Everything I Know. Save This.

I’ve spent years trying to figure this out. Exposed myself to things most people would consider insane. Tested compounds at doses that would make my doctor call an ambulance. Tracked every variable obsessively. Worked with dozens of men who were told they were broken by people who couldn’t fix them.

This is everything I know.

Part 1: Who I Was

I used to be the guy sweating during basic social interactions. Couldn’t talk to women sober. The only version of me that had any confidence was drunk me. Three or four drinks and I became a completely different human. Charming, sharp, funny. Sober me was a shell.

I accepted this as my personality for years. “I’m just an anxious introvert.”

I wasn’t. Alcohol was temporarily boosting my GABA tone and reducing neural inhibition. My real personality was trapped behind a biochemical wall the entire time. The confidence was always in there. My neurochemistry was blocking access to it.

Then things got worse.

My wife and I moved to a new city to build something together. No mentors, no money, no buffer. Within months we were flat broke. The flat we lived in was moldy, freezing, unsafe. The air was polluted. We barely had food. Most days we either fasted or ate the cheapest thing we could find.

Every stress you can imagine, we were under it simultaneously.

One day a stranger made a U-turn to race me in traffic and I had a full panic response. Heart palpitations. Blurry vision. Overwhelming fear. Over a guy in a car.

My body had zero reserves left. A minor stressor triggered complete fight-or-flight collapse because there was nothing in the tank to buffer it. I was running on cortisol and adrenaline as primary fuel sources and interpreting the fumes as my personality.

I went from 95kg to 80kg during that phase. Not intentionally. Joints became fragile, injuries constant, recovery nonexistent. IGF-1, testosterone, thyroid all in the gutter. My vision collapsed. Couldn’t see clearly past 5 meters. Night vision gone. Nasal congestion 24/7.

And beyond the numbers, here’s what it actually looked like day to day:

Hair shedding into the shower drain every morning. Dandruff on every dark shirt. Bacne that didn’t respond to anything topical. Skin that looked dull and inflamed no matter what I ate.

Getting injured instead of getting stronger. Every training cycle ending with a setback instead of a PR. Feeling like my body was working against me despite doing everything I was supposed to do.

ED and premature ejaculation. Not occasionally. Consistently. In my twenties.

Struggling to make eye contact with strangers. Feeling jumpy and twitchy in public, like my nervous system was permanently set to threat mode. Walking into a room and immediately wanting to leave.

Sleep that never restored anything. Waking at 3am wired for no reason. Lying there unable to stop the loop running in my head.

Addictive tendencies that made no sense given who I thought I was. Porn when I should have been sleeping. Phone when I should have been working. Anything to escape the discomfort of being in my own head.

ADHD-like inability to focus. Starting things and not finishing them. Sitting down to work and achieving nothing for hours despite genuinely trying.

Self-loathing after every failed attempt to change. Frustration that turned inward. The quiet conviction that something was fundamentally wrong with me as a person.

None of it was psychological.

The hair shedding was iron overload and zinc deficiency. The dandruff was gut dysbiosis and excess lipids feeding Malassezia. The injuries were mineral depletion and thyroid suppression slowing tissue repair. The ED and PE were endotoxin-driven sympathetic dominance and low neurosteroids. The eye contact and twitchiness were depleted agmatine and elevated glutamate. The addictive behaviour was low dopamine tone seeking stimulation. The sleep was elevated cortisol from gut-produced endotoxin running overnight. The self-loathing was the story a depleted nervous system tells about itself when it has no other explanation.

Every single one resolved when the buffer was rebuilt.

After rebuilding nutrient stores, it all came back. Vision fully restored. Hair back. Skin clear. Injuries stopped. Sleep fixed. The anxiety is gone. The confidence isn’t performed anymore, it’s the baseline. If people I knew back then saw me now, they wouldn’t recognise me.

People have no idea how many “permanent” conditions are just deep deficiency states wearing a mask.

Part 2: What I Figured Out

Everything I just described traces back to one thing.

Your body has a metabolic buffer.

When the buffer is full, you’re calm, warm, confident, sharp, sexually alive. When it collapses, your personality collapses with it.

Every identity crisis you’ve had was probably a metabolic crisis you didn’t know how to read.

That shy sweating kid who needed alcohol to function wasn’t broken. He was starving. And nobody, not his doctor, not his therapist, not his parents, thought to check whether he was eating enough of the right things.

The mechanism works like this.

When you’ve used antibiotics, experienced chronic stress, eaten a lot of processed food, drank lots of alcohol, abused NSAIDs, basically being alive in 2026, the two main things that happen are:

1. your gut goes to shit

   1. digestion and transit time slow, undigested food reaches the bacteria, which then create toxins from it. This then inflames the gut and eventually the whole body

2. you develop nutritional deficiencies

   1. When there is elevated inflammation, the body becomes stressed, which enhances the requirements for various vitamins and minerals. Now if your digestion has gone to shit, you’re not absorbing your nutrients properly, and if you’re not eating a nutrient dense diet…that’s a double whammy.

All of this leads to buffer depletion.

You might relate to this. Most people start to experience health issues after a certain event. A breakup, moving countries, death of a loved one, big financial stress, etc.

This is because any big stress quickly taps your buffer reserves. If you have a lot of reserves, you can buffer it. But the moment your reserves run out, health issues surface.

Brain fog? Inflammation in the brain. Low testosterone? Inflammation suppressing Leydig cell function. Cold hands? Inflammation forces sympathetic dominance, blood gets pulled from extremities. Can’t build muscle? Inflammation suppresses mTOR. Dead libido? The body deprioritises reproduction when the system is under threat.

One root. Everything else downstream.

And the mistake people make is to use NSAIDs, vitamin E or fish oils to help fight the inflammation. But that does nothing to fix the root cause…the depleted buffer reserves.

A good example is Enterosgel. People use Enterosgel, a toxin binder, costs about $14, and in less than a week they experience massive reduction in brain fog and achy joints. They get leaner and more vascular. HRV goes up. Sleep quality improves.

Enterosgel is a great tool that someone can use while fixing the root cause. But if the root cause isn’t addressed as well, the issues will just come back once you stop Enterosgel.

Once you understand that, you understood what you’ve been missing and why the progress you make feels so incomplete. It’s not that supplements aren’t working. It that most of them don’t fix the foundation/root cause.

Part 3: How I Proved It

Once I understood the importance of buffer restoration, I needed to test it.

Not with literature reviews. Not with “I read the research and synthesised a protocol.” With actual food, actual blood tests, and extreme doses that forced a clear signal.

Everything we do is built on five foods. I call them “The Top 5 TestoSuperFoods”:

Red meat. Eggs. Milk. Liver. Oysters.

I mega-dosed each one individually, held everything else constant, and ran blood panels, stool tests and organic acid tests before and after to see what actually happened.

Liver (250g daily for 3 months). Liver is the most vitamin-dense food that exists. Extraordinary for everything downstream of nutrient status. But at this dose, I experienced great energy and my resting lactate halved in about 1 week (which means my energy metabolism improved).

Oysters (15 large oysters per day for 30 days). What surprised me here wasn’t what went up. It was what came down. My ferritin dropped from 432 to 282. My transferrin saturation dropped from 51% to 31%. I was consuming four times more iron than usual and my iron markers fell, because zinc from oysters competes with iron absorption at the cellular level. That’s the kind of thing you only find out by testing. My lipids, testosterone to estrogen ratio, thyroid, etc, everything improved.

Milk (5 litres per day for 30 days). Total cholesterol dropped from 7.7 to 6.0 mmol/L. Triglycerides from 1.1 to 0.8. Fasting morning glucose, which had been sitting stubbornly at 98–100, dropped to 85 mg/dL (which is my daily average as well). Cortisol dropped from 479 to 317 nmol/L in one week. Klebsiella pneumoniae, a major autoimmune trigger, eradicated from my stool test without a single antibiotic. Leaky gut and intestinal inflammation markers down 70-90%.

White button mushrooms (420g daily for 2 weeks). My T:E2 ratio jumped from 23:1 to 32:1. My hsCRP dropped from 3.9 to 0.6. Ferritin dropped from 487 to 248. Cholesterol normalised. In two weeks. From mushrooms. The same result 50mg of Aromasin per week couldn’t produce.

Aspirin (4g daily for 2 weeks). Ferritin halved. Inflammation dropped. Body temperature raised. T3 uptake improved and TSH dropped to the lowest its ever been. The most accidentally powerful compound in your medicine cabinet and everyone’s scared of it because their doctor told them to be.

Specific foods produce specific effects. The only way to know which is which is to test. I didn’t do GOMAD to go viral on Instagram. I did it so I can test the actual metabolic effects in myself.

I’ve ran many more experiments (my SubStack is full of them), but I just wanted to share these ones with you for now.

Part 4: What It Does For Other Men

The personal experiments confirmed the mechanism. The client results confirmed it scales.

An MMA athlete came in with testosterone at 300. Doing 30,000 steps a day, multiple MMA sessions per week, strict carnivore. Doing everything right by internet standards. We reduced his training, added carbs back, increased nutrient density with liver and organs. Testosterone went to 1000 and he started making progress in the gym again. All that grinding was suppressing him. His body read the output as a survival threat and shut down androgen production to cope.

Another man had been at 300 ng/dL for years. Tried everything. Non-responder. We didn’t touch his hormones. Ran a gut protocol. Testosterone went to 700. His gut had been suppressing androgen production the entire time and nobody thought to look there.

Kennet doubled his testosterone from 350 to 700. Gunter went from 400 to 800. Brant increased from 500 to 700 while dropping 10 pounds simultaneously.

A client had diarrhoea 10 times a day for 10 years. Seen almost every gut specialist online and in person. Done broad probiotics. All the standard advice. We switched him from TUDCA to UDCA. Resolved within days. A decade of suffering. One molecule swap.

An executive came to me terrified he was going to lose his job. Brain fog so bad he couldn’t perform in meetings. Confidence completely gone. Colleagues noticing. We restored his dopamine and GABA pathways through diet and targeted supplementation. Clarity came back within weeks. He said it felt like waking up from a 2-year coma. And shortly after he even got a promotion instead of getting fired.

The pattern across all of them is the same.

Chronic inflammation + nutrient deficiencies + gut dysfunction → hormones crash → identity disappears.

Fix the root, hormones rise, the person comes back.

Part 5: What I Got Wrong

A few things I believed early on that turned out to be dead wrong.

Estrogen is the enemy. Wrong. Estrogen climbs when inflammation climbs. Chase the inflammation, not the estrogen. The men spending $200/month on aromatase inhibitors while their gut produces endotoxin 24 hours a day are treating the symptom.

Fasting is elite. Dead wrong for depleted men. It only works when reserves are already high. For everyone running on fumes, fasting accelerates collapse. The mental clarity you feel when fasting is cortisol, not healing. Your body screaming for food and you interpreting the scream as progress.

Cortisol is the villain. Misleading. High cortisol is almost always a symptom of energy insufficiency. You don’t have a cortisol problem. You have an energy and inflammation problem that cortisol is desperately trying to patch.

Cold showers fix everything. Cold exposure is useful in a buffered, metabolically stable person. In a cold, hypothyroid, depleted state, cold showers raise noradrenaline, worsen sympathetic tone, and accelerate mineral depletion. The biohack that works on a full tank actively damages an empty one.

More training = more testosterone. The carnivore athlete doing 30,000 steps and three MMA sessions a week with T at 300 proved that wrong definitively. Output exceeding input is its own form of suppression. The body doesn’t reward effort. It rewards high-leverage inputs.

Part 6: Where to Start

If you’ve read this far, one of three things is true.

You recognise yourself in Part 1, the anxiety, the fatigue, the flat affect, the symptoms that don’t make sense given how hard you’re trying. You want to understand the mechanism and fix the root.

You’ve tried the standard approaches, the supplements, the protocols, the diet changes (intermittent fasting, carnivore, Paleo, keto, sugar diet, honey diet, fruit diet…) and something still isn’t working. You’re looking for what you’ve missed.

Or you’re already implementing this framework and you want to go deeper.

Here’s how to get started based on where you are:

If you want the full system:

The complete framework — understanding your symptoms, diet, digestion, stress, nutrients, and the 14 bottlenecks that silently limit testosterone, mood, and recovery in men doing everything else right, is inside the Substack. Start with the module guide. It’s built to be worked through in sequence.

I’m linking the first 3 for you here to start with.

→ Part 1: The Symptoms Master Checklist (once you understand your symptoms, you can better address the root cause)

→ Part 2: How to Fix Your Digestion (it doesn’t matter what you eat if your digestion is broken. Then everything will cause symptoms)

→ Part 3: The One Diet to Rule Them All (how to construct the diet according to the 1 protein, 1 carb source rule so that you get all your nutrients, crush inflammation and rebuild your buffer the right way)

After you’ve gone through them, then move on to:

• part 4 (food selection to maximizing nutrient density and lower inflammation),

• part 5 (food selection to lose weight, without crushing your testosterone and sacrificing energy, sleep, taste and flavor or hunger doing so)

• part 6 (how to rebuild your buffer based on your specific case and symptoms)

• part 7 (identifying which bottleneck is holding you back and how to fix it)

• part 8 (compounds/stacks to supercharge your progress so you get to your goals faster)

If you have a specific problem:

Gut & digestion

→ How to Fix Slow Transit Time and Constipation

→ How to Fix Constipation & Improve Transit Time – Butyrate, magnesium, IAP.

→ How to Heal Leaky Gut & Lower Endotoxin – Bile acids, lactoferrin, probiotics.

→ How to Improve Lactose Tolerance & Digest Dairy Better.

→ How to Increase Butyrate & Improve Gut Microbiome for Hormones.

→ How to Fix Your Digestion: The Ultimate Guide

Hormones & mental function

→ How to fix hypothyroidism

→ How to maxx out your DHT

→ How to Lower Estrogen Naturally (Part 1: Block Aromatase Naturally & Part 2: Promote Estrogen Excretion)

→ How to reverse hypersensitivity to stress

→ How to Fix Anxiety Through Hormones & Neurosteroids – Allopregnanolone, GABA, pregnenolone.

→ How to Rebuild a Nervous System That Doesn’t Overreact

Sexual function

→ Fixing premature ejaculation

→ Fixing Erectile Dysfunction (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

If you want personalised help:

Every man’s bottleneck is different. The gut problem driving one person’s low testosterone is not the same as the one driving another’s. The protocol that doubled one client’s testosterone did nothing for another, because the upstream cause was different.

If you want to know exactly which bottleneck is limiting you and get a personalised diet and supplement protocol built specifically around it, that’s what the health report is for.

You fill out a comprehensive questionnaire. I identify your root causes. You get a protocol built around your specific situation, not a generic stack.

→ Get Your Personalised Health Report

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The guy who needed alcohol to feel like himself is gone. The vision came back. The anxiety is gone. The confidence isn’t performed anymore, it’s the baseline.

Not because I found the right supplement.

Because I finally understood what the body was trying to tell me.

It was never broken. It was just running on empty.