The GLP-1 Horror Stories Are a Setup: Here's Why | Q&A#21

I would be lying if I told you that I think the war with the social media and getting banned and censored and taken down was over, but we did make a significant amount of headway this week with the reinstatement of our YouTube channel.

The legal team got that done in a matter of a few weeks, and every piece of content that went missing in August has been backfilled.

As an example, in the same breath of our YouTube channel being put back up, we were then subsequently taken down from Instagram, so 161,000 followers there gone. Paperwork is filed, Meta has been put on notice, and the payment processor dropped us the same week under pressure, so we are switching methods.

I know in the last week and a half or two weeks, Instagram had basically pulled down like 15 or 20 different pieces of my content saying it violated community guidelines, most of which didn't actually none of it did.

So the page structure shifted around, and there is a new Josh Holyfield page with the peptide content filtered out of it.

But what we've also done is we set it up so that the content that's pertinent to Anvil nutrition, like the supplement science stuff that gets pushed to Anvil's page, the stuff that's pertinent to Apex, which is anything related to hormone optimization is pushed over to the Apex page. The content that's pertinent to business coaching, consulting, how to grow your brand gets pushed over to our new high caliber coaching page.

These guys wouldn't be so relentless about silencing guys like me unless the things that I was saying were true, and that much I know for certain.

Here are the questions people sent in.

The key difference between growth hormone and the growth hormone related peptides is that the peptides influence the growth hormone releasing hormone receptor on the pituitary gland, so CJC, sermorelin and tesamorelin are all telling the pituitary to do its own job rather than replacing it. Ghrelin, which is a hormone coming out of your gut, controls the magnitude of that pulse, and hexarelin and ipamorelin mimic that ghrelin signal.

When we stack the growth hormone-related peptides or the GHRH analogs with the ghrelin mimetics and then meet at the pituitary, that's what influences the largest pulse of growth hormone.

Growth hormone then triggers lipolysis, which is the conversion of stored fat into usable energy, and a portion of it is converted in the liver into IGF-1, which is what actually drives the repair and the building.

There's no receptor desensitization that happens at the pituitary because they have such a short half-life, but you do need to cycle the ghrelin-related peptides, especially hexarelin if you decide that that's one that you want to use.

The studies show that we see a reduced benefit, reduced result from those after capping at about 250 milligrams per day. After 90 days of consistent use you get a reduced response, which is why the GHRH analogs can run continuously and the ghrelin mimetics cannot.

You also do not need to cycle growth hormone itself, because it isn't going to create receptor desensitization and it isn't going to shut down the pituitary, since the pituitary keeps receiving the GHRH signal whether or not you injected.

The studies that we do have of people who were on GH and then came off found that typically you're going to see regular production of growth hormone resume within 48 hours.

Once you commit to GH there's really no reason to come off it. Optimize your dose to get yourself within a normal IGF-1 level or whatever it is that you're targeting, depending upon your goals. And at that point the GH peptides like CJC or tesamorelin stop being useful, because growth hormone is going to make it so that those don't function.

Question number two, where should IGF-1 sit for longevity while keeping cancer risk down? I kind of touched on this question yesterday and initially when I added this question to the list here, I read it wrong.

I thought that the question was where should using IGF-1 LR3 fall with a longevity protocol? Reading it now, I can see that it's more so where should your IGF-1 levels sit for longevity while keeping cancer risk down? That makes more sense.

Both answers matter, so take the first one quickly. When it comes to a longevity focused goal set, like I'm just doing peptides so I can live longer and feel my best, I do not believe that IGF-1 LR3 or DES has any place in a protocol. Those are advanced level peptides used specifically to support an anabolic cycle, and a therapeutic dose of growth hormone gets you a safer version of the same result.

The exception is the person whose pituitary genuinely isn't producing. So if that's the case, sure, you can look to add IGF-1, obviously under the care of a doctor or supervision, under the care of an expert. And I would advise that before you do that, you have all of your other labs optimized and you have an idea of what you want your IGF-1 levels to be.

And so that leads into the second part of this question, which is where should your IGF-1 levels sit? Now in my experience, the number one things that influence IGF-1 levels for people is age, which is normal, right? You're just going to slow production of these things.

After age it's food and sleep, in that order. Most of the time, people who are on some type of incretin like red atrutide or trisepatide find themselves with low IGF-1 levels and that has 100% to do with the fact that they're just not eating enough food and or people aren't sleeping.

The most upstream thing that you can do to influence your hormone production is 100% consistent sleep, period, because the hypothalamic signal that starts the whole cascade is influenced by your circadian rhythm, and a broken sleep schedule breaks the signal before the pituitary ever gets a chance to respond.

If your neck is over 18 inches, you probably need a CPAP. I know I need a CPAP, right? Get your sleep study, get your sleep figured out, that's going to be the first thing, okay? The second thing to understand is typically pituitary function, meaning its ability to actually convert those hypothalamic signals into the hormone that your body needs to produce the hormones that you want, a.k.a. whether or not you have the raw materials on board.

That comes down to micronutrients, specifically zinc, D3, K2, boron and selenium. Your thyroid is heavily reliant upon all of these micronutrients, and a thyroid running at half speed takes the rest of the endocrine system with it.

IGF-1 follows a U-shaped curve for mortality risk, with very low levels carrying elevated risk right alongside the high ones.

Then as we move to like a center point around 300 nanograms per deciliter, that's where our risk is lowest, and then as we exceed those IGF-1 levels beyond, the risk becomes high again.

The cancer fear comes from rat studies where the highest IGF-1 groups correlate with tumor growth, and that is a real finding worth respecting.

Yes, that's very prevalent in the United States especially, but the highest rate of death, especially after 50, is cardiovascular related problems, okay? And the benefit of using growth hormone is most of those cardiovascular related problems are mitigated by solving problems with your diet and nutrition, right? When I solve the insulin resistance problem, when I start taking the foundations of my health seriously, doing cardio and taking care of myself, I'm solving most of the problems that put me at risk of cardiovascular disease.

So to answer your question, in short, in my opinion, a healthy target for IGF-1 is about 300, okay? If your goal is health and longevity, that's kind of where you want to sit.

Most men I see come in between 150 and 200. You can push as high as 400 if you really, really want to, and anything north of 500 needs expert supervision.

If you get your lab work done and you get a draw of IGF-1 and it's sitting at 295, why add growth hormone? You're already where you want to be as far as that's concerned. If it's sitting at 94 and your diet supports conversion, now you have an actual production problem worth addressing.

This connects to the TRT question too, because this isn't a static number either. A 125 milligram per week dose with normal free test, total test, SHBG, E2, LH and FSH doesn't need changing just because you feel flat.

If you are building something of your own and this is the part you are stuck on, High Caliber Coaching is where I work through it with people doing the same thing: https://www.skool.com/high-caliber-coaching/about