The Honey Diet w/Anabology

We are back for round 2 with Anabology. Anabology and I had a conversation exactly a year ago, actually, which is crazy how that happens. But in that last year, Anabology's adapted and evolved his honey diet quite a bit. I got on the high amounts of sugar fruit till noon grind as well, and he's had a lot of very interesting insights since then. So we're gonna have a little conversation. Anabology, thank you so much for coming on again.

Yeah, thanks. Happy to be here.

Yeah. So, last time we talked, you were obviously in a different location, different climate. That was probably the beginning of the— was that the beginning of you weeding out the honey diet and kind of putting that into like documentation form? Or did you have that going on, you know, before you started talking about it on the internet?

Yeah, I think when I started it was kind of like November, December of 2023.

And now it's—

and then I kind of like publicized that in my like results after December, so around January and now it's 2025 January, so it's been about like a year. Yeah, definitely a different climate. I mean I think like Jack Kruse and people like that say that you shouldn't be eating fruits or sugar in these like northern climates. I was, I was like right by the Canadian border in upstate New York back then in the winter because of all the, all the deuterium.

Yeah. Well, we see how well that's working for Jack. Actually, first you should probably go over what the honey diet is and then were you doing that in that winter climate in the Northern Hemisphere? Yeah.

So, so the original honey diet was basically, uh, just trying to maximize sugar in the early part of the day and then load all of the protein into one meal. So it's like intermittent fasting, but instead of fasting, you just do sugar. And it was based on some animal data where animals just ate ridiculous amounts of sugar, whether it be like Coke. Or pure sugar or whatever they did, sugar water, and they didn't gain any weight. So I was eating half a pound of dates and a pound of honey in the early part of the day. And then I was kind of fasting between 3 and 7. Then I was eating a big protein dinner, like a pound of beef, pound of vegetables.

Yeah.

And that, and that was like during the winter when there was like 3 foot of snow on the ground in upstate New York. And that worked pretty well. I mean, I increased my calories from like 2,000 to 3,000 calories basically. Or 3,500 calories maybe in that time. And I lost about 10 pounds. So yeah, that was that. It definitely like worked in the winter and, you know, I was eating honey and dates and I think dates are basically like a desert food and honey is also something that you find in, in warmer climates and warmer times. So definitely not seasonal, but it, but it still worked. Yeah.

Yeah. It's interesting. And what I like about the way that you approach these things is we talked last time and you're like, the way that you figure out if something works or not is you just take it to the max volume and see if you get any adverse reactions. So you were talking about that with food. It's like to see if you're sensitive to a certain food, eat as much of that food as you can and see if you don't have any problems. That's super interesting. I definitely take a more conservative approach. But like, I think for weeding stuff out, that makes a lot of sense. One thing that I do notice is my cravings differ in the winter versus the summer. And I think that's something that we really lost is that intuitive eating component because we're having these food science abominations that were designed and, you know, billions of dollars are put in R&D to figure out how to make them as addictive as possible and rewire those food satiety cravings. Do you crave that same amount of sugar in the winter as you do in the summer?

So I, I think I actually might like kind of crave protein a little bit more in the winter, which like might, this might be a reason why it kind of helps like the diet. So there's this, you know, factor, it's called FGF21 and this is like the, the whole thing that the diet was based off of is there's this like hormone that increases whenever you just overfeed sugar. And what the hormone does to your senses is it makes you aversive towards sugar and it makes you crave protein. So, but it also increases your metabolic rate a ton. So it's like basically your body telling you, it's like, hey, you're eating like sugar that's deficient in protein or like some, some source of energy that's deficient in protein. And it makes you try and seek out protein, but it also increases your metabolic rate. So it's kind of like hacking this like mechanism. That is, is saying, like, hey, you know, why are you doing this? Like, why are you eating just like so much sugar? But your body seems to be able to handle it and like adapts and increases the metabolic rate. But yeah, like maybe, maybe it works better in the winter because like I do crave like more of this protein, which like might be a signal of having higher levels of this like hormone FGF21. Like, and you know, to be fair, like in the summer I do weigh like less just generally. But I attribute that to more to light than to just like diet. 'Cause like diet is like relatively consistent, but then the UV exposure is like much, much higher. Whenever I did kind of like tanning booths before, I also tend to lose weight like a lot faster. Like leans me out, just like lose 5 pounds immediately if I hop in a tanning booth and use that for like a couple weeks.

Interesting. That's so fascinating. I mean, we, we definitely gotta go and have a full section about light cuz we, we all know, I mean, light plays such a significant role. You know, light diet in my opinion is of equal importance to food diet. But the issue is we don't have as much control over our light diet as we do what we put in our mouths. So going back, just, you know, let's focus on the diet component. When I started doing this, it was, it, it started with me because I used to be into like working out and fitness and bodybuilding and whatnot. I would try to cut weight by cutting calories. And what would happen then is I would feel like shit all the time and I would never get the results that I was looking for, right? I wasn't lean, I became flat, and then I started gaining visceral fat and I just— it ruined my body composition and it ruined my energy and cognition. But I would eventually just say, okay, fuck it, I'm going to go back to bulking and I'm just going to eat a copious amount of carbs. I'm just going to eat until I'm hungry, hungry, hungry.. And then all of a sudden my body composition improves in the way that I wanted it to when I was trying to cut. And then it was actually around that time, right before we had that first podcast, I was in Mexico and I was kind of just doing whatever. Like, I never— I was never a guy that had sweets. I was never a guy that had anything dessert-wise because I was still in that orthorexic, almost masochistic model of health where it's like, for me to get the results that I want, I need to suffer. I need to intermittent fast. I need to cut out carbohydrates. I need to kind of eat like cardboard, really. Like that's what we're told being healthy is. And I was just kind of like having fun life maxing. So I would, you know, wake up in the morning, go, and I started getting like Oreo Frappuccinos and like a fruit smoothie. More importantly, I would have a fruit smoothie and coffee, but like a liter of fruit of smoothie, like 60 grams of sugar at least.. And then my energy and cognition and mood just started absolutely skyrocketing. One of the primary heuristics I look for is like the vibrancy that I'm able to see, like things seeming novel. When I'm in that mode, I notice new things in my surrounding that started happening. You started posting the honey diet. I was like, oh shit, like the mechanisms that you're talking about make a lot of sense here. Thermobolic then did it from more of a body composition standpoint, and that was also super fascinating to me. And then I started just doing it more structured and really experimenting with it, experimenting with certain compounds. One thing that you do, do, one thing that you do that is different though, is that you do the fasting window in the middle. I believe you said that's just to utilize the rest of that, you know, glycogen that's being stored in your liver and muscles. Like, is that the primary role? Is there something else? How important do you find that fasting window to be? And then, you know, how do that take, how does that impact your final meal, your dinner? Like, are you cutting carbs out completely? Yeah.

Yeah. So there's like one thing I wanna just put like a flag in there cuz you said something like really interesting how you were like cutting and you were gaining visceral fat is what you were, you, you were saying. So like despite kind of like doing like the calories in calories out thing while, you know, you're decreasing calories in. You kind of were having these negative like shifts where your maybe muscles were like being like lost and your fat was being like gained, right? So that's like an extra dimension to calories in, calories out that people underappreciate is like, where are the calories in going? Is it going to fat or is it going to muscle? And I think we should talk more about that. But like specifically on the point of the, of the like fasting window, I've actually moved away from that, I think. And I find it to be less important now after like a year of like seeing people try this out. So the original thought was that you would just have these like blood sugar spikes. And I used a continuous glucose monitor and when I was in this like protein deficient state, I would basically eat like a pound of honey and then I would have the glucose back, go back down to baseline, like 90 by like 2 hours after eating like all of that honey. Right. So I was like, okay, if I just, You know, have like a short fasting period. I can burn off all of this blood sugar like immediately within a few hours, and then I can have the protein or, or fat and then burn that off overnight. Right? So I like separate out the macros and like the metabolic processing of the macros to not have any interference between like the protein and then the, and the carbs, which people talk about as like the Randle cycle. But I, I kind of think about this in terms of that hormone we were talking about earlier, the FGF21, which is inhibited by protein. Um, but I actually find that to be less important now than before. Uh, like, because one of the things that you can really mess up with this diet is having too big of a dinner. So like you can gain fat on a one meal a day diet if you end up eating like a 4,000 calorie dinner and your dinner is just like a high carb, high fat, high protein dinner and you eat nothing else in the entire day, like just completely fast, you're still gonna gain fat. It's like, you know, too much food basically. With like too bad of a calorie or macro ratio. So you can do that on the Honey Diet as well. You can just eat like a really shitty, just like seed oil, you know, full 5,000 calorie dinner and then just gain a ton of weight. So then if you have this like fasting period and then you're too hungry by the time that you eat dinner, then sometimes you can just like overeat at dinner and, and just like mess up the diet. So whenever people are kind of like, it's kind of funny cuz like people like come to me and they're like, I'm not losing weight, like what's up? And then usually we just like do things to make the diet easier, right? Like where they're say not eating enough food during the, the actual like sugar period. So then they get too hungry and they eat too big a dinner. So I'm like, oh, just eat more food earlier in the day. And then they start losing weight or, you know, they're like, you know, oh, I'm not losing weight. And then they basically fast for too long. Like they, they can't get enough food in before 3:00 PM. So then I just say, hey,, you know, start eating during the fasting period and then by dinner they're like not so hungry that they overeat and then they start losing weight again. So like the, the kind of like, you know, aside from the one date point, right? So like recently I posted that dates might be problematic with the Honey Diet. There is like this failure case that I see where people eat like a pound of dates or, or too many dates and then they start gaining weight. For some reason dates are kind of weird and even though they're just like mostly sugar, people gain weight on those more than even just drinking only Coca-Cola or only honey or something, something like that, which is, which is strange. But aside from like the kind of switching what fruits you're eating point, like most people kind of fail by not eating enough food, which is pretty remarkable.

Yeah, that is interesting. Why do you, why do you think there's a problem with dates?

Yeah.

So, sorry, is it the allulose?

Is allulose in dates? I didn't know that.

Yeah, they got some abnormal sugar. I think it's allulose. Yeah, it's like that might have something to do with it. That's the only thing I can think about that makes dates different.

Well, there's, yeah, there's something weird about it. I mean, there's like, people said that like dates are estrogenic. I don't know if it's true or not. I haven't really seen good data on that., but, and like also they have like 8 grams per pound of uncooked starch. And there's all, all this data on, you know, starch itself is, is pretty benign if you cook it well, but uncooked starch forms these like big starch granules, which gets through your gut and is like super inflammatory damaging to all of your cells. It's like nanoparticles basically just going in your blood. So like that might contribute to it. There, there have been these studies where researchers will give animals the exact same diet, but they'll switch out the protein source from casein, which is like the standard in animal diets, to egg white protein. And then the same diet will make animals fat with casein, but not with egg white protein. And they think that that's because casein is inflammatory to the gut. So if something is inflammatory to the gut, despite being exactly the same macros as like another food, then that can cause weight gain. Is kind of my conclusion to this. So it like, yeah, I guess like the key things, like maybe, maybe it's the inflammatory issues with like the uncooked starch. I noticed on a continuous glucose monitor, I would eat a pound of honey and my blood sugar would never get above like 150 or 160. I would just like dispose of it immediately. And, but with dates, I like, I could push the dates too far. If I ate like a pound of dates, I would get like a blood sugar of like 180 or You know, maybe even slightly above, but I would never get that with honey. So yeah, there's just, but like, I'm not like the biggest opponent of like a transiently high blood sugar in the world. I just think that it's like behaving differently and something's weird about it.

Very interesting. Interesting that you bring up the protein difference as well. When I'm in that zone of like when things are running and I can feel like my metabolism just being funneled fuel like a blast furnace, it's like you turn on the turbo switch, right? Like you get the NOS switch and you can feel when that turns off. I can feel when that turns off, right? When something in my metabolism switches. Certain proteins make it not switch off. I found collagen didn't, 'cause when I was doing like the fruit smoothie in the morning, Some of those times I would put collagen in my protein powder, in my smoothie, no issues whatsoever. Sometimes like dairy, like kefir didn't seem to be very problematic. Beef protein isolate shut it off immediately, which was interesting. And I know that you're kind of phasing that out now with collagen. It's interesting that you bring up the gut, like the gut related, like if anything that's inflammatory seems to enter the system, it kind of shuts off that blast furnace metabolism. What do you think about fruit as a whole as opposed to honey? It's got fiber in it. Sometimes some people have a hard time digesting apple peels or anything like that. Do you think that that can have a negative impact on this weight loss component of the honey diet?

Yeah. I mean, I think it can kind of like, unfortunately, because fruit is a lot easier to eat than honey. Like the, the Josh Rayner recently posted his just 10-pound, you know, melt of his, of his fat after eating basically 10 Coca-Colas a day until dinner. He just like, you know, he is eating like 2000 calories of Coke only and then he eats like a dinner. So it's basically like honey diet but Coke instead of, instead of fruits and honey. And it like, it seems to work if you're just eating like Pure sugar, pure honey, like basically protein deficient, nutrient deficient sugar, even high fructose corn syrup, it works. But then sometimes when you add like the wrong amount of fruits or wrong fruits, then it just stops. So yeah, I don't know what it is in fruits. I mean, maybe, maybe too much protein in certain fruits even could, could get you over that level. That's why I was like looking at, you know, collagen and gelatin because the, studies that led me to this with FGF21, they found if you just restrict one branched-chain amino acid, isoleucine, you can induce the FGF21 like hormonal response, the blast furnace metabolism, and then the animals live a lot longer. So gelatin is pretty, pretty low in isoleucine, like maybe even lower than fruits in isoleucine specifically.

Interesting. Yeah, I, I only do fruit, and the reason that I only do fruit is because I do think that like a lot of us, like you and Josh in particular, you guys have been dialed, especially when it comes like the fatty acid intake of your diet. And I think that, that expresses itself in like the state of your mitochondria. I think a lot of people going into this, they're popping into this after not being as kind of like hard-nosed when it comes to dietary restrictions and like focusing on mitochondria as like a primary health needle mover. So for me, it's like fruit seems like something that's a little bit slower, you know, that they're gonna be able to process a little bit easier. Even like I become a little bit apprehensive when I'm starting to like slam fruit juice cuz I'm like, you know, at what point is this gonna overload my system? Like, can my mitochondria handle this influx of glucose? I do notice that certain fruits don't seem to jive as well as the others. And when I say jive, I just mean like give me that feeling of limitlessness. Apples work really, really well, especially when I peel the skins. I love pears, oranges, any citrus. I really do try to remove some of the fiber though. So if I have an apple, I'll do like the ribbon peel on and only eat part of the skin. If I have grapefruit, for example, I'll like open up the skins and I'll eat just the pulp. So I do think that fiber may slow it down a little bit. I think for some people that actually might be beneficial just because like, I know some people aren't in a metabolic state where they can process, you know, just copious amounts of sugar. Maybe you have a different opinion. I'd be interested to hear that. But this comes back to that conversation of the importance of like the fatty acid composition of your diet. I think that this is a primary and probably just as important as the eating only you know, sugar until a certain period of the day is avoiding polyunsaturated fatty acids. My logic is that like polyunsaturated fatty acids, you know, if your body breaks those down as fuel, um, like, you know, uh, beta oxidizes them or whatever, that it's, it's a very inflammatory process. So your body's like selectively going to store those as fat because it's a catch-22. It's like, well, do I want to store these as fat or do I want to burn them? Like, I'm either going to take this thing that's going to cause oxidative stress and store it where it's safe. I think that's also why you see people who eat— this is, this is completely, um, like, uh, tangential— but you see people who eat like high seed oil diets, if they're lean and they eat high seed oil diets, they oftentimes look very aged. If they're fat and they eat high seed oil diets, they just look fat. And I think that's because that thing that would otherwise cause a bunch of oxidative stress is now being stored in your adipose tissue. But do you think PUFA is, that's a hard line, that's a primary needle mover in making this whole system run smoothly?

Yeah, I think it's definitely really important. So then there's this blog, the Hyperlipid blog by this guy Peter D, his last name is really hard to say. Anyway, he has these posts where he just takes all of the animal data and then he'll kind of just deconvolute the diet and be like, okay, this one is 2% linoleic acid, which is the main seed oil omega-6 fat. And this one is 3%, this one's 4%. And with like changing just like 1% of your calories to be PUFAs to increase in seed oil content, then you get like basically like 1.5 times the body weight. There's just like these huge changes that you get just from a few calories. And then once you get to these like really, really high levels, which is like why kind of in the population data then you get different effects, right? So say like 50% of your calorie is coming from, or calories are coming from seed oils and then you turn that to 55%. Well then now your mitochondria become super leaky because now you're just like increasing the chaos in the cell membrane of your mitochondria possibly, or changing the physical properties of mitochondria. And then now because they're leaky, you leak energy, which is like basically called uncoupling. And then you start to lose weight, right? So, so there's these like weird effects that you get once you're already really high in PUFAs, but at the very low levels, like if you are convinced that seed oils are bad for you and you try and minimize them, then every little gram ends up kind of mattering, you know, when you're, when you're lean. So, so yeah, that's like one thing. Another mechanism is that, that I think is interesting that kind of relates to the point earlier where you were cutting and you were gaining visceral fat. Is that the thing that like this guy Peter on Hyperlipid Blog thinks linoleic acid does, that omega-6 seed oil, is that it actually doesn't produce enough reactive oxygen species in the mitochondria. And his thought was that these reactive oxygen species are just natively produced in the mitochondria. So like what happens is you have electrons that are trying to flow through these proteins in your mitochondria. And sometimes if you have a lot of calories, you kind of back this up, right? And instead of going through these complexes in your mitochondria, the electron gets given to oxygen instead on accident, in quotes, on accident. There's not really an accident, but it gets, it gets just ejected into oxygen and then that's a reactive oxygen species. So then if you have a lot of calories, you should produce a lot of ROS and then you start rejecting calories at the cell level. Once you have all this ROS. And that's what maybe saturated fats do, right? So it's like well known, at least in the mainstream science, that like saturated fats can produce ROS. And they're like, wow, this is terrible that saturated fats are producing ROS. They must be causing oxidative stress, et cetera. But the argument is that this is actually a good thing that they cause, they cause ROS to be produced. They actually cause insulin resistance transiently, but they're doing this in the context of I have too many calories and now I'm not gonna start taking up too many calories into my fat and start growing. So then the PUFAs, if they produce less ROS in the mitochondria, they don't cause the cell to be satiated. So then the cell keeps accepting more calories and then it starts to grow and it starts to get, you know, if it's a fat cell, it starts to grow more and more and more. And then you just, you're, you become fat as a human. So then the question is like, How, how does this like relate to muscles versus fat, right? Like what you want is you want your fat to be insulin resistant so it rejects calories and you want your muscle to be insulin sensitive so it accepts calories and grows. Oh, and the idea is maybe PUFAs or omega-6s end up biasing you towards having insulin sensitive fat cells, but insulin resistant muscle.

Interesting. I wonder how you could induce insulin resistance specifically in the fat cells. Cause we know what muscle's like. You wanna be insulin sensitive, you just work 'em out. You know, same way if you like wanna be androgen sensitive, you just work 'em out. If you could selectively make your vessels insulin resistant. And you know, the thing with this, and I'm sure that you realize this as you start going down, you know, deeper and deeper to your level that you're at now, it's like there's so many contradictions, right? It's like, okay, cool. We want to like improve insulin sensitivity, right? But then we all, or like we want to induce like an insulin response. Because insulin like has your, your muscle cells uptake fuel, but it also has your fat cells uptake fuel. Same with ROS, right? Like, oh, we don't wanna induce reactive oxygen species, but then we do things that are like hormetics, like exercise. And that's like one of the primary like outcomes of ROS. And this is kind of where a lot of people get caught up. And I think this is where the big schism is of like the pro-metabolic versus anti-metabolic crowds. It's like, if you are ramping up these metabolic processes, that is invariably gonna root, like create metabolic byproducts. And some of those are, you know, inflammatory. Some of those are those ROSs that we're talking about. Like, is that a case for concern? Why do we see people who have a lot of, you know, clinical or academic background actually aim to lower their metabolic rate, actually aim to lower their body temperature, What's causing that schism and why do you think that the pro-metabolic approach is the right approach?

Right. Yeah. So I think it's, it's, it's kind of difficult, like from just the perspective of the metabolic rate versus like these health outcomes. The main arguments that this comes from is like looking at just interspecies data where like animals with a higher metabolic rate tend to live shorter periods of time because they're like just physically smaller is generally what I think is the answer to that, right? Because like a mouse has to have a higher metabolic rate than an elephant, or an elephant has to have a higher— a lower metabolic rate than a mouse because it would just explode in heat if it had too high metabolic rate.

Sorry, we have tortoises that are like the size of my palm that live to be 100, right? But they're slow. They are slow.

But then there's, there's like always these kind of exceptions to the rules where say bats, for example, have a very high metabolic rate, high body temperature, but they also live a very long time. Right. So it's like, it's like hard. And if you want to like have like one of these models, like you really don't want these just like giant exceptions. If it's like something that's, you know, driving the rule, I guess, or driving like this for sure, if you think it's a causal factor, um, or you want to identify like the reasons why there are these exceptions and like how the species, um, mitigates it. But okay, so, uh, on like the human level, which I think is like the most relevant, right? Because like if you go through species, you find these exceptions and it doesn't really make like a ton of sense. Um, on the human level, if you are hypothyroid, your mortality risk is just like skyrocketed and your body temperature is going to be lower.. And I think that that is something that like most people, if you have a higher body temperature, your thyroid function is also better and your mortality risk is going to be better, right? So I think it's a useful metric like as far as that. But then there's also all this data of calorie restriction improving lifespan and there's genetic differences here, right? So if you take, I think it's been done in dogs and it did increase lifespan. It's been done in a ton of different species of mice. In most species of mice, it extends lifespan if you calorie restrict. In some it doesn't. And, you know, some people argue that if you eat less of a bad thing, that's like good. And that's why calorie restriction helps. But, you know, it is true that like in almost every time we study it, calorie restriction does extend lifespan and, and it does lower your body temperature. So I think when it comes to someone like Bryan Johnson and he has like a really, really low body temperature, I think my working model of this is that his metabolism has just gotten more efficient where you're just producing less heat because you're calorie restricted, but it's like some adaptation that isn't probably super detrimental. I think the key thing is he's probably producing enough ATP to like be okay, but just like not a ton of heat. And ATP is more important than heat, but if you don't produce enough ATP, then it gets really, really bad, right? So if you are hypothyroid, you're probably not producing enough ATP and then your body temperature is low and you're going to get cancer and all these other things at a much higher rate because you're not producing enough heat or ATP. You can also produce a lot of heat and no ATP, which is the case of uncoupling agents like DNP or other metabolic poisons that exist that like inhibit ATP production. So you can inhibit ATP production with like a poison. And then your body temperature can skyrocket 'cause your body's trying to produce like more and more energy, but it's just like not able to get all the way to ATP. So then you only produce heat. But then if you do enough of this, what happens? You end up having these cells that are just like permanently excited because they can't relax 'cause you have no energy to make them relax. And then you get a heart attack and die. So, so like it's, it's like bad on either end of the spectrum. Like you, you can have, you know, high body temperature, low body temperature and be extremely unhealthy. I think you can have high body temperature and low body temperature and be healthy. And same with high metabolic rate, low metabolic rate. It's like you kind of have to like live in the world of like paradox, if that makes sense, where like every single thing, like you can have any metric and be healthy or unhealthy. But you have to like figure out like what, what is like, what are you going to optimize for? Like what is the set of biomarkers that you deem is going to make you live longer? It's a weird way to think.

And I think a really important point here is that we're dealing with imperfect metrics. I think that any biomarker is an imperfect metric, but especially these ones. It's no different than with heart rate variability, right? We have a crowd of people that are saying, why would I want my HRV to be low? Right? Why would I not want my heart rate to, like my resting HRV to be higher? Having low HRV could mean that like, yeah, your pump's just not working well, but it's more indicative of an efficiency thing. And it seems like it could be the same thing for temperature to a certain extent. And then you also bring up a good point. It's like, what are you trying to get out of it? And I think this is where a lot of people differ is that their objectives differ. I think a lot of people, yeah, they'd love to live a really long time, who wouldn't? But they also just want to feel really, really good right now. And a lot of these guys who are in that space, they have a different opinion on what good feeling feels like. You know, I see with a lot of these high-level health guys that they don't care about having high testosterone at all. Like they don't care about, you know, anything when it comes to virility or fertility for that matter. They just care about living as long as possible, right? So David Sinclair, he is this metaphorical tortoise. Bro does not scream vitality at all, but based off of his metrics, he's doing really well. And I think that comes down to this other thing. It's like, you know, everybody has a different opinion or they fit a different bill of what health means to them. So I think you really have to compartmentalize like what you're doing and, you know, take it from people who are trying to achieve the same objectives that you are. Otherwise, like, you know, this idea of being healthy for healthy sake, it's too nuanced. And I do think there's a happy medium. You know, and I don't know if there's one thing, like there's things that I can do now that make me feel really good that will make me feel like ass, you know, 10 years down the line. There's things that I can do that'll make me feel ass now that'll be good 10 years down the line. Honestly, that's what kind of where I just come and I just tiptoe and I like dip my toe in something and I'm like, I'll do this for a little bit 'cause it makes me feel good now. I'm gonna dip my toe back out of it. One of the things here, you know, tying this back to this diet we're talking about, I apply this same principle of like dipping my toe in and out and cycling everything to this. I don't know if doing copious amounts of sugar until noon or just restricting other macronutrients until noon is a good idea. And, my primary concern with that is my fatty acid intake. I do believe that humans like us, we need a certain amount of these wide arrays, wide array of fatty acids, right? Monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and saturated fats. And then, all of the subtype of fatty acids within that. So right now I'm going through a period, one, because I think I upregulated my metabolism too much. I just like was not able to put on weight and I was trying to bulk. I'm like, I'm going to be actively pursuing PUFAs in the form of sardines and, you know, fresh mackerel and stuff like that. And MUFAs by just having a little bit more olive oil. And I'm just like cycling that. I'm seeing what happens. I do think, and this is something to note here, that through that process, when I went really hard this summer for like 4 months of doing that, I can now eat in a way where I could not eat before and still reap those benefits. Like, it's still consistent. Do you think with the Honey Diet, like, have you been doing it consistently since we last talked? Do you think that it is sustainable, or should it be something that should be cycled?

So, I mean, I, I've, I've just kind of done on and off because there's been periods where, like, I'm just with family or, like, with going to a bunch of, like, lunches for business and I'm getting coffees in the morning and I want a latte or something. And I try to go on it whenever I'm like, by default, when I'm not in any extraordinary circumstances because I feel the best on it. I just get the least headaches, migraines. That was a problem I had my entire life. If it should be cycled or not, I think it's a sustainable diet long-term if you kind of have like a spectrum that you can make changes on. So if you say like make the time at which you eat protein earlier or later, or you say add cream or like a little bit of milk during the day if you want to like start gaining weight, I, I think it's like really important to have this baseline kind of like diet that you just find that you feel good on. So if you do experiments and you change things and you mess up, you can always go back to something that works for you. And that's like kind of what the Honey Diet is for me. And I just like tune different like level levers on it whenever I want to change certain things. Oh, and I wanted to like go back to one point that you said earlier, like how would you, how would you make body fat insulin resistant and muscles insulin sensitive? So I mean, one way that I think you could do that is just have like really, really high stearic acid in your diet, which is mainly beef fat and like beef tallow and cocoa butter are the main sources of stearic acid. And the reason why is your fat cells inherently have really big lipid droplets in them and that's like how they store fat. They store these in these like physical droplets and then there's these, this like basal level of like cleaving off the fats and like using them for energy. So then if I have like the same blood sugar, my muscles are gonna be running off of sugar and my fat cells are gonna be running off of fat just because there's more sugar around these muscles that don't have big lipid droplets and then, and there's more fat around my fat cells that have this, this fat leaking off. And then the, the stearic acid can make the fat cells insulin resistant while the glucose or fructose allows my muscle cells to be insulin sensitive. So I mean, back to your like olive oil point, like gaining, adding olive oil or like PUFAs to bulk while, you know, because maybe the other things are like leaning you out too much or you can't gain weight. Now, whenever I add olive oil into my diet, like there's this one great restaurant that I found on Seed Oil Scout near me in St. Louis. Called Pizzioli's. If you guys are in St. Louis, just go to Pizzioli's. Awesome. But that thing, that place like makes me fat. Like they do olive oil pizzas and it's like local, you know, grass-fed cheese and like all this like great stuff, but they use olive oil for their pizzas and it just like blows me up, man. Like my body composition just immediately gets worse. I don't think it, like, I don't really recommend to people to like, you know, and you can do whatever you want, right? But I don't recommend to people to do PUFAs or like olive oil to gain weight completely. I just recommend like adding more protein in at different times or adding more maybe like dairy in if you're gonna do a fat, like to, to gain weight, like say like whole milk, you can definitely gain a ton of weight on whole milk or chocolate milk, right? If you wanna get that cocoa in. So like it's, you know, it's, it's a hard balance and it's worth trying. Like some people can just, can, you know, with like Italian heritage can just drink as much olive oil, you know, like as, I don't know, as I, as I eat sugar, just thousands and thousands of calories of olive oil and they're completely fine.

But like not, yeah, that, that's interesting. Yeah, I should probably clarify with, with me, like actively seeking out the PUFAs and MUFAs, that's like a, a refeed to me. I'm not doing that for body composition purposes. I'm doing that for overall health purposes. I, I do think that especially when it comes to some of these more nuanced benefits of olive oil or, you know, sardines or something like that. I'm just hedging my bets. That's pretty much what I'm doing. I'll go through a period where maybe it's a month where it's just like, I will be having more arugula with olive oil and capers and, and sardines. Um, when it comes to gaining weight for me, I'm like, I'm just gonna eat more starches and I'm gonna eat more, um, like, uh, protein. Like, and, and the protein for me, I think that really just comes down to whatever you can eat the most of. For me, I can eat paella. I eat paella, like I can eat paella 3 times a day and get 200 grams of protein in paella and 600 grams of carbs. I think that is interesting. I do like that you mentioned kind of finding the baseline and this is probably something that, you know, I think everyone should take to heart. It's like you have something that works at a baseline. Once you get that figured out, like that's what you need to start with. Figure out that baseline and then always be asking like, how can I make this better? And then experiment Once things go too awry, go back to baseline. I just think that's the best model, especially if you're a constant experimenter like you are and like I am. So I think that's a really huge factor. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about diet or insights that you had? You mentioned collagen being one of them, gelatin being one of them. You mentioned, I mean, we talk about kind of the, the hyper-saturated fats like coconut oil where it's like 97% saturated. MCT, the medium-chain triglycerides, anything that's gonna be converted into ketones in the liver, that it's kind of like open season in my book at least. I know for Thermabolic, he like takes those in that sugar window. I've experimented with that with coconut milk. With my coffees, I'll have coconut milk in it. And you know, that's a pass for me. I also, I do think that there is a grace window.. And that grace window increases the longer that you stay strict with that. So for me, with the grace window, it's like I'll have a carrot in the morning, I'll have a raw carrot in the morning. I can have, like I said, some milk in my smoothies, some coconut milk in my smoothie and not have issues. I think that's something you have to build up to once you build that metabolic flexibility. No different than people who like consistently go in and out of ketosis. They're able to, you know, have some carbs and still stay in ketosis. They're able to fall back into keto, ketosis a lot faster. It really is the same the other way around with glucose oxidation, right?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. There's definitely stuff I wanna talk about. I mean, one thing is that one way that people have failed on the honey diet, or people have done the honey diet correctly and then failed, and those people usually already had like fatty liver or like some just like really bad liver issue. So it's like, there's definitely like some aspect of having metabolic flexibility upfront that helps a lot. But then there's a side of having too much metabolic flexibility, which I think people like Thermabolic had. And that's like what I wanna talk about is like hypoglycemia is something that people run into a lot on the honey diet. And I wanna like establish the spectrum of like changes that you can make to get out of hypoglycemia. So like, yeah, people will eat sugar and then have a compensatory blood sugar crash and then go like to 60 milligrams per deciliter and just feel terrible, be shaky on the honey diet. Sometimes if they're like too insulin sensitive, potentially if they have like too, like, you Usually it's in people with, who are already pretty lean or have like a ton of muscle. They just like can't handle like sugar in isolation cuz then they just like run out eventually. So then what I recommend for this, and this is kind of what ThermaBolic did and how he came to coconut oil, is he, he tried the honey diet, he was hypoglycemic, had too much muscle, and then he added coconut oil to make himself like slightly more insulin resistant to like establish the Randall cycle. And have a little bit higher blood sugar. And that helped him a lot. And then I think eventually he added some skim milk as well, cuz protein does kind of the same thing. So the spectrum here is on the carb side, the most, like the most, you know, sugar-esque that's going to go to your liver, increase your metabolism the fastest, but also cause hypoglycemia is pure sugar, like honey, high fructose corn syrup, maple syrup, like nothing, no protein, nothing else, only sugar. And then you can go towards fruits which have a little bit of protein and that will help with hypoglycemia a little bit cuz the protein's going to inhibit the metabolic speed up a little bit. And then you can go to after that starches if you're still having issues with fruit only because, and like well-cooked starches. So those would be like a cooked rice, corn chips, like Tate Maras is this great brand that has completely like fat-free, no, no oil corn chips. And it's like amazing. Interesting. So that, so yeah, sometimes I'll use those and you can also do pure dextrose if you want to, just like pure glucose to increase that glucose to fructose ratio. And then, so those are like the, the sugars basically like on one side is just pure like more fructose and sucrose and then the other side is more starches and in the middle is kind of tuning the protein. And then there's the fat side where you could add, if you want to go like farther into like the heavy liver side where I'm signaling to the liver to speed up their metabolism, the rest of the body, you add MCTs in because that delivers calories to the liver. And then if you want to have kind of like the more glucose version where you're being more gentle on the liver and maybe you can do less calories, but you'll be more satiated. And less hypoglycemia, then you can add in things like beef tallow, like literally melting beef tallow and drinking it. Some people do, which is crazy to me, but yeah, you could have beef tallow in, you can add cocoa butter, a little bit of chocolate, like those things can help. So, so the analogy I make here is fructose is to glucose as MCT is to stearic acid.

Yeah, I like that a lot. And it's interesting, there's a lot of nuance there. For me, you know, I only do fruit. I don't really like honey, just like from a personal standpoint. I really don't use much honey at all. My girlfriend loves honey, but that's mainly in like baking and stuff where we use it. The protein in fruit is something that I didn't really consider. Like I really do have to look at the macros of the fruit that I'm eating. I think also like I, do a lot of physical activity, uh, and I, and I am lean, you know, I was doing a more moderate diet, slowly getting down to that lean point. Then I started doing the fruit diet, really got lean. Um, so maybe that, that protein does play a role. Maybe, you know, so I guess, do you think that people who are already very athletic, you know, ThermoBolic being the upper echelon of that where he's massive, I think it's like 220 pounds and he's like 8% body fat. He's literally Thanos. He like can't operate on just sugar. It's like a, it's like a giga bonfire operating on just kindle. Like you need some of those logs. Do you think that people who are a little bit more moderate, like the guy who's like, yeah, I'm fit, but I'm not like a fitness nut or I'm not like a muscle, like I'm not like super muscle bound. They actually would operate better with just eating you know, sugar, just fructose and glucose in that context, whether that's honey, maple syrup, or fruit juice?

Yeah. I mean, from a mental clarity perspective, for sure. Like, and like weight loss perspective. Yeah, I would, I would say yes. From maybe like a gym performance perspective, like maybe adding a little bit of the other energy sources would be better than just like pure fruit. Cause you kind of like, I've noticed you kind of like, there's something weird about like, you know, you know how on keto you lose water weight. And you, you just like gain it all back once you start eating sugar. There's like some weird type of weight I feel like that you lose on a very like low protein diet as well. And then once you add protein back, you just immediately gain like 5 pounds and, and something comes back. It's, it's like very strange. I don't know what it is because it wouldn't be glycogen because you, you know, you're keeping water weight cuz you're eating so much sugar. But if you do like a low protein diet, I noticed that like there's some weird rebound that I, at least I get whenever I add protein back immediately. But I think like keeping whatever and keeping whatever that is also helps in the gym. Like I noticed that like once I add like the protein back, I immediately get like a couple reps or a few reps in the gym back as well. It's, it's something strange and it's not water weight for sure.

That's super fascinating. Bowtie Biohacker, we talked a while ago. He's like, listen, eat 300 grams of protein a day. You'll look fine. You, you'll like gain 5 pounds and it will feel like all muscle. You'll be stronger. I did that. I don't, I'm apprehensive about eating high amounts of protein. My blood urea nitrogen's already pretty high. Ammonia clearance, you know, I don't know how good mine is. I fixed mine by just working out less, funny enough. But yeah, something definitely happens when you have a lot of protein. Like, and it's not like a glycogen Storage thing that might be— I'm gonna ask GeekBot about that, see if it has any ideas. Okay. That is fascinating. I think you said one other thing on that that I wanted to touch on.

But I definitely feel better. I definitely feel better when I have like, just like no protein in the beginning of the day and like slightly lower protein, like mental clarity. I mean, my goals at this point, like originally when I started the account, like anabology came from, you know, I was like obsessed with the gym and I was going to the gym all the time and I kind of like plateaued like since You know, for, for like a long time in the gym because like I really am just like not committed to that anymore and I'm more committed to just like building my company and like focusing on that. And all of my goals are really centered around, uh, mental clarity, uh, and, and things like that at this point rather than gym. So like, you know, I'm, I'm still going. I'm basically doing like this protocol where I'll, I'll, I just like go there and I do incline bench and then Zurcher squats and that's what I'm—

the essentials.

Yeah, the essentials.

I love it. Okay, curious question for you. Um, volume— training volume is a huge talking point and touchpoint. Um, we got the Mike Mentzer high-intensity model. Um, a lot of people experience better results when they lower their training volume. Like, functionality mechanism there, it's like you can only grow from what you recover from. Having obscene amounts of muscle is metabolically nonsensical. Why would you be carrying around all this metabolically taxing tissue when that could be going towards other things. What kind of change did you notice when you went from being more of a gym rat to just doing, you know, getting in and out? Hmm.

I mean, yeah, I think like my strength improved faster, but I feel like my growth was actually worse. So that's kind of my perspective there. It's, I mean, like my, uh, my dad was like into bodybuilding his whole life. And he actually, like, I mean, if there's like genetics history there, he, you know, was in the gym all day every day for like a pretty like long time. And then eventually he like just turned his gym sessions down to like 4 times a week, like 30 minutes total. And that's when he gained the most muscle in his life. I haven't personally experienced that like a ton. I mean, but like, I mean, on my legs, like my legs grow like super easily for me. So like on my legs, I, I might have grown more when I like turned on the volume, but like my chest, I think, and my biceps overall are like super problematic. Like they just really don't want to grow, like no matter what I do to them. And I like need the high volume to, to do it, uh, to like get them to, to grow. So like, yeah.

Interesting. I noticed that too. Um, I think we all have certain like preferential muscle groups, right? Whether it's just the structure of our muscle bellies, whether it's the mind-muscle connection. Like we just have muscles that grow faster. And I think a lot of that is a muscle, muscle recruitment, like capacity of those groups. So for me, it's like my muscle recruitment capacity of my chest and triceps, it's just like, it's, it's just like I do one set and I'm, and I'm sore. I do one set and I'm sore and I do one set and I grow. So I need to do low volume for those so they have ample time to recover. Now muscle groups where they're maybe smaller, they don't require as much recovery or they're weak points. You don't have as much muscle recruitment, you aren't able to activate the muscles as well. So you're not gonna get as much stimulus and subsequently you won't need as much recovery. So it makes sense to train with higher volume and to, you know, not need as much recovery. One thing I will note, and I will say this with the Fruit Cell Noon Honey Diet, is that my recovery was through the roof, not just my muscle recovery, my cardiovascular recovery as well. I went from being horrible at running, I never ran, not good cardio to running sub-7-minute 5Ks on this diet, all while having really pristine labs. My prolactin was a little bit high, um, but my estrogen was super low. My testosterone was like 860, um, and my free T was decent as well. But, and I think a lot of that for me was personally with the supplementation component of it and being really stringent about avoiding PUFAs, because if your mitochondria are better operating, you're gonna have more energy, right?, right? And then you have more energy, you work out more, it improves your mitochondria. The better your mitochondria are, the better your recovery is and the more you can train. I think a lot of people run into issues like the, the people overtrain, right? Because they don't have the mitochondrial capacity to recover from that training. And then that starts like that negative feedback loop. And anyway, I, I say this to tangent over into what I think big needle movers were there and also with the diet as a whole, which was supplementation. I'm just gonna go through what I personally supplemented with and what I found to be really beneficial, both from like a fundamental standpoint and an advanced standpoint. Fundamentally speaking, taurine. Taurine was like an intuitive, I almost need this. Whenever I have a lot of carbohydrates, I intuitively am like, I need taurine. One, for like the cellular water homeostasis. Two, for like the GLUT4 expression to like open the doors of my cells more readily. Three, for the glucose shuttling. I read a study, Taurine just enables your muscles to hold more glycogen, which is huge. It was almost like a hedge for me against having potentially too much sugar. So taurine was number one. What were the other ones? I just wrote a full article on it. I'm trying to think of the foundational ones. I have a total brain fog here. But—

Thiamine is a huge one as well.

Thiamine. Yes, that was one as well, just because of thiamine depletion, especially with me as someone who enjoys nicotine and caffeine. So vitamin B1, that was another one. L-carnitine. L-carnitine, this is what I wanna talk to you about because there are some studies that are saying L-carnitine is potentially, you know, a goiter, it's goitrogenic. I don't really fully buy it, right? Aspirin also seems to be a little bit goitrogenic. There's a number of things that have some seeming negative feedback loop with the thyroid. But while doing this, you know, the objective is to get really good at utilizing glucose, but it's also to burn off that extra fat that you have. I found L-carnitine to be quite instrumental. One, for its androgen receptor sensitivity, like androgen receptor upregulation capacity, but two, for burning off that extra fat. Have you, like, is, is L-carnitine even on your radar in one way or the other? Is this something that you even consider, like, think about?

Yeah, I mean, I kind of view L-carnitine as a thyroid of fat.. So it, if you have kind of really high PUFAs in your tissues and then you take L-carnitine, well you might not have a good time because now you're just like pedaling a lot more PUFAs in your mitochondria and you're gonna mess stuff up. And if you're not producing enough energy then maybe you're gonna get goiter. You're gonna, your thyroid's gonna try and grow and compensate for that and it's, you know, gonna be blocked. I mean carnitine in studies both fixes hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism. So it increases your energy production, but through fat. And it also blocks thyroid action by shifting from more glucose to fat. So I really think carnitine is like safe if you are already fairly lean and you've been eating like saturated fats for a while, or if you're, you know, if you've been eating saturated fats for a very long time and instead of PUFAs and you're fat and you wanna lose weight, like it can, it can help. I, I'm skeptical that it actually upregulates androgen receptors. I think that there was like one study on it and their trial design was like really, really shitty. They kind of just like had people exercise and then take carnitine and they had another group take carnitine and then exercise and they just measured like after the people exercised and then took carnitine and then they were like, these people had increased androgen receptors. And they called it, they said it was like responsible or the carnitine was responsible for the increased expression, but it could have like been some other factor like the exercise timing. It just like wasn't a very well-designed trial. So, so like I'm skeptical, like people think that you need it to upregulate androgen receptors, but I like wanna push back on that to say that like the reason why people should be taking it is to metabolize saturated fat faster if you want to do that. Which is a good use, right? Like if you, like I think if somebody is taking like Ozempic or like a GLP-1, and I'm not one of the people who's like super hyper naturalistic where you have to do the natural way every time. Like we almost have like a weight loss pill now and like why not take it if what you want is weight loss and you don't care about like some of the side effects.

Yeah.

So like if you do that, I think one of the best diets you could do on it because it does make you eat less, is a high protein diet. So you at least spare some of your muscles and work out during it. And then what could help you burn fat primarily on that without burning muscle is carnitine, right? So if you just do kind of like a high protein keto diet on Ozempic and then, and you know, the repeat community is gonna kill me for that. Then like carnitine is something that would be super helpful because then you're metabolizing fat primarily over anything like glucose or muscle.

Um, yeah, interesting. Yeah, the study wasn't like— I don't think it was very well designed at all, and like not a lot of people put a lot of merit on it. The only reason that I like— I'm, I just like, I'm a sucker for anecdotes and I'm also a sucker for personal experience. Um, when I take L-carnitine, I noticed that I'm a hyper-responder to certain things and I hyper-respond to L-carnitine. And I noticed it mainly because it was the only time that my delts were capped. It was the only time that my delts and traps just looked capped, um, because I have like pretty shitty shoulder genetics. And like, that's the only— like, uh, that was the only time. Um, also bioavailability is, is quite awful. I love acetyl-L-carnitine just because of its cognitive effects. And you bring up a really good point. If you are going to be burning fat, if you're going to be doing this at all, I think that liver health is an utmost priority. I love Tutka. My bi— my biliary system was destroyed by Accutane. Tutka and taurine, you know, Tutka or taurine bioconjugate TUDCA bioflow agent. That's huge for detox. And then NAC was something as well. I do NAC primarily for when I'm overtraining. That seemed to be a really good incorporation here. I know some people also think that NAC causes cancer. You know, cysteine causes cancer. Feeding cancer and causing cancer are two different things. When it comes to feeding cancer, I'm on glutamine, BPC-157, and NAC. So I actually have to go and I get derm tests. But anyway, another one that's super fascinating, moving on from L-carnitine, I should mention also injectable L-carnitine, something that a lot of people are really afraid of. I experimented with it and it was incredible. It's just an amino acid. You just bypass this very inefficient absorption process, which is your digestive system. C3G, cyanidine-3-glucoside. Are you familiar with C3G at all?

No, never heard of it.

So this is a really, really interesting one. It's an anthocyanin. And I know people have differing opinions on flavonoids in general and polyphenols, and anthocyanins are closely related. It's just like its capacity for nutrient shuttling seems super interesting. And the way that my logic behind the supplementation here is like, I am doing something that is relatively unnatural. Right? I'm doing something that's unnatural that my body may not be fully optimized for, especially considering the amount of damage that I've accumulated throughout the years and the metabolic and mitochondrial disruption. Um, anything that I can take that's going to help my body utilize the nutrients that I'm taking. So taurine, cyanine, 3-glucoside, which just seems to be really effective at nutrient shuttling, getting those amino acids to your muscles as opposed to be burnt off or, um, you know, just circulating in your bloodstream. Glucose to your glycogen storage and liver and muscle cells. And then fatty acids preferably to, you know, beta oxidation or whatever else you want to do with them. Cyanine-3-glucoside, that's pretty much— there's a rap sheet of benefits there. That's the primary one. I think that taking antioxidants, a lot of things have— these things have antioxidant properties. That's good as well just for like preserving mitochondrial function. The last kind of group or category of things that I take in here is like mitochondrial agents. So, coenzyme Q10 in its reduced form ubiquinol for the electron transport chain efficiency. And then, PQQ. PQQ for mitochondrial biogenesis. I've seen differing things on that. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. That's one of those things where it's like, I might as well take it and sit in front of the red light. We'll see what happens. What are your thoughts on targeting the mitochondria with tools like coenzyme Q10 or PQQ? Or other methods of mitochondrial enhancement? And does that play a role in your playbook, so to speak?

Yeah, I mean, I think they're super interesting and for quinones in general, I guess. So, I mean, I think that they're difficult to assess completely. One example is methylene blue that people talk about a lot. And there's other quinones that kind of work similarly. I don't know if methyl mesylquinone, I forget, I forget. But these things kind of a lot of the time end up making the cell shift to a more kind of pro-oxidized state, right? They're redox-active molecules. And the goal is to increase NAD+ NADH ratio. It's almost as if you're increasing the amount of oxygen available to a cell. And I sometimes am skeptical of that for kind of long-term utilization. It's as if you're going into a hyperbaric oxygen chamber every day if you take a ton of methylene blue. And I'm just not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I think having mitochondrial efficiency, especially with how many mitochondrial toxins there are these days, is just like a must and like it's probably better to take CoQ10 than not. But having it in animal foods like probably gives you enough. I think I've kind of just been like pretty divorced from small molecule-based things for like a pretty long time now. I'm like much more interested in peptides and like proteins and, and all of these things. Like I think one of the things that kind of like woke me up to this was that I like looked at the lifespan studies of all of the drugs that have been given to mice, and I just like plotted them on this curve and I tried to see what drugs are going to extend life and what ones aren't, right? And these studies are done by scientists like on animals, on mice, trying to see like when they think that this compound is going to extend life. Like they don't, they don't make a, they don't do a lifespan study on something that's gonna shorten life. And on average, the scientists get about 5% lifespan extension from a small molecule drug. A small molecule basically just means it's like a chemical compound that you would find in a pill. It's not like a peptide, right? They get on average 5% lifespan extension when they study it. And then, the distribution of the results that they get, sometimes they get 20% at maybe most lifespan extension when giving a drug to a mouse. The distribution suggests that they would need to test 30,000+ compounds to get something like 50% lifespan extension. With how well they're doing right now. And each study costs like $100,000 and takes like 4 years to do. So it's just like an unfeasible amount of money and time to, to figure out something that extends life a lot. But on the protein side, when people have done these genetic studies where they knock out growth hormone or they upregulate VEGF, which PPC-157 might upregulate, or they, you know, give telomerase to an animal, on average, these studies are getting like 30+% lifespan extension every single time. So, the average of a drug is 5%, but peptides and proteins and these other like kind of native things that are already in your body that you're just like tuning up or down are getting these like crazy, crazy results. So, I just like became much, much more interested in these because I'm like, wow, there's like this emerging evidence that you can get radical lifespan extension, but you can't do it through a drug. So mitochondrial side of that, the things I'm most interested in there are like MOTS-C. There's SS31, which is like this mitochondrial antioxidant peptide. It goes in and they say binds to cardiolipin on the inner mitochondrial membrane.

Wait, say it again.

SS31.

SS31. I've heard of that one.

Yeah. So just like 4 amino acids and it's like weird. It has like a D amino acid. It's a reverse isomer one. And then there's a Huminin, which increases your, the amount of mitochondria that you have. I don't know if it gets into cells very well, but there was this one Chinese study where they fused SS31 to Huminin and it works much better. Made it go into the cell, localized to the mitochondria. So like those are like the mitochondrial things that I'm most bullish on right now. And it's been a very long time since I've looked coQ10 to be candid.

Yeah, just beef heart. I do notice from a cardiovascular standpoint, if I'm going and I'm wanting to do an aggressive roll or grappling or even running, coenzyme Q10 gives me a second lung. MOTC, another one of these peptides for mitochondrial function, is that on your radar along with SS31 and humanin?

Yeah, I'm bullish on all of these. Definitely. Yeah.

Interesting. I love that you— it's interesting you brought up the BPC-157 VegF. A lot of people are afraid of BPC-157 because of its potential effect on vascular endothelial growth factor, but we're not even sure if that's the case. Right. And people are worried about that because, oh, if you're producing new blood vessels, angiogenesis, that can selectively generate new pathways for oxygen and nutrients to cancer cells. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, personally, it's something I'm willing to— it's just, it's not convincing enough for me.

It's one of those like weird paradoxes in biology. So, so VEGF, if you overexpress it in cancer cells, it does make the cancer worse. Patients with like high VEGF do worse with cancer. There are anti-VEGF drugs that do treat cancer and work against cancer. However, when you overexpress VEGF in mice, they live 50% longer and they have less cancer. Interesting. So, so it's, it's like clearly good to have higher VEGF when you're old based on the animal studies, but like in the case of cancer, it can be bad. I think like the resolution that I have in my head of this is that, you know, cancer cells are basically cells that are really stressed out and, and somehow turn into cancer. They differentiate. They get into this cancer state, and then they somehow stabilize the cancer state over time with evolution. And then, you know, if you give nutrients to cells via VEGF or new blood vessels, they generally are less stressed out and less hypoxic. So, VEGF probably prevents cancer. And then, a cancer cell can evolve to use VEGF to its advantage after it's already, you been deprived of nutrients forever and become cancer.

It's super interesting. A lot of paradoxes like that in biology. One that I always come back to is like DHT and hair loss. I think everyone loves talking about that. I mean, DHT is what makes your hair thick. It's what makes your hair stand up, right? And go like this. That's why people use hair gel to mimic what DHT naturally would do, which would be to give your hair volume. Only seems to be a problem when there's an underlying issue that's causing some sort of imbalance. In the VEGF case, cancer in the DHT case, you know, a myriad of hypoxic contributors. Also unrelated, but also related, you know, BPC-157, probably one of the best things you can do for hair growth. Like if you do BPC-157, DermaRoll, and red light, it's like the best hairline saver that I've found, especially in conjunction with GHK copper. I, I've been really— I think 2025 is peptide season for me as well. Um, one of the peptides that I really enjoy— you call it a peptide, it is a hormone, it's like a peptide hormone— is oxytocin. Oxytocin really seems to almost turn back on my endorphin system, uh, and like, or my oxytocinergic system, after I think that it got shut down from, um, adverse reaction to SSRIs. Um, oxytocin, is that on your radar at all? Something you think about? It's great for, you know, DHT recovery. In case anyone's wondering.

Yeah, I've, I've, I've used the nasal spray a couple times and I actually like didn't notice very much. I brought it to a party one time and everyone just like used it. It was, yeah, but I don't know. I mean, it's like at the time I like didn't really notice anything, but I am dating one person from that party who did use it now. So I mean, maybe something happened.

Yeah, I started using a lot. I was using a lot when I first started hanging out with my girlfriend. I'm like, is this a result of oxytocin? Is that why I'm still here? I'm just kidding though. She can't watch this. But anyway, let's talk about something that's also equally related and important is IQ. I told you before this podcast, I feel super dumb recently. And I think sometimes the dumbness has benefit. You know, you retweeted the IQ, like, curve where it's like there's this segment of being smart where you're just smart enough to be smarter than the average person. Things go swimmingly because you don't overthink. You do enough to kind of finagle your way into good opportunities. And then there's this pit of despair where you are smart enough to realize how messed up the world is, but you get stuck in it. And then there's the other side where you are so savant-esque that you just focus on the thing that you enjoy. And you phase everything else out because it doesn't matter. People get stuck there. I think a lot of people are in there. I mean, like, if you think about the average IQ, it's, it's low. So like, there's a lot of people with above average IQ and they tend to congregate in the same space and it just becomes the new normal. But I think just overall, people kind of like get in that threshold. It's like being high carb or low carb keto. It's like one side or the other is good, but the middle sucks. You said that you're actually trying to boost your IQ 10 points. Have you started that process yet?

Yeah. So, uh, I, I've started making moves like towards that. Um, they basically, I think that like when I say IQ, what I really mean is like intelligence. And then what I mean by intelligence is like the ability to just do what you want, uh, and get what you want out of the world. Right. So like, I mean, it's like different from agency. Um, I think agency is, is the, um, You know, it's like the ability to just like do things, I guess, but like have, have them work is probably intelligence, if that makes sense. So like agency is just like trying things and doing whatever you want, but then having them work every time is what I would consider to be intelligence. Um, so then, uh, that's like a little tangent, uh, but IQ is like the, just like the word that I use because it's like immediately understandable. Um, but what I really want is, uh, like this fast proxy to intelligence. So like if I use an IQ test as like this metric that I'm optimizing for, every time that I have to, that I iterate on it, what I have to do is I have to wait the 2 hours that it takes to take like the comprehensive IQ test. And then I do it again at a later point after I do an intervention. And then I have to try and deconvolute whether or not there are training effects. Like maybe I'm training myself to be better at IQ tests. So I think that's a bad way to go about improving just your cognition or whatever allows you to succeed in the world via your mental horsepower. So what I've, what I've bought is I bought these EEG devices, the NeuroCity Crown, for example, and then the BrainBit. And I am looking at these different metrics to see if I can make an EEG correlate of intelligence or cognition, or just like find all of like the set of things that are relevant for cognition. Like gamma activity or like P300 or these different things that people measure that are proxies to intelligence. And then I want to optimize like every single one of those. And then it should be just like a 1 or 2 minute test that I can do with the EEG device and then tell what my intelligence is for the day. So that's like, I started digging into like the possible things that I can use as the metric. And then, and then I'm going to do the different interventions and I can talk about interventions. But I think it's important I say this because I think one big piece of alpha that people can take from this is that if you can just make your iteration cycle very, very fast, you can get better at basically anything. But if your iteration cycle is really, really low, then really, really long, or you're not getting feedback immediately, then you're never going to get better at something. Maybe Twitter. People on Twitter, if you want to make a big Twitter account, what you need to be able to do is tell if your tweets are are going to work or not, if they're gonna grow or not. And you can do that within the first few minutes of a tweet, like the first 100 views of a tweet. If you don't have 4 likes, your tweet is gonna die. If you have 2 likes, your tweet is gonna die. So like you can iterate basically like on a 5-minute timescale on Twitter if you just figure out like what the immediate metrics that you need are for a tweet to grow. As just like a concrete example of like how to create some fast iteration cycle. And if you wait like 2 days for your tweet and then you go back, well, now your iteration cycle's 2 days instead of 5 minutes and you're never gonna improve. So yeah, that's maybe just a little—

maybe just how well you perform on Twitter being the litmus for your IQ.

Yeah, that could be.

I find the opposite. I find the dumber I am, the better I perform on Twitter.

But yeah, so I mean, sometimes if you just like stop censoring yourself, you just, you're improve, you're, you You improve a lot.

And that's not just about Twitter either.

Yeah. Some of the drunk tweets that I had have grown almost the most. But yeah, the things that I'm looking at for improving IQ. I think the people who are the most skeptical about IQ being improved are the people who are in the AI fields where they just see the neural scaling laws. They see that if you train an AI model with more compute, it gets smarter and smarter. And the architecture doesn't even matter that much, like once you've had reasonable choices. So the only way to improve intelligence is to improve like training or improve the architecture, I guess. Um, and they think you can't do that in a human, but like biology, there's just like so many things that are hidden. And every single time there has been like a dogma in biology or just like something that somebody says is fixed, eventually people find out that it's fake. So like the central dogma of biology was this idea that information flows from DNA to RNA to protein and information doesn't flow backwards. But then people found reverse transcriptases like from HIV, and that blew up the central dogma of biology. Like information could flow from like the protein level even to the RNA level to the DNA level in certain exotic cases like proteinoid microspheres. This guy Sidney Fox, Anyone wants to dig into that. And then there's the, you know, the, the body level. I'm going into the rabbit hole here, but like the body level version of the central dogma of biology was the Weismann barrier, where this guy said that information only flows from the germline, basically like the eggs and sperm to the rest of the body. And it doesn't go from the body back. But then people found that there's gene transfer from the body to sperm or to the eggs and the Weismann barrier. Got blown up and now your epigenetics or your like single generation changes, like eating a toxic diet for your whole life can impact your children. When before that was like thought to be false. And then there's these like theories of protein folding where like the Anfisens dogma where proteins always find the optimal folded state, but then people found like prions and they found that this, this, you know, folded state that is the most energetically favorable isn't the active state. So like basically every single time anybody has said anything definitive in biology trying to simplify it, it's always been wrong. So people are saying that with IQ and I'm like, okay, it's wrong. And that's, and I want to go after that.

Interesting. What's going to be your first experiment if you have one? Your first implementation?

Yeah. So I think that I want to go with any neuropeptides that I can. I think mitochondrial peptides are like really interesting because there's the idea that you can improve the energy metabolism of neurons. And I want to do that. So all of the mitochondrial peptides that I listed before. Another interesting concept is like vasocomputation. This is by this guy, Mike Johnson on Twitter, Michael Edward Johnson, I believe is his full name. And he talks about how the clenching or like opening of blood vessels may be how thoughts are stored or transmitted. So in, you know, if you take acid, for example, all of like the blood vessels constrict in the default mode network, and then you have these blood vessels maybe dilating in the rest of your brain. And you can see that with like brain scans and where the outside of the brain is kind of like lit up, but the default mode network is shut down. So if you can, but if you have like spasms in blood vessels, For example, a vascular spasm example is migraines where you have vasodilation that's painful. If you have vascular spasms during a thought, well then maybe that ruins this long-term coherence in a thought that you have and you just terminate the inference. So if you have O1 Pro versus O1, the AI model thinks for much longer about one thing and then it has a much higher quality output. So if you can hold one thought in your brain and think about it for much longer, then maybe you can have a much higher quality thought. But then if you have a vascular spasm, then maybe that stops that, you know, long-term inference. So then maybe just controlling muscle spasms, figuring out how to like reduce this, you know, how much noise there is in muscle contraction is another way to achieve that. So like Ion Balance, for example, like really mega doses of potassium. Or other things that like improve just ionic states of cells is something that I also want to explore here.

Yeah, I do think for the average person, if they just started consuming electrolytes, they'd gain 10 IQ points right off the bat. Interesting that you bring in the vasoconstriction and then also that correlate with migraines, being that you're someone who suffered with migraines and you're relatively high IQ. I always come back to Nietzsche. You know, Nietzsche, I really like him. I know he was an incel, but he was a smart guy. He's got a lot of good one-liners. He struggled with a number of things, but primarily mind grains, like mind-numbing mind grains. And he probably is a perfect example of someone who's able to just inherently fixate and chew on an idea for years. I've always been curious of what the overlap is with like, I wouldn't say necessarily neurodivergence. I think that term has become participation trophy-ified. But this idea that like our brain structures are different, some people have frontal lobes that don't get as much oxygen as other areas of their brain and it changes the way that their brain operates. Given your experience with migraines, have you dove into like what larger neurological implications that has and you know, what potential root causes is for people that are chronic migraine sufferers?

Yeah, so I've, I've like looked into it briefly and I think that like migraines actually weren't really correlated about with with like IQ or intelligence, maybe like slightly worse executive functioning. Um, but like executive functioning is like the way that there are people determine like ADHD and then ADHD is this whole like fake thing where, you know, your brain just works differently and you can, there's like benefits of it and, uh, drawbacks, I think. But yeah, like I've been, I've been like slightly interested in this too, but I haven't really found anything that's like very high signal, uh, relating migraines to intelligence, unfortunately.

Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. The ADHD one's a big, big topic and I think a lot of people are like, oh no, like it has nothing to do with, with damage in your brain. It has nothing to do with disorders. I think that the, the, it's a lot more nuanced than that. You know, I do think it's also one of those things like people lose their sight and their sense of smell improves. It's kind of this thing where you have this certain amount of biological energy. If it's not going to one place, it can very much go to the other. The best solution is just to increase the amount of biological energy you have as a whole so you don't have to make those concessions. Uh, but Anabolgy, I appreciate you coming on. Uh, we went a little bit longer than the hour. Um, excited to see how this IQ, uh, experiment goes. I'll probably follow along with it. I'm trying to reduce my dumbness a little bit. One of those things is just talking more. I think like getting back in the podcast, being a little bit rusty, um, forcing the brain to go grow in that manner. Anything else that you're working on that you wanna share with anybody? Anything else you found interesting?

Yeah, I'm actually gonna launch a skincare product in mid-February. So just like keep an eye out for that. That's coming soon. We've already produced all of it and we just need to ship, but I'm going to be overseas in the beginning of February, so I won't be able to ship it until mid-February. And then also like I'm working on, you know, last year I mentioned that I wanted to start this Gilbert Ling-focused company. And I have done that since we've talked last. And I am looking to make a founding engineer hire. So if anybody wants to work on directed energy therapeutics as a life's project and wants to take maybe a like founder salary with generous equity, then like reach out to me and and we'll work on something cool. So awesome.

We're looking forward to that. Anabology, @anabology on Twitter. You got longestlovers.com. Love that. Love the format. Super simple. Um, and then I'll post this directly to Twitter so everyone will see you there. Uh, once again, dude, thanks for coming on. I'm sure I'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, thanks.