April 2026
There are four research chemicals in my fridge right now.
I've always been the type to take something and push it further than I probably should. Not because I have to, but because I can't leave it alone. Lately that thing has been me. My body, my health, how I feel every day. And the way I've been pushing it is peptides.
I'm not going to pretend this is smart. I don't actually know if it is. That's kind of the whole point.
Honestly, it started with my little brother. He got on retatrutide and lost ten pounds in a couple of weeks. I watched it happen right in front of me. That's what actually made me start. Just reta, at first.
But the reason it stuck goes deeper than that. After Ryft ended, I needed something I could control. A startup doesn't care how hard you work. The market doesn't care. You can do everything right and still watch it fall apart. But the gym gives it back to you. You put in the work, you eat, you sleep, and your body responds. Nothing else in my life had been that honest in a while.
For a long time after everything ended, I felt like I had no proof I was moving forward. No pilot, no product, nothing I could point to. The gym became the one place I could see progress. Small numbers going up. A little more each week. It sounds stupid but it kept me sane.
So I leaned into it. And with me, leaning in is never just leaning in. I don't do things halfway. I did the same thing with Ryft, the same thing with every project I've ever cared about. I take one small interest and I turn it into an obsession before I even notice it happening.
It started with just wanting to recover faster and look a little better. Normal stuff. Then I started reading.
Once I start reading, I can't stop. Every study, every forum thread, every random guy online who's been running this stuff for ten years and swears by it. I read the science and then I read the people who ignore the science, and somewhere in the middle I try to figure out what's actually true.
That's the part most people don't get about how I think. I don't want the surface level answer. I want to understand the thing well enough to have my own opinion on it. With peptides that meant learning what each one actually does, what the risks are, what nobody has data on yet. The more I read, the more I realized how much of this is people guessing. Confident, but guessing.
And I still decided to try it. Knowing all of that.
Retatrutide is the one that actually changed something in my head. It started with food. The constant wanting, the background noise of always thinking about the next meal, it just went quiet. But it didn't stop at food. The same pull that used to push me toward a drink or to smoke got quiet too. I barely smoke or drink anymore. I didn't sit down and decide to quit. The urge just left.
What's left is this strange clarity. It's like someone turned down the volume on the part of my brain that's always chasing the next little hit of dopamine. Some days that feels like the best thing that's ever happened to me. Other days it tips into something flatter, a kind of anhedonia, where things that used to excite me don't really land the same. I'm still honestly not sure if I traded one thing for something better or just for something quieter. That's the trade I think about the most.
CJC-1295 no DAC and ipamorelin. I pin it before bed for recovery and sleep. This one I actually feel, though I know how easy it is to feel what you want to feel when you spent money and effort to feel it.
KLOW. The healing one, for when I'm beating my body up and want it to bounce back.
Adamax is next. I haven't started it yet.
I'm not going to give you doses or tell you any of this works. Half of what I feel could be in my head. Half of it could be real. I genuinely don't know yet, and anyone who tells you they're a hundred percent sure is either lying or selling you something. The honest answer with almost all of this is we don't know, and I'm one of the people finding out the hard way.
I'm young. Younger than pretty much everyone doing this. I'm putting compounds into my body that aren't approved for what I'm using them for, that I'm sourcing myself, at an age where I'm not even done growing. When I say it out loud like that, it sounds stupid. Maybe it is.
Part of me is genuinely scared of what I don't know. There's no long term data on a lot of this because the data doesn't exist yet. I could be trading something years down the line for how I feel right now. That thought is there every single time, right before I do it anyway.
And that's the part I keep coming back to. I do it anyway. It's the same part of me that couldn't sit still after Ryft, that always needs something to push on, something to optimize, something to take too far. For a while that was a company. Right now it's me. I don't fully know what that says about me and I'm not going to dress it up into something clean.
There's also a part I don't really talk about, which is that most people in my life have no idea I do this. It's not exactly dinner table conversation. So it stays mine. A quiet little experiment I run on myself while everyone assumes I just go to the gym a lot.
This is not advice. If you take anything from this, let it be that you shouldn't do what I'm doing because some college kid wrote about it. Talk to a doctor. I mostly didn't. That's not me bragging, it's just the truth, and the truth is the only reason I write these at all.
Every study wants a big sample size. Mine is one. There's no control group, no placebo, no one checking my work. Just me, how I feel, and whether I'm being honest with myself about it.
That last part is harder than it sounds. When you want something to work, you start seeing what you want to see. So I try to stay skeptical of my own results, which is a weird thing to do to yourself. Doubt the thing you're hoping for. But that's the only way any of this means anything.
Maybe in a year I look back at this and cringe. Maybe I'm right. Probably somewhere in between, like always. Either way I'll have learned something, and I'll have learned it firsthand, which is the only way I ever really learn anything.
I'm the experiment. I'll let you know how it goes.