Full longevity stack — 5 compounds, 12 months, blood panel moved

@nad_nightowl I warm the vial in my hand for 90 seconds first and inject slowly (20-30 sec push). Zero sting. Cold push was brutal the first two tries.

Those marker changes are substantial, especially the CRP and HOMA-IR moves. Impossible to partition causally but the trajectory is great.

NAD+ Sub-Q at 100mg 2x is a dose I'd expect to see from someone who isn't doing IV. How's the injection site tolerance at that dose? NAD can sting.

MOTS-c at 10mg weekly is textbook longevity dosing. Glad to see someone running it consistently. The mitochondrial biogenesis angle is the most plausible mechanism for the VO2 bump.

The apob move from 94 to 74 is the single most important marker here. That's a real clinical risk reduction. Question — did you add a statin or other lipid-active drug in this window? If yes, attribution gets fuzzy. If no, impressive.

@showmethestudy no statin, no new lipid drug. I did start taking 2g EPA/DHA daily about month 6. That could be a factor on top of the peptide stack and the whole-food shift.

Thoughtful stack. Epitalon 10mg x 10 days every 3 months is the standard Khavinson protocol. The telomere claim in humans is still debatable but the pineal/sleep effect is well-described anecdotally.

Any humanin in your stack plans? It pairs theoretically with MOTS-c and the peripheral data is interesting.

2g EPA/DHA is not nothing but wouldn't drive a 20-point ApoB reduction by itself. The full picture is likely dietary LDL-C reduction + GH/IGF axis supporting LDL-R upregulation + omega-3.

@humanin_hope I've looked at it. Going to try adding humanin at 5mg 2x/week in the next cycle, pulling one of the NAD doses. Will report back.

Did you DEXA for body comp? With IGF-1 moving from 172 to 244 and 12 months of consistent training, would expect meaningful LBM changes.

@dexa_devotee yes. LBM +3.1kg, fat mass -2.8kg over 12 months. At 47 I wasn't expecting either to move that far given I was already decently trained. The CJC/Ipa cycling probably the biggest driver.

The IGF-1 of 244 is in the upper-middle of normal range for your age. Good target. Any concern about sustained high IGF and cancer-related epidemiology? Curious how you think about that tradeoff.

@citation_required yes, I think about it. The epidemiology is mostly observational and confounded, but the mendelian randomization work on IGF-R pathway has some signal for prostate/breast risk. I chose to stay in the upper-normal range rather than push to 300+. I also cycle off to give the axis a break. Acknowledge there's no free lunch.

The Epitalon every-3-months cadence is exactly what I do. Pineal sleep improvement is real for me — within 3-4 days of starting a 10-day block my deep sleep jumps.

Not to spoil the party but 12 months of lifestyle intervention alone would plausibly account for a majority of these marker changes. The peptide stack's marginal contribution is hard to isolate and probably smaller than the post's framing suggests.

@nullhypothesis fair and acknowledged in the original post. I explicitly said I'm not claiming the peptides drove all of it. The tight trajectory and the LBM gain in particular are the markers I think are most likely peptide-attributable, not the lipids or insulin.

The cleanest framing: this is a lifestyle stack with peptide potentiation. The lifestyle changes would have moved most markers. The peptides likely accelerated the trajectory and added the LBM gain. That's still a valuable contribution.

Pinning this in my head as a canonical longevity stack post. Transparent, labs, honest on attribution.

Quietly appreciating the honest epistemics here. Thanks.

Learned more from this one thread than from a week of YouTube. Saving.

Well-built stack, well-reported, well-caveated. This is the bar.

Solid post and respect for not claiming the peptides did all the work, but real talk, the lifestyle shift is like 80% of this. Better sleep, consistent training, actual diet discipline, creatine, vitD. That's the foundation. The peptides probably helped but you could've gotten 70% of these results just doing the lifestyle piece clean for a year. Still worth running if you've got the budget and the baseline protocol dialed, just don't let people read this and think the compounds are the lever when they're really the fine-tuning tool.