u/stainless13

At least hoping it was a meteor.

[it's a novel, TL;DR summary: good]

43M. Back in early December a gout flare-up prompted some bloodwork, which prompted an honest chat with my doctor, who told me I was getting close to walking through a door I wouldn't be able to walk back out of if I didn't start making some changes. 304.8 pounds, metabolic dysfunction, the lot. Started back in the gym, cleaned some things up, and went down the peptide rabbit hole about a month later.

How AI helped me track things

I've been using a Withings scale, bpm, and sleep tracker for years, but didn't do anything with the data. I used Hevy to track workouts and ride my Peloton for zone 2 cardio. My Apple Watch is my daily tracker. I worked with Claude to start importing all of it on a daily basis so it could start analysing things (I didn't build an app or anything and am not trying to sell you any of the preceding products, I have no financial relationship with them other than being a customer). I then would import bloodwork, my supplement stack, and have it evaluate what might help influence my numbers and test those theories at the next set of bloods.

Enter Retatrutide

A friend got me going on Reta, which I titrated up to a working dose of 8mg, split across two doses/week. My diet sort of cleaned itself up on its own and I ended up at around 2000 calories/day, which was a pretty big deficit in hindsight. Weight started falling off (again, in hindsight, a little too quickly).

Trying out Tesamorelin

Saw a lot of content about Tesamorelin, did some research, and decided to give it a go, as I figured I had a large amount of visceral fat, which was confirmed by my DEXA scan, where I was double their optimal range. 8 weeks later, my follow-up DEXA reported significant reduction in visceral fat but my bloodwork indicated my IGF levels were supraphysiological and my fasting insulin levels were worrying. Exit Tesamorelin to see where levels settled back at.

The rest

In typical Peptide Reddit fashion, I've tried bits and bobs of the following: GHK-Cu, SS-31, MOTS-C, Epitalon, DSIP, 5-amino-MQ, NAD+, and KPV. Some worked better than others, I'll probably continue with GHK-Cu and KPV for now.

What the biomarkers showed

Retatrutide definitely impacted my heart rate, raising it about 10bpm at my combined 8mg dose (I never took a single 8mg dose, probably would've raised it more). Splitting the dose helped prevent the other side effects. Now I'm back to a weekly 4mg dose on Sundays and the results have been interesting: my heart rate peaks on Tuesday night and declines gradually the rest of the week.

Another thing I noticed was with Tesamorelin: I ran it at 2mg 5 days on / 2 days off just to keep the vial math easier. After enough time I noticed a trend with my weight: I took Tesa Sunday-Thursday and noticed the water weight would show Tuesday morning and build up to peak on Thursday before going away on the weekends, only to come back again the following Tuesday morning (30ish hours after restarting Tesa). So the water weight thing is real, per my data at least. It was never a ton, usually 1.5-2 pounds. If I run Tesa again it would be at a 1mg dose because of how my IGF and insulin were affected last time.

Was Tesa solely responsible for my visceral fat loss? Honestly, probably not, Reta was doing the heaviest lifting in that regard. Percent change in visceral fat wasn't meaningfully different on Tesa and not on it.

After losing 90 pounds, what the biomarkers also showed

Just about every one of my blood markers showed drastic improvement (triglycerides down 71%, HbA1c normal from basically diabetes-level, ALT optimal down from NAFLD levels)...except cholesterol and lipids. I had changed everything I could change but those numbers didn't budge, so I got my Lp(a) and ApoB checked, and they were off the charts for cardiovascular risk. Here's the thing though: if I hadn't had done everything else already, I'm not sure those numbers would've jumped out as much as they did. I'm getting treated now (went ahead and got on a statin, I know I know).

So in a way gout saved my life. This part of Reddit (which I lovingly call Redditrutide) has been an essential resource as well, and I'm trying to give back by sharing this novel of my experience.

If you’re losing weight on a GLP-1 or peptide stack and you don’t change your dose, your mg/lb is quietly going up over time. Curious how the community thinks about this. Hold the dose steady, scale it down to keep mg/lb consistent, or doesn’t matter?

I’ve lost about 25% of my body weight so my dosage has gotten 33% stronger per lb, for example.