I’m down to 78kg again, my stomach is flatter than when I was a teen (no six-pack yet), and I’m nearly as fit as I was at my peak, running regularly in my late 20s. Only five months ago I was 92kg and climbing, with high blood pressure and evening sugar cravings. The heaviest I’d ever been before that was 87kg, almost two decades earlier, and I dieted down to 75kg in a few months. Not so easy at 50. A couple of years ago I got to 85kg and went to OA. Obviously it didn’t stick.
I moved back to Australia in June last year at a healthy enough 82kg. I got on TRT and started going to the gym, so I expected to gain a bit of weight, but the 10kg wasn’t all muscle. TRT is awesome. I felt better than I had in years, but that was fading with the extra weight and my insatiable craving for sweets at night. Over the years, every time I’d gotten overweight I’d managed to change my behaviours enough to get back to something reasonable. Maybe not on the first try, a bit like my drug habits, but somewhere before the fifth new diet I’d get some traction.
This time it was failure after failure with no light in sight. I wrote this in my journal, and it dawned on me that I was entering that familiar state of surrender where everything seems hopeless, the darkness before the dawn, right before the solution comes. I could see that the pain and failures were part of the journey, laying the foundation for the destination. A wave of surrender to God, and to my weight and eating problem, washed over me, and a peace followed, knowing I had been here so many times before and risen victorious.
There was a solution, I was sure of that, but I’d surrendered to the point where I had no idea what it looked like or even what the goal was. I assumed it was losing weight, but ultimately I just wanted to feel good about myself. I will go where you guide me, I prayed, deeply and with conviction, to a God I didn’t understand.
A couple of hours later I’d forgotten all about it and was scrolling X on my iPad when an ad for peptides came up. I’d heard of peptides but knew nothing about them. I clicked the link, and the next thing I knew I was at my computer browsing their catalogue. There was a lot here. Where do I start? In another tab I asked Gemini for the safest, most proven peptide and the best place to start.
Gemini recommended Tirzepatide, because it had been FDA approved for a while and had significant human trials behind it. Beyond weight loss, the improved insulin sensitivity and calorie partitioning could help with energy levels and sugar cravings. I didn’t entirely know what that meant, but it wasn’t expensive, so why not experiment on myself? The next day my vial arrived and I injected Gemini’s recommended 2.5mg into my big old fat belly.
I felt pretty crappy that evening and the following days, but Gemini assured me that would pass. The next week I took half the dose and still felt crappy, so the week after I halved it again, to about 0.7mg, and hit the sweet spot. The good news was I’d lost about 4kg, and my sweet cravings had almost entirely gone. I hadn’t even needed much discipline; a chocolate and a cookie after dinner and I was satisfied. Perhaps even more profound, I was waking up in a much better mood, especially from afternoon naps. It used to take me an hour after a nap to get my mood right, and mornings weren’t much better, but on the Tirzepatide I woke up mildly annoyed instead of in full-blown fight or flight. I think it had something to do with insulin and how it interacts with cortisol. Anyway, my mood was much better.
Down the rabbit hole I went. If Tirzepatideepatide was this good, what else was out there? The list felt endless: weight loss, healing, growth hormone releasers, mitochondrial, even tanning, plus ones to get my balls back to size after they’d shrunk on TRT. Then I found the supply. I could buy all of it direct from China for next to nothing. I felt like I’d opened a door into a new universe.
I’d always had this idea that once I was wealthy I would focus on my health and do medical tourism, travelling to places that offer stem cell therapy and other procedures and medicines that weren’t available in Australia’s corrupt medical-industrial complex. And here I was with access to what could be the fountain of youth. BPC-157 and TB-500 (the Wolverine stack) helped my recurring neck and back pain. GHK-Cu made my skin and hair soft and glowing, and reduced inflammation. Tesamorelin helped with the belly fat. My balls were back to normal thanks to HCG, which improved my mood too. And MOTS-c gave me this wonderful clean energy and endurance.
Workouts were awesome, my aches and pains had eased, my energy held up through the work day, and the weight kept coming off. I was floating on a cloud of enthusiasm and hope. Could peptides really be this good? Had I just found the elixir of life? Only six weeks earlier I’d been totally lost about my out-of-control weight gain and everything that came with it. I still had a long way to go, but the trajectory looked good.
But there was a dark shadow behind all this. This secret knowledge I was sneaking into the country in vials raised an uncomfortable question. Why? Not only why were they contraband, but why weren’t they actively promoted? This was the final straw in my understanding that the Australian medical business model was to make people sick so they’d always have a customer.
The number of people I know who’ve had cancer or heart attacks since Covid, and not one of them unvaccinated. I know that’s anecdotal, but it’s hard to ignore. Making healing peptides illegal, when they’re only amino acids with no history of abuse, overdose or injury, was a bridge too far. It didn’t really surprise me, but it was one more red pill to swallow.
I heard on the grapevine that an old friend I got clean with in Melbourne in 2000, affectionately known as Cowboy, was into peptides, so I gave him a call and we rekindled our friendship. He agreed they were miraculous, and that the medical industry in Australia, and the West for that matter, only prohibited them to protect profits. “If people could take control of their health and heal themselves, they’d lose all their customers,” he said. The more we talked, the more he opened up. “If you think peptides are good, wait till you see what else is out there for longevity and performance.”
“I’ve been on TRT for a year,” I said.
“TRT is awesome. I’ve been rocking it for a few years now. That’s the base for everything else, but what you add on top is where the fun really starts. You want to know why Sylvester Stallone looks so good at 80, or Brad Pitt in his 60s?”
“I had wondered,” I replied. “I just figured they were genetic freaks.”
“That’s part of it, but they get a lot of help, and I can pretty much reverse-engineer their stacks. Best part is, I’m doing for a few grand a year what costs them over 100K from some Hollywood quack.”
He had me very intrigued. “So what else are you taking?” I asked.
“At the moment I’m running 500 test, 400 primo and 4mg of growth hormone split morning and night, and I’ll run Anavar in shorter cycles, like eight weeks. But I’ve got plenty more goodies in stock. I’ll run Deca occasionally. I’ve even got Tren, though I haven’t run that for a while.”
I thought I’d misheard him. “Did you say 500mg a week of test?” I asked. “My TRT clinic only prescribes me 125mg.”
“Those are rookie numbers. You gotta pump that up. You can run 500mg safely. I was doing closer to 1000mg about a year ago, but then I connected with a biochemist and I’ve been working with my bloodwork to optimize my performance. He recommended coming down, and 500’s been the sweet spot. You can’t really run those doses on Test alone; your estrogen gets too high. But pair it with something like Primo or Masteron and that keeps your estrogen in check.
“Mate, PEDs are awesome. I’m in the shape of my life. At 50 I’ve got abs like a 20-year-old Calvin Klein model. I always dreamed of having this physique, but it wasn’t till later in life that I got the access. Gym culture has changed. These longevity medications aren’t taboo or underground anymore.”
I remembered dreaming of one day being wealthy enough to truly optimise my health, and then I thought back to that journal entry only a few months earlier, the deep spiritual surrender that gave me hope and trust there was an answer. Was the answer really steroids? My conditioning bristled at the suggestion. I had always considered them dangerous and reckless. Were steroids really longevity medications, like Cowboy believed? Could the medical establishment have been lying to me? Well, that had been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. I was going to have to find out about steroids for myself.
“Do you ever see a doctor?” I asked.
“Fuck doctors. If they’ve still got their license, they’re totally compromised. They’re puppets of Big Pharma. They aren’t even allowed to look outside their little box, the business model of keeping people sick so you can sell them drugs to manage the symptoms. I even keep antibiotics and painkillers on hand so I don’t have to play their game. But sometimes you can’t avoid it. If I broke my arm, I might go to a doctor.”
I placed an order with Cowboy, and within a few days I had Test, Primo, Anavar and HGH. Might as well stock up. I tried the Chinese-made Test for a week and it was identical to my prescription one – at a third of the price, not counting the clinic fees. I emailed the clinic, told them I was moving overseas and didn’t need them anymore, and asked them to cancel the quarterly direct debit. That felt good. Not only was I saving money, I wasn’t feeding the beast.
I started on the Primo and left the others in the drawer and fridge for now, so I could assess them one by one. I also bumped my Test dose from 125 to 180. About a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio of Test/Primo was standard, so I started on 90mg Primo. Wow. A few weeks later I felt five years younger. My wife would run her hands over my torso at night and say, “What the fuck? Your body feels totally different.” “Thanks, Cowboy,” I’d say.
My strength hadn’t increased much, but my endurance was back to my late 20s. My VO2 max on my iPhone looked like a Bitcoin bull run. This was awesome. He was right: peptides are good, but PEDs are awesome. It had been quite the journey, and the peptides deserved their credit too. The Tirzepatide and then Retatrutide, combined with the GH secretagogues Ipamorelin and Tesamorelin, had helped me lose 10kg while keeping most of my muscle, and the fat I lost was the bad fat, the visceral fat – my belly no longer felt hard and bloated. I suspected my liver was in much better shape too, with Retatrutide reported to significantly reduce fatty liver. They had primed me well to increase my Test dose and add some steroids.
My days were so much better and life was so much more satisfying. The improvement in my work day was even bigger than in my workouts. I was alert and focussed. I was also way less fearful, calmer and less resentful. Now that I had proper Test levels, I could see I’d been suffering from low T since my 30s. I used to wonder why I hadn’t been as fearful when I was younger, and figured it was just part of getting older. What I’d been trying to hand over to God and “work the program harder” on was just low testosterone – I suppose it happens to all men – but not anymore!!
Now that I was my own doctor, I had to check my own bloodwork. The results were great. All my markers had improved: my liver numbers were down and my cholesterol was better. Insulin sensitivity and cortisol were optimal. Everything was optimal. My blood pressure was also down better than ever around 120/75. I’d started a long chat with Gemini to help with my protocols, and after the bloodwork it gave me the all clear to add the Anavar and increase the Test again. AI is awesome.
My estrogen was high, but I felt so good, especially my mood, and had no high-estrogen symptoms, so Gemini said that was a better indicator and some people just run higher estrogen. My libido was incredible, but not frustratingly so. I did hit a wall one week and felt depressed for a couple of days – not really depressed, probably less than I used to be on a normal day, but I’d gotten used to optimised Micky. I asked Gemini what it could be, and it said my symptoms pointed to low estrogen because of the Primo. My tests said otherwise, but Gemini said the numbers are different for everyone.
I took 100mg of Test and by the afternoon I felt like myself again. I love fucking with my hormones. I backed off the Primo for a few days and increased the Test, so now I’m at 250mg Test and 60mg Primo, which seems like the sweet spot. I’ve started the Anavar and HGH now, just at a low dose, and my health and endurance keep improving.
So here I am, five months on from that desperate journal entry. I’m 78kg, my VO2 max chart still looks like Bitcoin in a bull run, my balls are back to factory settings, and my wife still runs her hands over my torso and asks who the hell this bloke is in her bed. Still no six-pack, but Cowboy assures me that’s just a rookie-numbers problem.
I asked God to guide me, and a couple of hours later He served me an ad on X. Then came a Chinese peptide catalogue and a bloke called Cowboy. I did say I’d go wherever He led. Gemini knows more about my hormones than any GP I’ve ever met, and I’ve never looked better. Peptides are good, but PEDs are awesome.
