So you can't get this body through diet, exercise — and supplements?

Christian Boeving is, in our mind, the real life Brooke Wyndham, the fictional exercise queen from Legally Blonde, whose alibi for the murder of her husband is a liposuction procedure she needs to keep quiet or risk losing her entire empire.

But in this case, Boeving is a real person, and a real fitness model, and he was, until recently, the spokesman for Iovate Health Sciences' dietary supplements, including Hydroxycut.

That was until he admitted, on camera, that he took steroids. The camera he acknowledged this tidbit to was filming for the documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster, which was screened at Sundace in January.

Granted, Boeving's steroid use was doctor-prescribed, but Iovate isn't in the business of hashing out details; they're in the business of public perception that their product works all by itself. So they fired Boeving.

While he may not been breaking the law, Mr. Boeving was apparently breaking a taboo in the bodybuilding world, one that Mr. Bell’s documentary was aiming to expose. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been looking at muscle magazines,” Mr. Bell said in an interview. “I would see these guys that are huge, and they’d say, take this pill and you’ll look like this. We know that’s not the case.”

Mr. Boeving said he had worked with Iovate for nearly nine years and was in the midst of renegotiating his contract when “Bigger, Stronger, Faster” had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Mr. Boeving said that after the premiere, he was suspended without pay; he flew to the Iovate headquarters in Ontario to plead his case, but, he said, MuscleTech has not renewed his contract.

Mr. Boeving said he was not allowed to say how much the contract was worth, but said the company’s contracts for athletes typically ranged from $36,000 to $300,000 a year. “I was able to live off my contract, put it that way,” he said.

Though the loss of income is tough, Mr. Boeving said, he does not regret his on-screen candor.

And also: Boeving is still not exactly clear on how Iovate thinks its customers might conclude that his amazing body might not be the direct result of products like Hydroxycut and Nitro-Tech, but from, uh, steroid use. And that they, too, might have to get on the juice to look like him.

It's the same scandal Anna Nicole Smith almost faced when her fridge was photographed stocked with Slim-Fast, when she was paid to promote Trimspa. She probably took Trimspa too, but execs there couldn't have been happy with the public message she was sending — that even she needed something else to appear semi-conscious in public. Then again, Smith was dead as this point, so her contract violation was essentially moot.