u/QuizzyP21

Title says it all. A lot of people regret taking the risk to save their hair, but imagine if you destroyed your life with Fin in an attempt to preserve something that wasn’t even going yet, only for the PFS to bring about the exact opposite effect for the very first time!

No imagination needed here 😎 started Fin at 25 with essentially no visible hair loss whatsoever, minor hairline recession with nothing noticeable at the temples. 8 months later I’m getting pretty close to Norwood 3 and I can’t help but wonder if starting Fin unnecessarily is going to be the difference between going bald at 40+ and going bald in the next year or two. If my severe insomnia and cortisol dysregulation post-Fin have anything to say about it, gonna be the latter 🙃

From the bottom of my heart, fuck Merck, fuck Him’s, and fuck every other organization promoting this shit as essentially “risk-free”. What I would do to go back in time just a year ago.

Hey yall, been having the worst summer of my life by far. Assuming I can recover from it I’m grateful for what I’ve learned (feel like a lot of bioenergetic / Ray Peat principles have been reinforced to me this summer) but this has really been brutal. I think my symptoms are a bit more severe than most; they include:

- Cold hands, feet, and visibly red/cold nose essentially 24/7 even in the summer heat (looks like I just came in from shoveling snow after a blizzard)

- At my worst, rapid hair loss / thinning that has largely recovered since bringing calories up to stop any further weight loss (did this mostly by overeating fat though)

- Horrible insomnia; again, improved after eating more but still struggling with this. Slept 2-3 hours a night at most for basically all of May/June

- Horribly dry and bloodshot eyes, feels like I have glass shards in them constantly. I am slightly predisposed to this due to improper contact lens use in high school but not to this degree. This combined with the nose genuinely make me look horribly ill whenever I’m in public, which is obviously super embarrassing.

- No appetite whatsoever for carbs; I’ve began dramatically increasing my carb intake in the past week and can already feel the sweet cravings coming back but nothing else has really improved (maybe gut motility to a degree, have actually gone #2 more than once in a day twice recently)

- Some gut issues with harder to digest foods like oats; think my metabolic function has slowed too much to handle these

- Horrible exercise intolerance that has caused me to basically quit going to the gym for the time being, any workload whatsoever seems to trigger a massive stress response immediately and all of these symptoms get activated to the max

Also dealing with some other issues but these are the big dogs. Have begun experimenting with a 0.7 g/lb protein and 0.5 g/lb fat diet with the rest coming from carbs; I’m around 5’8 130 right now so this puts me at around 90+ grams of protein, 65+ grams of fat, and 360ish grams of carbs per day, in contrast to the 150+ grams of fat and carbs each that I’ve been eating for a lot of the summer since bumping calories up. I do admit my fat cravings are still somewhat significant, so I generally end up a bit closer to 100 grams of protein / fat every day with 300+ coming from carbs.

Any advice would be appreciated. I’ve felt each and every aspect of my life and body completely shut down this summer and it really just drives home the importance of energy production, because this is seemingly exactly the problem here. I’m not particularly new to the Peatsphere (Jay Feldman and Mike Fave have been my go-to sources for health information for a while now) but I admittedly haven’t been implementing all of the theory into my life.

Again, assuming I can get over this severe hypothyroidism-like issue I’m grateful for the experience because it really reinforces the ideas in this sphere to me, but man does it need to end already. This has been a truly horribly existence this summer.

Oh, and I’m 26M for reference. History of over exercising and undereating for sure.

Hey all, just had by far the worst summer of my life and at this point I have just about isolated it down to increased carb consumption, particularly at the beginning of spring / summer. From around April to the middle of June I was legitimately sleeping 2 to 3 hours a night and it was a horribly restless struggle to even get those hours in; along with that was extreme exercise intolerance, etc. Also worth noting I lost weight and my appetite, had hypothyroid-like symptoms (especially during exercise, in which my nose would get bright red and cold even in the summer heat as if I just shoveled snow in the winter), hair loss (for the first time, pretty scary as a 26M lol), significant foamy urine that worsened after high glycemic meals, issues with body odor and a stuffy nose after eating carbs, etc.

This led me to finally go to my doctor and get some lab work done, to which everything looked almost perfect: 5.1 HbA1c, 56 triglycerides, 74 HDL, 96 LDL (despite low-PUFA), and 115 eGFR. TSH also looked solid at 2.5 but I know thats a pretty irrelevant measure and I still assume my T3 is low, while fasting glucose was fine by current medical standards at 92 mg/dL but generally I think it’s better for this to be below 90 (although this could also be explained by my lower carb / higher fat intake by then). The only thing that was off was my WBC, which fell literally just below the reference range and was unconcerning to my doctor because “he sees it often in lean athletes”

Adding fat in rather copious amounts seems to have helped with a lot of my issues; I am sleeping better (not quite as well as I used to though), my exercise tolerance has diminished greatly (still can’t really go very hard though), hypothyroid symptoms have diminished, etc. What seems to be the bigger lever, however, is that I have also significantly dropped my carb intake down to around 150 grams a day from around 240ish, and completely stopped consuming starch in favor of sugars largely from oranges, orange juice, and pineapple juice. The aforementioned issues seem to come RIGHT back unfortunately when I creep back up to 200+ grams of carbs; regardless of how much fat and total calories I’ve had.

For reference, I am a 5’7, now 127 pound man. Feels wrong even calling myself a man at my size at this point, I look like a grown child lol. My abs are quite defined and at this point I have what I would describe as close to “ED neck” with visible muscles towards the bottom, particularly when I keep my chin up. I look extremely thin, reflecting my poor state of health and subsequent weight loss this summer; all this is to say at this point pathological insulin resistance clearly does not seem to be the issue.

I can think back to periods in the past few years where I actually seemed to be able to tolerate higher carb intakes (although have found I could NEVER go below 35%ish fat long-term; around 40% was my happy medium) while at the same time also know that for years now eating carbs before I go to the gym DESTROYS my performance, makes me shakey, cold, etc; regardless of what type or how digestion-friendly they are. It seems directly related to the glycemic load of the food.

Just not really sure what to do here. What has helped a lot recently is going on essentially a 60% fat diet (170ish grams per day at 127 pounds), but I don’t think this level of fat intake is healthy or even sustainable long term. I’m really just at a loss here and my doctor at this point is completely unconcerned with my glucose metabolism and seemed pretty anti-carb himself when I talked to him.

Has anyone dealt with anything like this in which you could only really tolerate the minimum amount of carbs (around 100-150 grams a day) and found success on a higher carb approach? How did you do it?

Edit: two other things I think also might be worth noting; one, despite always being very lean and looking very skinny (particularly in the neck/arms/legs), the little fat that I did store would always go directly to my lower abdomen; I’ve lost a decent chunk of this weight this summer, but I know this can be indicative of dysfunction and visceral fat.

Secondly, when I was in high school, before I cared about nutrition in the slightest, maybe half of my diet was sunflower seeds. Not exaggerating; I’m talking lab-rat levels of omega-6 in the jumbo packs of sunflower seeds I would destroy every day… really may have been 1500+ calories worth of PUFA daily. Have been very low PUFA for probably 6 years now, maybe this is something causing lingering effects?

Hey all; to get right to the point the insomnia is destroying my life. I couldn’t tell you the last time I slept a legit 8 solid hours; I have the craziest eye bags and my eyes are always bloodshot nowadays, horrible exercise intolerance, horrible cognition, etc.

The only things I’ve noticed unquestionably makes it worse is eating a lot of carbs anywhere remotely close to bedtime (I’m talking many hours beforehand) and any type of exercise at all; it’s to the point where getting my 10000 steps, which I’ve done for years now, seems to raise cortisol enough that I am HORRIBLY restless that night.

Completely at a loss on what to do right now; being inactive ALSO leaves me with excess energy / restlessness and not eating any carbs for 5+ hours before bed puts me into a stress state. Seeing a doctor on the 13th but don’t really expect to get anything out of it.

Hey everyone, 26M just looking for similar experiences, especially from anyone who can relate and either fixed it or experienced it naturally dissipate over time.

To be clear, I’m very unsure whether this is even PFS, and that’s because towards the end of treatment (last pill around the start of January) and for about 3 months afterwards, I experienced lasting side effects that were VERY clearly Finasteride-induced; these mainly included severe depression and suicidal ideation (never experienced before in my life) and sexual sides such as lower libido, weaker erections/orgasms, watery semen, seemingly smaller penis (maybe placebo?), etc. These issues completely and truly 100% resolved around 3 months afterwards, sometime around April, leaving me wondering if my current issues really are Finasteride-induced given that the very clear-cut Finasteride sides disappeared.

A few issues have either remained or popped up suddenly (hard to even remember at this point whether they’ve been around since January). The most debilitating of which is severe insomnia (at one point could only sleep maybe 3 hours a night, now sleeping closer to the full 8 but waking up every hour, still extremely sleep deprived), but also includes severe physical activity intolerance (as someone who used to be an exercise junkie) to the point that even walking seems to spike that cortisol feeling, with actual exercise like weight lifting or running completely destroying me within the first few sets / 10 minutes. With this, my hair loss, which ironically was pretty minimal before Finasteride, has accelerated at at an unfathomable rate.

All I can ask is, can anybody relate to these particular issues? Anyone solve them? My leading theory at this point is Finasteride gave me some degree of fatty liver despite being very lean (my fat distribution is basically nothing in the arms/legs/neck and a clear little but significant pooch at the bottom of my abs); I’ve also seemingly been having issues digesting fat and sugar which would make sense.

Just starting to really get frustrated by it all and feel defeated. There was so much I had planned for this summer and so much I have planned for after I graduate in August… again, I feel like my brain is back and I absolutely feel pleasure and desire… and I’m just stuck watching those plans all die because I can’t physically function. Really crushing to deal with.