The self-quantified, data-to-action human.
A protocol earns its place here by moving the logged numbers. Most of what I have tried did not, and the interesting part of a measurement habit is not the wins. It is having a reason to stop doing something. Everything below is what my own log showed for me. It is not a claim about your physiology, and several of these are things that plainly work for other people.
1. Escalating the dose to buy more coverage
This is the biggest one, and it was expensive in time. The complaint was always the same: appetite came back around day 6 after the weekly injection, worst at night. The obvious answer, and the one the internet gives you, is more drug. Between early July and mid-August I went up four times on semaglutide, from 15 units to 20, then 30, then 35, then 40.
Four increases bought zero additional days of coverage. At 30 units, hunger returned on day 6. At 35, day 6. At 40 — the highest dose of the course — it returned the following day and I ate through the evening. Read down that column and there is no dose-response curve in it at all. The full table, with dates and the reasoning at each step, is on the GLP-1 hub.
Killing this one mattered because of what it implies. If a wall does not move when you push harder on the lever, the lever is not connected to the wall. The eventual response was a change of molecule rather than another increase, and separately, a much harder look at what was actually breaking through — which turned out to look more like intake variance than like a shortfall the medication should have been covering.
2. The supplement stack, now paused in full
During the femur recovery I ran a real bone-healing stack, built with my coach against a blood panel and aimed squarely at the substrate side of fracture repair. That had a clear job, a clear window, and a clear end point. At the Week 12 review the surgeon dropped the calcium, which was the first honest signal that the job was finished.
The rest went the same way, just more slowly. As of August 2026 the stack is paused in its entirety. Not tapered, not swapped, paused. The reason is boring: once the fracture-specific rationale expired, I could not point to a single logged number that any remaining item was moving. Weight, body fat, training load, sleep and resting heart rate all sat where they sat. A daily protocol you cannot connect to a measurement is a habit with a cost, and this one had accumulated a lot of items on rationale rather than evidence.
I want to be careful here, because this is the entry most likely to be misread. This is not "supplements don't work." It is that I was not measuring anything that would have shown me whether these ones were working, and I would rather run a clean baseline for a while than keep paying for a story. If something comes back, it comes back one item at a time with a metric attached.
3. The idea that a suppression window builds habits
The original theory behind a short GLP-1 block was elegant. Use the months of quiet appetite to build eating patterns that stick, then stop the drug and keep the patterns. It held perfectly at full dose. It did not survive the dose cut. Within two weeks at a reduced dose the weight was back up, the hunger was sharper in the second half of the week, and the old pattern — emotional eating, a lifelong sugar sensitivity — was exactly where I had left it. Alcohol made it worse in a way it simply had not at full dose.
The suppression had not been building anything underneath. It had been covering. That is a genuinely useful thing for a drug to do, and it is not the same thing, and I had been assuming it was.
4. Daily tracking during a phase with no decisions in it
Six weeks non-weight-bearing after femur surgery, and I still logged something every day. None of it fed a decision. The gate was a radiograph at Week 6, and the radiograph did not care about my spreadsheet. I have written that recovery up properly in Rebuilding a Femur on Data. The rule I took from it is the one I now apply to everything on this page: if a metric cannot change what I do inside a week, it is not a metric, it is a mood.
What survives
Short list. Weekly circumference measurements, because they trend even though they are a blunt instrument. Weight, treated as a trend and never as a single reading. CTL, because it answers "how far back am I" honestly. Resistance work and protein through any weight-loss block, which I keep on principle even though my own data on them is more ambiguous than I would like. And evening injection timing, which removed the side effects almost entirely and is the cheapest win in the whole log.
Everything else is on trial. Back to the Biohacking hub.
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