lessthanhalf said:
Sharing that kind of information seems worthwhile to me. My own data matched it exactly, so I'd guess it came from the same place. On here, and even more so on meso, what I've noticed is that most people carry a mistaken picture of what normal levels look like. Based on what they report using, and above all on what bodybuilders are able to use, it becomes very easy to walk away thinking that 4iu a day and above isn't a high dose. For younger people, 2iu or less at least sits nearer to physiological, yet the truth is nobody actually knows the long-term consequences of hgh use, particularly among older users taking it for visceral fat reduction or to hold onto muscle mass, which looks like the most common reason here. The long-term studies simply don't exist, only a handful of short-term ones plus animal work. Declining gh is quite typical as people age, and even more so with obesity, but it matters to keep in mind that no medical recommendations support using it in those situations, since the risks are believed to outweigh the benefits. It wouldn't shock me if wellness clinics and celebrity doctors were using it, but that doesn't make it safe.
Secretagogues may be somewhat safer, since they don't push levels up as far as hgh does, but there's still no evidence of long-term safety. Short-term gains in things like visceral fat, lipids or body composition have turned up in studies of tesamorelin in HIV patients, yet with so many animal studies linking gh deficiency to better life expectancy, you genuinely need long-term safety data to have any real sense of long-term safety, and that probably won't materialize, because Doctors generally view it as a bad safety bet, which makes long-term studies hard to justify.
I'm being a bit of a hypocrite here, since I take 1.5iu/day (igf-1 hasn't been checked yet, though I intend to). My assumption is that 15mg tirz plus 5mg of reta ought to be enough to keep blood glucose from rising, but that will be checked too. My reasoning: given the high overall health risks I carry, and that if I put back some or all of the 54% weight I've lost, my odds of another 10 years of reasonable health drop toward zero (not a common risk profile), the possible small extra risks from hgh are probably smaller than the benefit I get from helping keep weight/fat off. Probably unprovable logic, but it makes sense to me. That logic won't apply to the vast majority of people on this forum, who sit at more normal risk levels, where the risks of hgh or secretagogues, or ghrelin agonists, are very likely greater than the benefits or are simply unknown.
(and take a break from TikTok for a while)