I suppose a progress report/results post is long overdue. I don’t like sharing too much specific, but here we go.

Subject: 58 year old male, family history of hyperlipidemia and heart disease.

Start Date: 12 Aug 2025
Weight: 200 lbs
Height: 5’8”
Note: Subject lifts weights regularly, does jiu jitsu 3x a week, walks 45m/day. Has chronic shoulder injuries and knee pain. Various other issues. Trouble losing weight.

End Date: 28 Aug 2026
Weight: 166.8 lbs
Note: Shoulder pain mostly gone, no knee pain. Subject lifts weights 4-5x/week, has hit numerous lifetime PR’s, still does jiu jitsu, walks daily and sometimes runs.

Current Protocols: Tirzepatide, 6 mg weekly

Protocols during report time: Epitalon, Sermorelin, SS-31, MOTS-C, NAD+, CJC/Ipa, Tesa, Wolverine, Glow, Klow, and probably forgetting something.

Also, lots of supplements, and added Rosuvastatin and Repatha for high LDL and LP(a)

Measurements:

Progress pics: Before/After

New peptide storage box for my research cat. “Nice box!”

If the biggest risk is the plastic in the bottle, it really makes you wonder why they don’t use glass bottles.

Bro, you need selank to help you stop stressing about it and semax to help you get your peptide stockpile organized. Then you can DSIP and sleep like a baby knowing it’s all handled.

I mean, practically speaking if the takeaway is that RUO Reta is 82.3854% as effective as Lilly reta for 10% of the cost, most researchers would be happy taking 1.22x RUO Reta and have money to buy a car rather than spend full boat just for Reta.

@craigpaul I have used bac water much longer than 30 days. There was a recent post about it, but the 30 days is a lab test based on hospital use where it is being poked a lot of times by many people. If you are wiping it down and poking it a couple times a month, it is fine for much longer than 30 days, imo.

Everybody saying it is only good for 28 days is people and AI repeating the hospital standard where bunches of people are handling a vial over time.

My .02

@Stan-Douglas said in Did I get taken... still trying to work out prices:

Consider it tuition. You were guided by a professional along the correct route, got your wings and can jump on your own from here on out.

100% this. When I got started, I also went through a clinic and paid $400 for 10mg Sermorelin and $400 for 5/5 Wolverine blend. I got a 20% discount. I was completely new to peptides and didn’t know much about them. I hadn’t discovered Peptide Critic and a lot of other sources yet.

IMO, that was money well spent because after watching the (no shade) 23 year old pierced and tatted (ok, maybe a little shade) tech reconstitute the stuff and hand it to me, I thought, ‘there has to be a better way.’ And all those roads led me here. And It also took me several months to find my way from the Peptide Sciences of the market to the EZ Peptides.

It was all a path that gave me the education, confidence and comfort to research peptides from various vendors knowledgeably and as safely as one can do.

I have been very happy with Nexaph. I will have to buy some stuff from BLL next time there is a big sale, but for now I will stock up a bit more. It sure beats the prices of vendors I was buying from before I discovered this lovely community last year.

And yeah, I see the discount now. Sweet! (Don’t tell my wife!)

@STATIEEIGHT said:

@Eleanor

Lily?

Fuck Lily - I give my money to a Chinese geisha girl.

My doctor was not happy when I told them that yes, I trust Jenny on TG more than I trust someone trying to prescribe Clomid.

@wisgal64

Your rat soon:

I probably have 15 pens at this point and rarely use more than 6 at a time.

I approach pens the way Neo and Trinity approach agents in the foyer.

@afkar7 There is one prominent YouTube doctor whose team quoted me $1,360/month for Glow. I am sure his target audience has the money and desire for that level of service, but I certainly don’t. The whole regimen I was looking to set up for my bride (HRT, minox, Glow, Tirz) was going to cost around $6k/month. We’re doing it for maybe $300.

This site has saved me a small fortune.

For what it’s worth, I love the new, slightly smaller Peptide Critic stickers you send out with orders.

I think it would also be cool - I know it’s a branding thing - if you had stickers or merch that was a bit more secret squirrel, like a Randy the Research Rat sticker or t-shirt. That said, I totally understand if you don’t want to deal with the headache of merch. Sadly for me, my visionary skills are excellent but my artistic execution skills don’t exist.

“I’m an idea man, baby!”

@afkar7 The idea is that all of us peptide users are right wing extremists who refused to take the Covid vaccine, in the same way that all of the people who took the covid vaccine plus 8 boosters based on the FDA’s say so are super smart in pointing out that peptides are junk at best and poison at worst because the FDA says so.

Tl;DR: Believe the Science! (Where ‘the Science’ is the scientists paid for by big pharma and the medical industrial complex to maintain a monopoly over your health and access to treatments.)

I hope I haven’t just outed myself as a vax denier.

Yep, lowest effective dose. The telehealth companies and your doctor is trying to get you titrated up to the maximum dose. You should be trying to get to the minimum effective dose.

Read as much as you can on the topic, see what recommended titration schedules are, and imo, only increase when you need to. I have been taking tirzepatide for about a year now. I got up to 10 mg for one week(month 4) and immediately started dropping back down. Was taking 2.5 mg for a while, and am at 6mg so I can lose about 5 more lbs. I adjust my dose slowly and as needed so I can eat enough and get my macros, while also maintaining a reasonable GI stability.

I am assuming you are lifting weights. If you aren’t you should be. While Reta is more protective of muscle than Sema and Tirz, if you aren’t exercising and getting protein, your body will eat muscle - that is just natural.

Finally, go slow, and make sure you recon and calculate dosing based on COA’s and not just what’s on the vial.

I got an email from the VA recently saying that they are starting to open trials using GLP-1’s for alcohol and drug addiction, which means we will likely see a lot more on this in coming years. They are also starting to investigate psychedelics for TBI and PTSD.

Given the VA’s historical reputation, I see these as good both as a peptide researcher and as a veteran, since these are relatively cutting edge treatments.

@Randy I am feeling like I am being pulled into an entirely unnecessary research project.

@jamiek I have bought and used Glow, CJC/IPA, Epitalon, and MOTS-C from EZ Peptides and I have had no issues using their product. I have used multiple vials of everything except the MOTS-C(that is on the schedule,) and would absolutely recommend them for price and quality. They often have sales, and I believe the peptidecritic.com discount stacks.

It is a good question. Possibly germane to the question is that the whole peptide fragility discussion seems largely spurious. Over the past year or so, it seems like a lot of ‘experts’ have gone from ‘treat your peptides like a precious flower’ to ‘you can drop it from an airplane’ and I have never really seen any evidence that shaking it will destroy the contents.

It is similar to the conversations about how quickly peptides deteriorate once reconstituted and whether blends destroy themselves. Both of these assertions have been clarified thanks to Randy’s work here.

And anecdotally, based on my chats with him, you can be certain any vials Jeff/Randy send into the lab have been shaken quite vigorously. :). I can say from experience that you don’t get 7 vials of epitalon into one pen cart without shaking.

I want to put on my smartass hat and say, “Y’all know this stuff is sitting in containers from China for a while, right? Another couple days with Brown Santa won’t kill it.” (Laughs in callous disregard for personal well being.)