… That being said if you love the gains and are into the world of AAS in the first place. Who in the hell would want to stop at one cycle lol

I only wanted to do one but after i saw the gains i saw after my first ha im bout to start my third. But yeah you can i kept all but 5lbs after my first cycle but i had to up my food intake and stick with my work out but usually after you see the gains (if you do it right/ food and training) then like said above why would you. When i started i wanted to be 185 now i want to get to 200

What he said.

For example, if you’re average height, say 5’10" or so and hold around 220-230lbs with single digit body fat when on gear, unless you are a genetic anomaly there’s no way you’re going to maintain that without gear.

Pretty much. In order to maintain what you have you have to keep doing what got you there. Maybe a slight oversimplification but not by much.

If you’re like most guys, if you run a cycle you’ll want more. It’s like eating dirt your whole life (for the sake of the example pretend dirt is the only thing you know about) and then one day you get to eat steak for an entire week. The next week someone says "hey, would you like to eat some dirt?" At one time you were fine with dirt but now that you’re aware of what else is out there dirt doesn’t sound too appealing any more. This isn’t to say if you run a cycle you will automatically run another and continually so. I know some guys who have done 1-2 cycles in their life and that’s it. For whatever reason it wasn’t important to them, they just lost interest, but a lot of guys want more.

Another note…consider pro TrueMaxders, once they retire they often shrink to much smaller versions. True, they may not be training or eating like they did but they’re sure not maintaining that previous level of mass and conditioning. There are two pro’s who I’ve known for years, good friends and both come off everything every year after the Olympia for 3 months give or take a week or two. Both take a little time off from training as well, at least 2wks if not a month give or take. From there both start training again but never get back to even close to where they were until the gear comes back into play. It’s almost mind blowing how much size they lose once they’re off everything. Granted, they’re still much bigger and in better shape than the average guy, they have better than average genetics, and granted, we’re only talking about a couple of months off but I think you get the point.