MOTS-c + 5-Amino-1MQ + Epithalon — the longevity trio, results after 6 months

Fair question. No alcohol change (zero either way). Sleep time +15 min average but bedtime consistency improved which might matter more. Training volume constant. Caloric intake within 100kcal/day.

HRV +10 on Oura can also come from sleeping an extra 30 min/night or cutting alcohol. Were any lifestyle variables stable?

This is the kind of write-up the category needs. HRV +10 over 60d is a real number. But I'd caution anyone reading this: if you stack three interventions you cannot attribute the result. You can only say the stack did something.

5-Amino-1MQ alone gave me a ~0.8kg fat drop over 12 weeks at maintenance calories. Mechanism (NNMT inhibition) is interesting. Downside: it's an NNMT inhibitor and long-term human safety data is nonexistent. Cycling it aggressively.

No illness. Diet basically the same. I don't want to overweight the CRP — it's one reading, within normal variance. The HRV and RHR numbers I trust more because they're rolling averages of thousands of datapoints.

The hsCRP drop is the most interesting number to me. Was there anything else in your life that changed? Diet, sick kids at home, anything?

Curious whether you tried MOTS-c alone before stacking. I split-tested MOTS-c vs NMN alone and the MOTS-c arm was more impactful on exercise tolerance. NMN arm was more impactful on sleep HRV weirdly.

Ran MOTS-c alone for 8 weeks before adding the others. Exercise tolerance bumped noticeably. Body comp didn't move alone. Stack is where things compounded.

Planning exactly that. Pulling 5A1MQ for 12 weeks starting next month, keeping the other two stable. Will report back.

Would you consider dropping 5A1MQ for a cycle and keeping MOTS-c + Epithalon, then re-adding? That's the only way to isolate its contribution.

10mg 2x/week on MOTS-c — why that frequency vs 5mg every other day? Half-life is short enough that split dosing should matter.

Inertia honestly. Started there, never tested alternatives. If I had to guess, more frequent smaller doses are probably better but I don't have data to back that up.

My Epithalon protocol is identical (10mg x 10 days quarterly). My RHR drop was ~4 bpm and stable. It's the most consistent wearable signal I've gotten from any peptide so I'm now a believer for sleep/autonomic purposes at least.

Agreed. I flagged it as possibly noise in the OP for that reason. The HRV and RHR are the real numbers.

DEXA at -1.2% BF and +0.4kg LBM is within the noise floor of most scanners (CV ~1-2% on BF). I'd repeat the scan at 12 months to be confident. Doesn't mean nothing happened, just means don't bank on it yet.

Fair. I wouldn't present this as evidence to start the stack either. I'd present it as "here's what happened, for one person, make of it what you will."

Everyone's going to hate this but: three compounds started together, subjective improvements, objective improvements that could be accounted for by lifestyle consistency alone. I'm not saying nothing is happening. I'm saying this data wouldn't convince me to start the stack.

As someone considering this exact stack — what's the all-in monthly cost at those doses?

Ballpark: MOTS-c ~$180/mo, 5A1MQ ~$120/mo, Epithalon amortized across the year ~$30/mo. Call it ~$330/mo total. Not cheap. Not insane either.

Appreciate the transparency on cost. Most longevity posts skip that part.

Real talk though, the resting HR and HRV improvements are interesting but you basically admitted lifestyle consistency could explain all of it. Did you actually keep training, sleep, and diet locked down identically across the 6 months, or was the stack period just when you happened to dial things in? Because I've seen people attribute gains to peptides when they actually just got more consistent during that window. The hsCRP drop is the one marker that actually points at something specific, everything else reads like noise or training responsiveness.