Im gonna retract this one. Recommends some suboptimally dangerous stuff. Also gives people the wrong idea. I have at least tried anything I recced. But I don't personally use all these things. I only ever recommended them to solve problems you actually had. But given how crazy things have gotten in the rat/ea community I no longer really recommend people explore crazy stuff.
I like (and recommend) creatine. It has a long record on the research literature, and its effects at improving exercise performance are well known. More recent research is finding cognitive benefits—anecdotally I can report I am smarter on creatine. It also blunts the effects of sleep deprivation and improves blood sugar control.
I strongly recommend creatine over some of the wilder substances recommended in this post.
one exercise remark: swimming! might have to pick up a little technique at first, but the way it combines a ton of muscle groups and cardio is unparalleled
(if anyone reading this is in the bay I will 100% teach you the 0->1 on freestyle and breaststroke technique, just DM)
Personal note from my own experiences swimming: if you have breathing problems this is a lot less enjoyable. That said, it is definitely excellent exercise.
Semaglutide is the real-deal weight loss drug we have been praying for. It works well for 70%+ of people. Losing and keeping weight off is so difficult that prior to ozempic, it was reasonable advice to preach acceptance or extremely restricted diets. Prior to Semaglutide, I used to assume that most of my friends who wanted to lose weight would fail. Now I assume they will trivially succeed if they get on the drugs. Here is how to get on Semaglutide:
- I purchased sema, for myself and others, on this site: https://evolutionpeptides.com/products/semaglutide-10mg?variant=42834747326660. It has been a reliable supplier for me. Reliability can always change, but for now, it's where I would go.
- Start with a dose of 0.25mg. Increase your dose approximately every four weeks. Stay on lower dosages as long as possible. Tolerance can increase rapidly. For example, the official guidelines say to double your dose after each of the first two months of treatment. I would try to increase dosages more slowly.
- Gray market semaglutide is sold as a powder. You need to mix it into a solution to inject. Search for reconstitution solution.
- You also need needles. Any insulin needle will work fine but some hurt less than others. Here are the ones I use.
- To make the solution, I draw 100 units of reconstitution (a 'full' vial) solution into the needle. I then squirt the solution into the sema vial and repeat this process again. This means 5mg of semaglutide per 200 units of solution. So, to do a 0.25 starting dose, I would inject 10 units of mixed sema solution into my deltoid. It doesn't really matter if you inject into fat or muscle.
Semaglutide feels weird in many ways and makes many people nauseous. Fake Dr. Sapphire's medical advice is to use gray market odansetron to manage nausea. But dramamine is OTC in the USA and most other countries and also works well. Don't expect insanely rapid weight loss. It's normal to lose 1-2 pounds a week, which is honestly quite quick!
Injecting anything from the "gray-market" is quite risky, since it may not be sterile. People have died from such things (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Compounding_Center_meningitis_outbreak)
I'd add the best in class drug testing resource: sending a sample to https://drugsdata.org/
GC/MS equipment can distinguish hundreds of substances and report all present, even trace contaminants. Far superior to at-home reagent kits or test strips.
More generally, I find it troubling that you relegated drug testing resources to an appendix, and there only linked to weak at-home kits and a lab providing infrared spectroscopy (much less sensitive than GC/MS). Relatedly, your description of street ketamine as "usually pretty pure" comes off as flippant. It makes me feel you don't have the reader's safety in mind, which in turn makes me trust your recommendations much less.
A rather large fraction of the total words in this document are dedicated to safety warnings. I do not see how its possible to deny I seem quite focus on some sense of safety. I focused on the safety issues I think are genuinely the most pressing (addiction risks, trauma). I genuinely do not think that drug purity issues are the main risk of taking this advice. Certainly not for ketamine sourced in San Fransisco. Also the service I linked in SF also sends samples to a lab for quite thorough testing and you get results in about four weeks. You should believe I genuinely disagree with you on what the risks are for the substances mentioned.
I've been using nootropics for a very long time. A couple things I've noticed:
1) There's little to no patient-focused research that is insightful. As in, the research papers written on nootropics are written from an outside perspective by a disinterested grad student. In my experience, the descriptions used, symptoms described, and periods allocated are completely incorrect;
2) If you don't actually have ADHD, the side-effects are far worse. Especially long-term usage. In my personal experience, those who use it without the diagnosis are more prone to (a) addiction, (b) unexpected/unforeseen side-effects, and (c) a higher chance of psychosis, or comparable symptoms;
3) There seems to be an upward curve of over-rationalising ordinary symptoms the longer you use nootropics. Of course, with nootropics you're inclined to read more, and do things that will naturally increase your IQ and neuroplasticity. As a consequence, you'll begin to overthink whether the drugs you're taking are good for you or not. You'll doubt your abilities more and be sceptical as to where your 'natural aptitude' ends, and your 'drug-heightened aptitude' begins.
Bottomline is: if you're going to start doing them, be very, very meticulous in writing down each day in a journal. Everything you thought, experienced and did. Avoid nootropics if you don't have ADHD.
No mention of modafinil? It's quite useful for maintaining productivity on low amounts of sleep.
I was prescribed modafinil for sleep issues for 4 years, 200mg/day. It definitely promoted wakefulness, but also made me more irritable.
Yes it is, for sure. I told a nurse at a sleep study that that was my dose. She mentioned she took half a 100mg pill once and stayed up for over 24 hours straight. For me it was barely enough to stay awake through a normal day. It took those 4 years and more to find enough of the root causes to not need to be on it anymore.
I think modafinal is great for a lot of people. But I made the choice to only write up the very best (in terms of expected outcomes) stuff. Given that many substances have risks or legal issues it was much simpler for me to just not mention a lot of stuff. I do not intend any implicit claim that other things aren't useful. But I didn't make a list of 'stuff I've investigated and found less good on average' vs 'stuff I have not investigated'.
Thanks for sharing moda is working that well for you
To stay with the drug theme: I've had moderate success using nicotine lozenges to "jumpstart" an exercise habit. For the uninitiated, nicotine is habit-building more than it is directly addictive and slow-release forms like lozenges or patches are relatively safe. I had no trouble stopping the lozenges after a few weeks and the habit stuck.
Do be careful with this if you have any cardiovascular ailments (particularly hypertension), as nicotine is a vasoconstrictor.
nicotine is habit-building more than it is directly addictive
This seems doubtful. Various other sources have described nicotine as highly addictive, comparable to various "hard" drugs. Evidence is that coffee drinking also seems "habit building", but it is empirically much, much easier to quit caffeine than to quit nicotine.
This comes up a lot - Gwern has a decent research overview on arguments why nicotine by itself isn't particularly addictive (spoiler: MAOIs in tobacco) and there also decades of trying and mostly failing to get animals hooked on nicotine alone. As far as I can tell, society has just conflated nicotine and smoking and blamed the former for addiction to the latter.
n=1, but I personally do not feel any pull towards using patches not lozenges and ironically often forget about them.
IME there is a real effect where nicotine acts as a gateway drug to tobacco or vaping
in general this whole post seems to make this mistake of saying 'a common second order effect of this thing is doing it in a way that will get you addicted - so don't do that' which is just such an obvious failure mode that to call it a chesterton fence is generous
To stay with the drug theme: I've had moderate success using nicotine lozenges to "jumpstart" an exercise habit. For the uninitiated, nicotine is habit-building more than it is directly addictive and slow-release forms like lozenges or patches are relatively safe. I had no trouble stopping the lozenges after a few weeks and the habit stuck.
Do be careful with this if you have any cardiovascular ailments (particularly hypertension), as nicotine is a vasoconstrictor.
IME there is a real effect where nicotine acts as a gateway drug to tobacco or vaping
in general this whole post seems to make this mistake of saying 'a common second order effect of this thing is doing it in a way that will get you addicted - so don't do that' which is just such an obvious failure mode that to call it a chesterton fence is generous