eidos said:
I'm a routine-driven person. Back in high school, I picked up the idea of changing only 1 variable at a time in experiments, and I've kept to that ever since.
Lately, I've gotten into working with half-lives. That said, our knowledge of half-lives isn't complete: for certain compounds that get inside cells, nobody knows how long they linger there.
Still, using whatever data exists, I work out how long it should take to hit steady state. And until that point is reached with a new peptide, I leave my doses, my schedule, and my stack untouched.
Take something with a half-life under 1 day: roughly 1 week is needed. If the half-life is around 1 week, you're looking at about 1.5 months, or 2 months if you want a bit of buffer.
Most half-life figures people quote are means. Strip away the standard deviation and they tell you nothing. When I go digging through papers, what I usually come across looks like this: for 95% of patients, the half-life falls somewhere between 4 and 8 days, averaging 6 days (care to guess which peptide that is
Precision isn't mandatory, but that doesn't give us license to act arbitrarily.
As an example, with Reta I observed hunger creeping back around day 5 or 6, and the sunburn effect reappearing on day 6. My reading of that is a circulating dose roughly equal to d+1 and d+6. It lines up with a climb to peak over 2 days plus a half-life beyond 7 days in my own case. Crude, yes, but good enough for what I need. So I settled on 1 pin per week as my floor and won't go under it.
I notice that the majority of people follow the study doses to the letter (2, 4, 6, and so on). What's worth grasping is that those doses were chosen pragmatically — whatever is convenient for the lab to manufacture, simple to explain to a patient, and straightforward to analyze. Researchers dislike creating headaches for themselves.
There's no real reason for us to copy that. Personally, I began with 10 and 20mg vials. The doses I used were 2.5, 5, 6.7, and 10. Continuous glucose monitoring is what counts for me. Early on I rarely stepped on a scale; instead I tracked my waist circumference at the navel. That kept me more motivated.
With compounds that have no human clinical trials behind them, like MOTS-C or 5-amino-1-mq, the hard part is zeroing in on the right dose.
All sorts of so-called "protocols" make the rounds, complete with cycles and time limits, backed by zero science. You'll spot that these usually feature pricey products, and that people use them for a quick energy lift before a workout rather than, say, to address metabolic syndrome. We should scrutinize where our information comes from.
One more element is the reconstitution solvent. There are those who insist on Pfizer's BA water. Yet certain other solvents perform fine, occasionally better. These days I use 0.9% NaCl for SS31, MOTS-C, and GHK-Cu: it's isotonic and lowers the odds of a nasty reaction where you inject. For 5AMQ I use sterile water only. That's plenty when the pen is used up within 1 or 2 weeks. Worth knowing: in some hospital settings, insulin sits in the fridge inside polypropylene syringes for 1 or 2 months, and 90% of it is still potent and sterile after 3 months (the paper isn't hard to locate). I wouldn't run things that way if I had to turn out millions of pre-filled pens meant to last months and cross the globe.
Stacking peptides is a touch trickier than stacking crepes. But you still want to dodge the lumps, and it feels just as good when it comes together. Have fun
. Definitely not the ones from the not-a-real-doctor-DCs. And not the ones stuffed with placebo storytelling either: during my first quarter at college I nearly got fooled, and I won't let that happen a second time.