On Taking Peptides

I’ve tried to write this down something like 20-25 times. I get halfway, I get distracted, something else comes up, or I get to a part I have to untangle, and then I give up. In light of my growing visibility on the subject, I have decided to set the record straight.

I have been accused of a lot of things in my life, mostly that I am not serious, should not be taken seriously, or that I am just permanently fucking around. This is to some extent true. I am also simultaneously insanely neurotic and forgetful. It’s a strange and often off-putting combination. I can write a lot about myself here, and the contradictions I contain. I could write an entire article just on the question “what exactly is wrong with you”.

However, this is not about my flaws. It is instead a completely accurate, unflinching examination of my peptide journey. I hope that after reading it, you come away with a different understanding of me, and why I am so intensely radicalized.

I cannot say enough that I can only tell you about my body, and what these substances did for me. None of this is meant to encourage you to buy anything from anyone. I don’t even reply to DMs asking me how to source, how to inject, how to calculate, or if I trust certain sites versus others. I am trying my best to be safe, help people, and talk about what helped me.

Put much more bluntly, if you decide to take something – if you decide to inject something into your body, without any research, just because I said I did it – you are too stupid to be helped. I am sorry. I must be this blunt about it.

If you are going to go and try something solely because of what I write here, you must understand that I am not a doctor, I have not gone to medical school, and I am not offering you an ounce of advice. I have done my best to show you that I have an atypical body, and that I truly believe in individualized, n=1 experiments that cannot possibly be used to make larger sweeping statements about what might work for you.

My critics will claim that me saying this is not enough. I find that wildly unfair. I can only tell you what I went through, what I experienced. I cannot tell you about other people’s experiences, because I did not have them. I am not encouraging you in any specific direction to do any specific thing, other than perhaps to believe that there are alternatives out there, and that you must find and research these substances yourself.

I do not believe I should sit by idly and say nothing, on the off chance someone might truly be unable to care for their own body, and think for themselves, and so they blindly inject based off of my story about my own.

At the very least, I hope I receive better criticisms than I have gotten. Usually, the criticism is something like “you’re promoting dangerous chemicals in a very carefree manner, and not properly explaining the risks”. This is a convenient argument, but it isn’t particularly correct, and it paints a poor picture of everyone else I’ve ever interacted with. So let’s start from the beginning.

Like all complex health journeys, there is more than one beginning. A lot happened in parallel. It’s hard to explain in a linear fashion. Back in 2023, I got engaged. I am somewhere around 4’11, depending on a number of things.

At the time, I weighed somewhere between 168 and 173lb. My BMI was, at most, 34.9.

I do believe a large portion of this was somewhat out of my control. It doesn’t particularly matter if you agree with me on this or not. I had been very sick, on and off, for ten years. I had things like intense heat intolerance: if it was more than 58 degrees outside, I would be sweaty. I would go for bike rides in Chicago in the winter and not wear gloves. I would stand outside and need to “cool down” after them. My hair was falling out. My nails were ripping. I couldn’t really walk more than a few blocks before I needed to sit down. I had weeks where I could not get off the couch.

None of that is even close to the worst of the experience. No, the worst was that I would be talking and mid-sentence I would start gagging. It did not stop until I threw up. For a year, I worked with a trash can next to my desk, increasingly scared to present on Zoom calls, because I was afraid I would have to stop and puke. I had intense GI issues, and had a colonoscopy and endoscopy for my 27th birthday.

My organs were failing – my gallbladder was producing ‘sludge’, my liver enzymes were terrible, I was at one point puking up bright yellow bile – I was dying.

This ended up being a very unusual and outlier reaction to a late-developing allergy to casein.

No, seriously. I was misdiagnosed a bunch, sent to 10-15 different specialists, and bounced around a medical system that I can only describe as “deeply fucked up”.

Here is what happens when you are mysteriously sick: you go to a doctor, and they run some tests. They get the results back, and the results don’t make any sense. They go “wow, that’s weird, let’s send you to a specialist”, and then you get referred to a doctor that can see you somewhere between one week and ten months from now.

Sometimes, you even get put on the wrong doctor’s list, and after eight months, they call you and tell you that you’ve been on the wrong list, and now you have to wait another eight months for the right doctor.

The sickest person in the room is the one who has to hold all of these opinions together, advocate for themselves, skill up on learning the language of medicine in order to properly explain their symptoms, organize the appointments, get to these never convenient appointments, and also somehow not be too sharp, too pointed, too informed, or doctors will say things like “oh did you read that on the internet” about what you think might be a possibility, because god forbid you’ve spent too many nights sweating and praying on the bathroom floor, too many days learning how to throw up quietly, or too many weeks on the couch in such severe pain that you can’t move… none of that can compare to their having read about a medical condition for like twenty minutes during med school.

I need to keep this from turning into an angry rant, but what you should take from this is that there are people who are extremely sick and weak, trapped inside a Kafkaesque system that cannot and does not actually want to help them, lost in the belly of paperwork, surprise bills they get nine months later and increasingly can’t afford because a $300 copay here and there totally adds up, and doctors that don’t have time for them, don’t take them seriously, or really just don’t listen, often because the patient is fat. These people are often too sick to be radicalized by their experiences until after they get an answer, if they ever do.

I truly believe that anyone who defends the healthcare system in the USA has never meaningfully interfaced with it, and that while they are lucky, they are ignorant of just how bad it really is. These are generally healthy people, who have never had a mystery about themselves, never been sicker and sicker in a world that doesn’t believe there’s anything wrong with them, and have generally had things go their way their entire life. I mean, it must be nice!

Anyway, I had a colonoscopy and an endoscopy and then the doctor looked at me and asked if I’d tried a food sensitivity test. Not necessarily an allergy test, because doctors are insane and pedantic about what an allergy is, but a sensitivity test. I had already been diagnosed with celiac, and so I said sure, why not try that.

So I found a startup that did food sensitivity testing, and for $299, they shipped it to my house. I pricked my finger, sent them some blood, and then they would send me back results.

This was the first time a tech startup saved my life. Everlywell is an incredible technology and I will shill them forever. The test sounds kind of Theranos-like, but it’s really simple. After I sent them a notecard with my blood on it, they sent me back results with a range of numbers on a scale of 0-100.

Anything from 0-20 was basically “not the problem”, 20-50 was “likely not the problem”, 50-100 was where most people’s problem foods would lie, and anything over 100 was essentially a bright red “never touch this item of food again”.

Cow’s milk came back for me at 158. I stopped eating it, stopped having butter, cut out the creams, and for a while essentially had no dairy at all. All of my symptoms stopped. Every single one of them. Suddenly, I was not throwing up 3-4 times a day. Suddenly, I could handle the heat. My hair started growing. My nails stopped ripping. Even the gagging mostly stopped.

This was all great, except I didn’t lose like a single pound. My poor, weak body, which had definitely taken some hits from all the years I literally couldn’t exercise, now just had this 60-lb blanket on it. I started trying to walk, trying to exercise, but I was literally at zero. My muscles had basically atrophied away, and I had to re-learn how to have any stamina before I could even think about things like “losing weight”.

In this time period, I tried, well… everything. I counted calories, but this comes with an entire set of neuroses for me: in college, I was a d1 athlete, in a sport that had a weight minimum. I was weighed constantly, shamed by others for weighing 115 instead of 110 (over 2,000 meters, the difference in drag from these 5lb is something like .01 seconds….), and I had developed some pretty gnarly disordered eating habits, like playing “how low of a score can I get in eating”, a thing that is both normal to want and easy to attain. I tried eating nothing but potatoes for an entire month. I lost 12lb. It sort of mostly stayed off. But that’s not reasonable.

And so, after I got engaged, I went to the doctor, and I asked for Ozempic. The doctor I was seeing at the time knew all about my weird experiments, my weird body, and said yeah no problem. Let’s try this new type, Zepbound. It should work really well for you.

So they prescribed me 4 x 2.5mg pens, and I went on my way. At the pharmacy, the tech told me the price and I literally laughed at him: $1,070 for a month’s worth.

What the fuck? I said. I know, he said. Call your insurance company.

And so I did.

The reason the insurance company would not cover my Zepbound was my BMI. As described above, my BMI was, at most, 34.9. You see, they said, since your BMI is under 35.0, this means you’re not actually obese, and so you don’t actually need the medicine. That’s why we’re not covering it.

I remember laughing on the phone and saying “so you’re telling me, if I gain 10lb, you’ll cover this medicine… so that I will have to lose 70lb instead of 60… instead of just giving me the medicine.”

The insurance rep on the other end of the phone might not have been a human, capable of real emotions, because she very cheerfully confirmed that. So did her manager, and her manager’s manager.

When I tell this story, people often stop me and say, "Oh well, why didn't you go back to the doctor and drink a lot of water before? Put some sand in your pockets or something," or, "Oh, why didn't you get on the scale with shoes on?"

Sure. Those are all things I could have done. What you're essentially suggesting here is "Why didn't you commit insurance fraud?” and “why didn’t you falsify medical records to receive a treatment you knew you needed despite your insurance deciding you didn’t?”

So I found a coupon that made it $750 and said, "You know what? I'll try it. I'm so desperate. The worst that happens is this is really expensive, and I'll figure out some other cheaper way of doing it if this really does what it claims to do."

And so I did it.

The first month was so bad. The first month was horrifically bad. I was maybe the sickest I have ever been. That's not really an exaggeration. It was like I had the flu. I had to essentially relearn how to eat.

I've covered it extensively in other places, joking about it and coping to various extents, but I pooped my pants twice in public in one weekend during that first month. I have been extremely honest about this, extremely open about the fact that I experienced just about every bad side effect you can think of.

To be clear, I would still do this again. If I had to relive the entire experience, knowing exactly what would happen, I would do it.

I have a food log where there were days where things like one grape were too much sugar. There were two weeks where I essentially couldn't eat anything and went to an herbalist who prescribed me nettle tea because it had enough nutrients in it. Thankfully, I could actually keep it down. I survived that first month off of broths, teas, Gatorade, and sugar-free electrolytes.

I experienced massive side effects. I threw up all the time (2-3 times a day, at one point, but honestly I’d been here before, so it wasn’t that bad?). I had diarrhea all the time, in that I probably did not have a solid bowel movement for… two or three months.

Now people will go, "Oh my God, that's terrible. Why did you keep going?" The answer is that I knew what was on the other side. I knew that it was working because I could see it, because from the first shot, I could feel it immediately.

And I mean that without exaggeration. There's a growing body of evidence that it turns off things like “food noise” for people, and they're studying the GLP-1s for other sorts of use and other sorts of addiction. It's true. From the very, very beginning, it was like a switch had flipped in my head. All of the noise was gone.

Now, I love to eat. At one point, hearing about other people’s experiences, I thought “wow, I’d honestly rather stay fat”. This, I promise, was cope. No one would rather be fat.

I ended up being what I suspect is a hyper-responder. About 1% of people I've talked to (and I've talked to thousands of people at this point) experience side effects anywhere near what I did. I was the edge case. I was in an adrenal spiral. I was unable to eat enough, and that made me tired. That made me so tired that I couldn't possibly think about eating, which just made me more tired. I had to pull myself out of the spiral, and I have a half-written article somewhere about how to get out of the spiral.

There's this interesting thing going on with the GLPs, where doctors aren't really sure how a patient is going to react. Some people tend to lose dramatic amounts of weight. Most people tend to lose a decent amount to a regular amount of weight, and some people just don't seem to respond at all. There are some pretty famous people out there that have not responded to the medication, and so I think we can pretty clearly state there's a lot we still don't know about it. I'm comfortable with that.

The other part of this, I think, that doesn't get enough attention is that everyone goes, "I’ve heard these can make you really sick” and the answer is … yes, but I suspect dosing and trial dosing is off.

When these pharmaceutical companies are doing these tests and trials, they're trying to figure out what the right way to sell them is and what the right doses are. They're not looking for a minimum viable dose. They're looking for a maximum dose before you die or before you discontinue, because the side effects are so bad.

I personally really believe that a lot of people that say, "Oh, I had a terrible experience with this medicine," just started too high. 2.5 mg is supposed to be the "starter dose." After that, the way they sell it at the pharmacy for tirzepatide specifically is 2.5 mg, 5 mg, 7.5, 10, 12.5, and 15.

If I had done those, I would have gotten violently ill.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After that first month, I went, "Oh my God, this is great. This is amazing. This is life-changing. This is revolutionary. We need to put this in the water supply."

It truly changed everything for me. It changed my body's knowledge of where it is in space. It changed the level of inflammation in my joints. It changed my ability to process and understand hunger. It changed my executive function. I was remembering to stretch. I'm much more able to sequence tasks than I was before. It's been dramatically useful for my ADHD and for clarity of thought.

I have been on stimulants for ADHD for about 13 years now. My resting heart rate dropped from 75-80 BPM to 58 BPM, and this happened to me before I lost any weight. It’s now stabilized around 55 BPM, and my heart is working much less hard these days.

And so I knew that I couldn't stop, but I also couldn't pay $1,000 a month. Besides, I had lost 15 lbs. How the hell was I supposed to go get it prescribed to me now?

I called a friend who had been in a similar situation. Faced with the same thing, rather than battle the nightmare that is the American healthcare system, he had gone to China and started importing these chemicals himself, using himself as a lab rat. I trusted him, and so I bought some from him. I learned how to compound this myself, and this gave me so much more freedom, so much more ability, and so much more control over my dosing schedule.

Most people will go up in the ways the pharmacy sets, as described above. Since I was compounding on my own, I was able to go from 2.5 mg to 3 mg, 3 mg to 3.5 mg, 3.5 mg to 4 mg, 4 mg to 5 mg, and so on. The highest dose of tirzepatide I ever took was 6 mg, and it made me sick in the same way that 2.5mg did when I started. Honestly, I backed down the dose to 5 mg after that and have tapered down ever since.

I was to the point, after I lost 73 lbs and hit my goal weight for my wedding, that I was doing 1 mg every 9 days. I thought I was maybe almost done! I hadn’t considered the idea of staying on these medicines long term, though I maintain that if I have to take it for the rest of my life, I'm perfectly content to do so. I am on the record as saying that even if these meds took years off my life, it would be worth it. I still think that’s true, though study after study now seems to show they’re essentially a miracle.

One of the interesting things that happened during all this, however, was that my period normalized. In 2022, my average cycle length was 114 days. Then, in 2023, it was 104. In 2024, it was 78. In 2025 it was 38, and in 2026 it is 32. Before I started, my period had always been wildly irregular. It had never been normal.

When I first got my period at 11, it was a violent, bloody, painful affair. It was heavy, 7 to 10 days long, and left me in a very bad state of depression. When I came off of birth control, for example, one time I bled for 19 days straight.

By the time I'd tapered down, every single period I'd had in the past 9 months had been on a regular schedule, about 28 days apart, which was an incredible change for me.

As I'd tapered too far down, though, some of these hormonal shifts started appearing again, and so I went to a doctor. After a long debate, looking through my charts, and previous doctors' visits, they came to a really simple diagnosis: on top of everything else, I have PCOS.

Weirdly enough, do you know what the treatment prescribed for PCOS is?

Tirzepatide.

“Try raising your dose a little” was the advice I got from those doctors. I take roughly 1.5mg of tirzepatide every 5-9 days now. Sometimes I do things like 2.5mg if I’ve been weirdly hungry, and then I go 13-14 days between injections, but the point here is that I am in control in a way that works for me and my sensitive, stupid body, and that isn't available to me commercially in any meaningful sense.

Many people, when talking to me about these things or when criticizing me about these things, go, "Oh, well, you'll have to be on that medication for the rest of your life."

To that, I have one thing to say: who cares? Do you know what other medications I'm on for the rest of my life? Do you know how many people in the country are on medications for their entire lives because their body doesn't do something it's supposed to do, or does something it's not supposed to do?

Ina Garten has a saying: "If you can't make your own, store-bought is fine too." This applies to people with schizophrenia. This applies to people with asthma. This applies to people with diabetes. This applies to people taking statins. I really don't see why those of us who are more susceptible to obesity should be shamed about this. If it was just willpower, a shot would not do the things it did to me. If it was just me going, "Oh, I'm fat and I love eating," a shot would not have changed that so dramatically and in such a short amount of time.

Now, I do agree that often people become more tolerant to medications over time…. But that’s why I’m taking such minimal doses now. Some people’s bodies just need this drug, and mine appears to be one of them.

This was my first foray into “peptides”. You can see how this might change one’s worldview. And it very much did. People often ask me, what’s it like to have changed so dramatically? And the answer to that is that it’s psychedelic. I wake up every day and look in the mirror and truly cannot believe that this is my body now, that they let me drive it. I used to pray for shots that would magically take it all away, and now we have them.

If you can’t marvel at the idea that obesity is now essentially a solved problem, I don’t really know what to say to you. If you can’t grasp how beautiful, how wonderful, how insanely fantastic that is for human lifespan, for quality of life, and for healthcare costs, I’m not sure why you’re reading this. I’m also not sure that there’s literally anything I could say that would change your mind, because you don’t want it changed.

After that, I started looking into things that could now help me in other ways. The fat was gone, but now I didn't have hair because of a terrible haircut I'd gotten. I wondered: Are there things I can fix in my skin? Are there things I can do for energy? Are there things I can do for this constant body pain that doesn't seem to go away? I began exploring.

First, I tried a round of copper for growing my hair and making my skin look nice before my wedding. I loved copper. I did it in a very unorthodox way, and it turns out that I got my doses wrong, which is a thing that can absolutely happen. I was massively overdosing on it. I'm really glad I didn't do something stupid or dangerous to myself beyond that, and that I cycled off of it after a month. Frankly, I didn't have any side effects, so I'm not really sure what to make of that experience.

Then I tried NAD+. Personally, I didn't like the NAD+ injections. They burned, they made me feel weird, and they were uncomfortable. I got about 20 minutes of energy out of them after feeling very flushed. Also, they hurt to pin, so I chose not to continue that one. I have had a much better time with the sublingual strips, though I don’t think my body particularly likes NAD+ in any form. I am much more interested in NMN, though I have not yet tried it. After that, I started experimenting even more.

Now, I do believe everyone's body is different. I do believe that there is no such thing as anything more than n-of-one medicine. I understand that's a really crazy statement, and I understand that we look for population-level effects. Yes, there are things that work on populations, but I also do really believe that some of us just have wildly outlier body composition, and things will always be different for us.

The next thing that I will say saved my life was actually whole genome sequencing. I do not want to go into depth here, because despite my weird need for the internet to know every single excruciating detail of my medical journey, I don’t feel the need for the internet to know what my whole genome sequencing found for me. I also believe that if the community who thinks they have this disease found this post, they would be willing to try things out without considering if they really have this disease, because it is often a self-diagnosed descriptor that has been reached out of frustration with a lack of any other answers. I’m not blaming them for this. I too have been desperate for answers, stuck on the idea that perhaps something weird and rare is wrong with me, and after all, all the symptoms fit….

I will say that it cost me roughly $800, and it found me more answers. Things made sense in a way they did not before. I had enough material to ask my family more questions, and it turns out that things we thought were normal were very much so not normal for other people.

I researched more, and I found anecdotes that BPC-157 can be very helpful for tendon and soft tissue injuries, and can massively speed up healing times from things like surgery. A friend of mine had a boob job done, and it took her healing time from like 3 months to more like 3 weeks. Another friend reported the same.

I was nervous about BPC-157, for a variety of reasons. It does seem to promote angiogenesis some of the time, though other times it seems to modulate it, which is confusing and strange, especially when you don’t work in these things professionally and are trying to make sense of them from a layman’s perspective.

I then suffered a concussion.

The internet will tell you a lot of contradictory information about concussions, the brain, and how to heal them. I am very clearly biased in a specific direction. I probably would have tried Cerebrolysin (if I could get my hands on it) despite the mixed reviews. I probably would have tried just about anything, because a concussion is the scariest injury I have ever had.

It is a minor traumatic brain injury, caused by your brain hitting your skull. You essentially bruise your brain. It is the weirdest, most uncomfortable, sense-of-self-shifting injury. For two months, I was simply not me. I was someone else.

After two weeks in the city, I realized I could not be here with this level of confusion. I got lost going to the train. I got angry quickly at people on the street. I was exhausted by the energy, the pulsing heat, the noise. So we fled to the beach house.

The beach house was an excellent place to work on recovery. I read books, I swam in the ocean every day, I rode bikes every single day, and I limited my screen time.

I didn’t just try to heal myself the old-fashioned way. Every morning, I injected BPC-157, took CoQ10, some saffron extract gummies, and a multivitamin. Every night I took zinc, magnesium, drank lemon tea, took blackberry and elderberry extract.

I did these on top of my regulars: Vyvanse in the morning, guanfacine and gabapentin at night. This exact mix has kept me regulated, sane, capable, functional. The gabapentin helped with the headaches, but wasn’t prescribed for that originally. It was just something my psychiatrist said might help.

Every day, I did my eyeball exercises. The concussion I suffered was so stupid, I have to do vision, vestibular, and cognitive speech therapy through at least Thanksgiving.

When I first got to the beach house, my right knee clicked when I walked. It’s been x-rayed, imaged, etc, a couple times. There’s evidence something makes it swell, but no one has any real reason to point to why my knee gets irritated and swollen in the first place.

My knuckles, my wrists, my elbows, my knees, and my hips are all hypermobile. They all pop extremely loudly, and often I feel the need to pop them in order to relieve them of what feels like built-up pain.

I’m clearly telling you all of this in this order on purpose, so I’ll get to the point: before I went to the beach house, I had not injected any BPC-157, ever.

Since I left the beach house, my knee has not clicked or gotten painfully locked up when I walk at all. My fingers, knees, toes, and arms all seem to need to pop much less (probably 60-70% less) than before. My hips hurt less. I sleep better because they don’t ache as much at night, and don't require me to contort myself into strange positions nearly as much. If I had to put a number on it, it’s probably a 30-40% reduction in overall pain, across everything, everywhere.

Oh, and for the first time in my literal life, despite being from Florida, I got a really bad sunburn that faded to a tan instead of sun poisoning or blistering or peeling.

The only real downside seems to be that it made my ADHD medication less effective, which I was warned about. That’s a real pickle: either I can think, or I can be pain-free. Which would you choose?

I know I took a lot of things. I know I did a lot of things. I understand that a lot was extremely different than normal, and that much of it may have played off of each other. I know that I am at best a bad test subject, full of multivariate outcomes and an awful lot of factors thrown at the wall all at once. I know that this would not be considered “proof” in any clinical trial.

I know that BPC in particular is understudied. I know that it’s what made a longtime friend crash out at me and go on a two-day rant on her private alt about how irresponsible I am for ‘promoting angiogenesis’ when someone asked which peptides I liked – a thing that is definitively much more up in the air than her side of the story would have you believe.

It can’t be both understudied and dangerous: either we have studied it and know what it does, or we haven’t studied it and can’t know what it does. But god forbid I used AI to make this point, and now another thing I know is that there are 4,000 furries in my replies dunking on me because I didn’t feel the need to hand-write a respectful reply to someone being disrespectful to me… anyway.

I can’t possibly know which thing did what in specific. But I know that I took something, and it seemed to have some effect. This seems to be relatively aligned with most reports about BPC-157: for what you might call a majority of people, it seems to do relatively little. For a smaller group of people, it seems to have some sort of huge effect, but none of us can point to exactly what shifted, except we simply don’t hurt as much anymore.

I am, for the first time in my adult life, relatively close to healthy. I can go for walks again. I can hang out with my friends in a variety of places and not just think about my body or eating the whole time. I can handle a lot more than I could before. I can get off the couch! I can wear cool clothes! I can say really crazy things, and now instead of being ignored, I get extremely cool mentions in popular magazines and other publications.

When I was fat, I was mostly invisible. I could walk into a room, take stock of who was there, who I wanted to talk to, what I wanted to do. Now, people notice when I walk in. Now, people seek me out to talk to me. Now, I am treated differently. I am somewhat resentful of this, in the sense that I’m still saying the same things I was before, still acting how I was before. It’s just that I’m taken much more seriously now. It’s a shame the world views fat people this way, but plenty has already been written on that.

I was recently profiled in a very gonzo-journalist way in Mama Magazine. I have received mentions for what I am “doing” in the New York Times, Fortune, The Guardian, Wired, Core Memory, and others. This will not stop. This is because I am on a mission. Many people took what I was saying as insane. Maybe people took the opportunity to dunk, to clout farm, or otherwise say shitty things about me. I am okay with this. You are all doing me a favor, actually.

The way social media works, and more broadly, how attention works (because it is deeply reflexive) is that the more you engage with a subject, a topic, the more you are served of that subject or topic. That’s the secret behind recommendation algorithms, etc. It’s not really a secret – the more you hit “like”, the more you post comments about something, the more you are going to see it. If you hate what I am doing, the correct thing to do is not to rage against it, not to go post about how awful I am. The correct thing to do is not reward me at all.

The right thing to do, if you can’t stand to see me, think I’m being irresponsible or dangerous, or if you think I’m just annoying, is just leave it alone and not engage. Every single one of your comments, hateful or otherwise, is broadcasting my message to your entire audience. It doesn’t matter if you and your close homies get together to hate on me in a private group chat. If anything, that would hurt me way worse than you doing it in public does.

Another thing from the Mama profile that seems to be getting a lot of air time is that I really do believe we’re about 5-15 years away from being able to shapeshift. I have an entire article upcoming about this, but it’s really not hard to see if you’ve gone through what I have. In every form of civilization, in every society, humans have done some sort of body modification as a way of self-expression.

We see this in 1.5 groups in modern American society (I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which group I count as half): trans people and bodybuilders. These are the only people who have gone “there is something immutable about my phenotype, and I would like to mute it anyway”, and so they have. Their methods are crude, but ever-evolving. I believe a lot of the reactionary pushback here is going to look myopic in retrospect.

If you take this to be fact, right or wrong, I think you can see where my thoughts go from here: we have shots that make you skinny, shots that make you tan, shots that grow your hair, shots that make your skin look incredible. This is relatively new technology in some ways, and I think it would be absurd to pretend humans won’t experiment with their appearance if we can package it in a friendly way.

I don’t see why we shouldn’t have an arsenal of substances available to modify ourselves with. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have something like slurp juices on demand, the same way we take random supplements and whatever multivitamin looks good on the shelf. In fact, the more I learn about the delineation between “dietary supplement” and “medication”, the blurrier the line gets. I could write an entire piece on how complicated and confusing this is, and how the consumer is harmed by this.

I have friends in San Francisco that experience gender dysphoria over not being a 1,400-foot ship in space. I have friends in Europe that really, truly, honest to god want to be Catgirls. Do you believe that these people, given the chance to modify something about themselves, wouldn’t? Do you think that if a shot came out that could make one experience what it means to float in space with people inside you, I would have to write some thinkpiece about the implications of recommending that experience to someone else?

Obesity is now a solved problem. We can solve many, and maybe one day all problems in the human body with the right combination of technology, experimentation, and belief that things can be better. We will continue ascending, and continue accelerating. Some of it may be for our health, some of it may just be because we want to.

I expect that 10-15 years from now, we will have moved on from “peptides” entirely. We may even call them crude, the way we call the wildly popular diet pills of the 90s crude. We’re already moving past injections, since there’s just a meaningful portion of the population that will never inject themselves with anything. We’re experimenting with sublinguals, with pills, with patches, with nasal sprays, all in hopes of finding newer, better ways to change things that couldn’t have been changed in any other period of history.

I hope for this to be true. I hope that in a decade, I will be looked at not as someone on the frontier of experimentation, doing something radical and scary, but as someone who was just an enthusiast for a mediocre cure. That would be spectacular! Progress continues marching on, and I hope that I am called out of date and of a time simply because better has been invented.

The great news is, it almost certainly will have been.