pepbob
Explorer
Hey all!
I'm 26 and work as an engineer, based in Toronto.
A bit about me:
For the bulk of my life, I've kept my distance from other people by my own choosing (possibly not the wisest one) and because of what I now recognize as a kind of neurodivergence. That led me to build my own framework of beliefs, routines and tendencies, and not all of them have served me well. My weight gain, I think, came from a mix of naturally high appetite, eating quickly, poor nutrition and low baseline dopamine (depression). I've tried to escape this loop with mixed results, but because depression bouts bring higher caloric intake and metabolic adaptation follows, any loss never lasted.
My long-held view was that nature, and therefore the human body, is far wiser than the modern world and by extension the pharmaceutical industry. Part of me still holds that; nature has had billions of years to optimize itself, even if it suffers from a lack of foresight, while the modern world, despite its capacity for planning, often develops too quickly to anticipate the consequences of its own actions. If we are very well-optimized for living inside of our own bodies, why should we use our comparatively limited minds to interfere with them? So I avoided medications, until a few years ago when it became clear to me that the modern world can do more than nudge us outside of the optimization space of human evolution; it can rewrite the objective function altogether. Usually, when evolution has been bested, it'll show up as a self-stable feedback loop with negative personal consequences. Once you start to look for these in the modern world, they are remarkably common.
Lately I've started nootropics like modafinil, l-theanine, caffeine and creatine, mainly to lift my dopamine floor. On that front they've worked great: my processing speed, willingness to think in depth and overall energy level have increased noticeably. I plan to start peptides for weight loss, visceral fat reduction and training endurance. Since I began treating myself as an engineering problem instead of a delicate piece of glassware, I've been just as excited to learn the biochemistry as to apply it to myself. Looking forward to meeting like-minded individuals
I'm 26 and work as an engineer, based in Toronto.
A bit about me:
For the bulk of my life, I've kept my distance from other people by my own choosing (possibly not the wisest one) and because of what I now recognize as a kind of neurodivergence. That led me to build my own framework of beliefs, routines and tendencies, and not all of them have served me well. My weight gain, I think, came from a mix of naturally high appetite, eating quickly, poor nutrition and low baseline dopamine (depression). I've tried to escape this loop with mixed results, but because depression bouts bring higher caloric intake and metabolic adaptation follows, any loss never lasted.
My long-held view was that nature, and therefore the human body, is far wiser than the modern world and by extension the pharmaceutical industry. Part of me still holds that; nature has had billions of years to optimize itself, even if it suffers from a lack of foresight, while the modern world, despite its capacity for planning, often develops too quickly to anticipate the consequences of its own actions. If we are very well-optimized for living inside of our own bodies, why should we use our comparatively limited minds to interfere with them? So I avoided medications, until a few years ago when it became clear to me that the modern world can do more than nudge us outside of the optimization space of human evolution; it can rewrite the objective function altogether. Usually, when evolution has been bested, it'll show up as a self-stable feedback loop with negative personal consequences. Once you start to look for these in the modern world, they are remarkably common.
Lately I've started nootropics like modafinil, l-theanine, caffeine and creatine, mainly to lift my dopamine floor. On that front they've worked great: my processing speed, willingness to think in depth and overall energy level have increased noticeably. I plan to start peptides for weight loss, visceral fat reduction and training endurance. Since I began treating myself as an engineering problem instead of a delicate piece of glassware, I've been just as excited to learn the biochemistry as to apply it to myself. Looking forward to meeting like-minded individuals
