What was your catalyst for starting peptides? (Sharing wisdom)
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JoeC’s post on the lifting/TRT thread triggered the memory of a line I heard on Modern wisdom a couple years ago, which was a big catalyst for me finally breaking down and starting peptides (Tirzepatide, soon followed by Wolverine and Sermorelin.) This came after 2+ years of lifting and seeing some gains, but not being able to lose weight and having a lot of persistent injuries.
I forget who the guest was but he said something that struck me as profound. The context of the conversation was about doing difficult jobs and using tools to make doing those jobs easier. Distilled down, the point was that you can do it all without tools, make your life harder, and achieve small goals, or you can use all the tools available to you, and work just as hard but achieve much more. Using tools isn’t cheating, using tools lets you do more with the same amount of effort.
For whatever reason, this was what I needed to hear to finally take the plunge, and to get myself in better shape than I have been in probably in the past 20 years.
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I had already been on the fence about starting a GLP-1 for a year or more before taking the leap.
I went from being pretty active running my own business to taking a job managing somebody else's business and spending a lot more time behind a desk. I was already about 60# north of where I would like to be and I put on another 25 in short order. I tried going through "proper channels" to get started on Tirz but my insurance did what they are good at, deny deny deny.
Around that same time, a friend of mine had been encouraging me to try BPC 157 to see if it helped with my arthritis pain at all. He's a gym rat and swears by it. He's also a needle-phobe, so he takes the capsules.
His vendor accidentally shipped him 3 10mg vials of lyophilized BPC-157 and he offered it to me. I did a little homework and started a course of 500mcg daily. I started feeling some joint and spine relief after the first 10 days or so.
At about week 3 I fell and contorted my back something awful. Barely made it to my bed and couldn't get out of it. Not even for the bathroom. Thank God for helping hands. Day 2 of not being able to move without crippling spasms and I ended up having to take an ambulance ride to the ER. They did the usual, morphine and Methocarbamol. At least they made me comfortable enough to be able to walk and get into a car.
The fall happened on Friday. I went to the ER on Sunday. I went back to work Monday. I thought I was going to be out of commission for at least a week based on past experiences. The only thing different than past injuries was the BPC-157.
That started my journey. -
Mine was injury recovery, BPC/TB, but then it was a picture of myself from the wrong angle, without holding my gut in(a skill I have mastered) that make me go to the fat boy juice. I carried extra weight well, so my friends wouldn’t believe my weight was closer to 300 than 250. But the scale knows me too well.
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Decades of cortisone shots for shoulder injuries the would shift from one, to the other, to the other and became closer together. This is required lifting for my job. Wolverine has reversed that process, still getting injured but they are getting farther apart.
I refuse to cortisone shots now and tell my Ortho the industry will embarrassed they ever administered them once BPC becomes approved. -
JoeC’s post on the lifting/TRT thread triggered the memory of a line I heard on Modern wisdom a couple years ago, which was a big catalyst for me finally breaking down and starting peptides (Tirzepatide, soon followed by Wolverine and Sermorelin.) This came after 2+ years of lifting and seeing some gains, but not being able to lose weight and having a lot of persistent injuries.
I forget who the guest was but he said something that struck me as profound. The context of the conversation was about doing difficult jobs and using tools to make doing those jobs easier. Distilled down, the point was that you can do it all without tools, make your life harder, and achieve small goals, or you can use all the tools available to you, and work just as hard but achieve much more. Using tools isn’t cheating, using tools lets you do more with the same amount of effort.
For whatever reason, this was what I needed to hear to finally take the plunge, and to get myself in better shape than I have been in probably in the past 20 years.
@ResearchCat That “tools aren’t cheating” mindset really resonates with me. My wife actually started before I did because I was hesitant. Then she switched to Reta, and meanwhile I was working out relentlessly and had managed to lose about 5 lbs. In roughly that same amount of time, she was down around 20 and barely hitting the gym.
That pretty much drove the point home for me: I can work my ass off for a little result, or use the tools available, still work my ass off, and get more out of that effort.I’m still fairly new to peptides and GLPs, but I’ve been steadily expanding my knowledge and it’s turned into a rabbit hole.
I’m already looking at Semax, glutathione, TA1, and possibly Cagri or Cagri + Sema alongside Reta. MOTS-c and 5-Amino-1MQ are on my list to research and eventually try too.At this point I’m like a kid in a candy store.
The more I learn, the more things I want to learn about and experiment with. Research on! -
@juliano546 100% the same. Getting past the combination of ‘tools are cheating’ and ‘doing the work’, plus the perceived social shame associated with it were big barriers for me. Most of the people I know don’t approve of GLP-1’s or peptides, the former of which is completely asinine.
Oddly, I am kind of the godfather in my small group, and they talk about peptides constantly while I sit in the back smiling and nodding. It’s a good obsession. The keys are to educate yourself and take it slow. Staying healthy and capable is a lifetime effort; you don’t just do 6 months and then you’re good. (Even though life’s vagaries often make it work out like that.)
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@juliano546 100% the same. Getting past the combination of ‘tools are cheating’ and ‘doing the work’, plus the perceived social shame associated with it were big barriers for me. Most of the people I know don’t approve of GLP-1’s or peptides, the former of which is completely asinine.
Oddly, I am kind of the godfather in my small group, and they talk about peptides constantly while I sit in the back smiling and nodding. It’s a good obsession. The keys are to educate yourself and take it slow. Staying healthy and capable is a lifetime effort; you don’t just do 6 months and then you’re good. (Even though life’s vagaries often make it work out like that.)
@ResearchCat I completely agree, especially with taking it slow. That’s probably the hardest part once you start learning about all of this
. Every time I research one compound, I find three more I want to read about.The social stigma is interesting too. People don’t think twice about using tools or technology to improve almost every other part of life, but when it comes to weight loss or health, suddenly struggling unnecessarily is supposed to make the accomplishment more legitimate.
I’m definitely still the new guy in this world, so right now I’m trying to keep the enthusiasm balanced with actually understanding what I’m getting into. But yeah… “good obsession” describes it pretty damn well.
At this point you might as well invest in that pinky ring it carries great respect 
Don Cat -
I agree with everyone - it took me a while to get over the GLPs are cheating and not-good-for-you-Parma mindset. Reta got me to NAD (for the absolute fatigue on day 2) and that led me to mitochondria research (which I was doing years ago with sunlight, fluoride free water, etc) and now I just want ALL the PEPTIDES in ALL the PENS. I'm happy to research at this age, but I would not really want all my kiddos doing this (while they are all having babies or going to soon). The long term & epigenetic consequences would scare me a bit until after all the children. I'll happily be the science project they can build on later.
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@skepticjen Yeah, there are loads of people who probably have no need and no business being on peptides, but it’s their choice, and hopefully it doesn’t hurt them. (Though the 20 year olds blasting T seems like a terrible idea.)
Part of the appeal to peptides is that all things being equal, and used in moderation (cough!) they should be relatively safe.
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I snapped both ACLs during covid running down a mountain.
Off my feet for ten months. A high character surgeon barely got me into two surgeries before my medical insurance ran out. I had shrunk down to nothing but bone and blubber and was laid off from my job. (Employers fear a person hobbling around on crutches.)
Inflammation kept my my knees from bending past 90 degrees and physical therapy was not working too well. I got a high stress traveling job working 70 to 90 hour work weeks on the road for 3 weeks out of 4. Yes, I set myself up to be a peptide poster boy.
A friend got me on TRT. I found oral BPC-157. Curiosity and newfound confidence with needles got me injecting my girlfriend's big brown beaver with the typical list and getting the typical phenomenal results. I remembered BIO102 back in 1983 and thinking how if someone could make some of these compounds, we would not be subject to nature's cruelty.
l set a course on the belief that one should seek out smart people AND LISTEN TO THEM.
At this moment I watch a sickly coworker, only 4 years older than me, hobble around bent over, wrinkled up after arrogantly dismissing my suggestion of taking peptides. -
Mine was injury recovery, BPC/TB, but then it was a picture of myself from the wrong angle, without holding my gut in(a skill I have mastered) that make me go to the fat boy juice. I carried extra weight well, so my friends wouldn’t believe my weight was closer to 300 than 250. But the scale knows me too well.
@Snake-Pepskin amazing how you can train yourself to keep those long buried abs holding your gut in so well that you forget your doing it. I don't think I've relaxed my gut since the year 2000 or so.
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@Snake-Pepskin amazing how you can train yourself to keep those long buried abs holding your gut in so well that you forget your doing it. I don't think I've relaxed my gut since the year 2000 or so.
@DarkStar
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