I’ve had similar interactions with Gym Bros in hotel fitness centers, grocery stores, and even Pokemon trading card shows, but the one I’m about to describe encompasses the current State of the Union when it comes to Health and Fitness.
There was a new gym in the area, and to celebrate its Grand Opening, there was a Bounce House for kids outside the facility. It looked like fun, so I took my daughter and waited for her outside the puffy plyometric pagoda as she happily defied gravity with other children.
And then some guy who was roughly three times my size walked up to me.
“Bro, you’re (bleepin’) LEAN! What’s your stack?”
Not-so-subtly pointing out that I was THERE WITH MY DAUGHTER, I replied, “Believe it or not, I’ve actually been obscenity AND steroid-free since 1986!”
“Dude, you’re NATTY?! Me too…except for test (this is short for testosterone…these guys try to conserve their syllables) and Var”(short for anabolic steroid oxandrolone, or Anavar). He also later told me had just started started “Reta,” or Retatrutide, a currently FDA-unapproved “Triple G” incretin that could make a blue whale lose enough weight to look like a blue trout. So yeah, me and this guy are pretty much “identically natty.”
Under the delusion that we were now kindred spirits, the guy leaned in, attempting to give me a Bro Hug. I didn’t want him to crush my ribs or rupture my spleen, so I pretended that my daughter had yelled something and scampered away.
But there is an implicit assumption these days that if you aren’t a corpulent toad, you’re “on gear” or taking MOTS-c, tesamorelin, testo, Retatrutide, or all of the above. And that you “need” peptides or anabolic agents to “Biohack your way to health and happiness.”
Although your lighter wallet might allow you to run a little faster if you’re on all the Special Sauce in the Health Guru Protocol, the Undefeated Solution for health continues to be:
- Sleep
- Move
- Fuel the machine with something other than total garbage
- Love with all you’ve got
- Lather, rinse, repeat every day until God takes you home
And there are pharmacologic catalysts that can be safe and helpful for optimizing metabolic health in certain contexts. But, no matter what the Influencers may tell you, profanity and peptides actually aren’t required😊
