On downregulating one's baser appetites and improving the human condition via grey-market pharmaceuticals from someplace in China

An off-topic Tuesday post

I get that nobody cares but I WILL make off-topic Tuesday posts a regular thing.

I used to run a lot, and by a lot I mean as much as 90 miles a week. Depending on pace, that averages to 90 minutes or more of running every day. Running turns out to be an addictive but also a rewarding thing, and for years it was a huge part of my life – particularly as I became disillusioned with professoring and found myself with a lot of time to spend on other things. Then Covid happened and some combination of prolonged disruptions to routine, social isolation and increasing intellectual engagement with the vaccinator dictatorship dismantled my running addiction bit by bit. When Germany finally lifted the last pandemic restrictions in 2023, I was lucky to be running a third of the volume that I used to.

As I lost discipline and fitness, running got still harder and I ran still less. Whenever I tried to get back into it, I would always remember how fast and how long I used to run, I would find my present degraded fitness and smaller goals laughable, and sooner or later I would push too hard. I pulled muscles and tendons, sidelining my training and feeding my downward spiral still more. Woe is me, I know.

To all of that came the Food Problem. Some assume that if you run a lot you can eat whatever you want, but that was never my experience. Skinnier is faster, for one thing. And at high training volumes you can benefit enormously from tracking your macros like an obsessive-compulsive lunatic, for another thing. The average Western diet is not optimised for endurance sport, it’s basically too carbohydrate-poor and too fat-rich, so eating normally means that your tougher runs always feel like some varying shade of shit. What I’m trying to say is that in my obsessive running years I spent a lot of time plotting about food and micro-managing my intake of food and this was easily the worst thing about distance running for me personally, because thinking about food beyond a certain point is just really retarded.

Still worse, when I stopped running and stopped thinking about food, I inevitably gained some weight, which additional weight is inimical to distance running for a long list of obvious reasons. I’ve spent the last months questioning whether I really want to be anything more than a recreational runner at all, particularly because I know any return to serious training would require a simultaneous return to strict dietary discipline and obsessing once again about food all the time.

Some weeks ago I explained these trials and tribulations to a body-builder friend of mine, who like other body builders has spent a great part of his life not only lifting heavy things but also alternately eating a great deal and then not eating very much at all. He suggested I try an experimental drug from Eli Lilly called retatrutide, a third-generation GLP-1 agonist that is kind of like Ozempic but even more effective. Although no doctor can prescribe retatrutide and no pharmacy will distribute it, there are middlemen who source this peptide from Chinese labs and who will sell you vials of dehydrated powder ominously labelled NOT FOR USE IN HUMANS and FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY. They take crypto and their packages arrive overnight bearing return addresses from countries like Bulgaria. Untold thousands of people all across the world are injecting this stuff as I type this; a whole social media subculture has emerged around these and other grey-market peptides. My friend recommended a supplier in Poland and because I am a crazy and heedless internet person I followed his advice and I’ve been injecting retatrutide for about a month now.

It’s been a curious experience, mostly because the food thing is not the half of it. The drug has subtly realigned aspects of my personality (generally for the better), and given me new perspective on some basic human struggles. I hope that doesn’t sound too dramatic but I’m serious.