The Numbers Came Back

Two Coffees and a PDF

My son is an early riser. So am I — we've written about this before, and it remains one of the stranger inheritances: the kid gets up because he wants to, not because anybody made him.

So this morning it's the two of us at the desk before anyone else is awake. I'm on coffee. He's talking. And the email comes in: the first results are back.

We opened them together and went through the numbers line by line, him asking what each one meant and me explaining triglycerides to a kid before seven in the morning. Then we got to the part where I realised what I was looking at, and we celebrated in the way you celebrate at 06:30 with no one else awake, which is quietly and with a lot of grinning.

Because the numbers are very good.

What We Were Comparing Against

Ninety-four days ago I drew a full panel *before* starting anything. That was the entire point — a clean, unmedicated baseline, so that whatever happened next would be measurable rather than believable.

21 April 2026 — pre-protocol. 30 July 2026 — day 94. Same lab. Same reference ranges. Both fasted. And crucially, nothing was washed out for the second draw — I deliberately measured the system running the way it actually runs, not a cleaned-up version of it.

Here's what came back.

The Lipids

Triglycerides fell 41 percent. The VLDL fraction — the triglyceride-carrying lipoprotein that was sitting exactly at its ceiling in April — fell 43 percent and is now nowhere near it. Non-HDL cholesterol, which is arguably the single best single-number summary of atherogenic risk you can get from a standard panel, dropped 18 percent.

That is not drift. Ninety-four days is not long enough for that to be noise.

The One That Actually Mattered

Here's the section I cared about most, and it's not the lipids.

The liver.

Ninety-four days of injected peptides, testosterone, a GLP-class compound and NAD+, and every single hepatic marker is normal — in both panels. Not improved. Normal at baseline and normal now.

AST moved 18 → 28, which looks like the biggest jump in the table until you notice it's still comfortably in range and that AST also lives in skeletal muscle. The AST-to-ALT ratio went from 0.95 to 1.33 with a completely normal ALT. That pattern points at muscle, not liver. I lift. That's what it looks like in blood.

SHBG: The Number Nobody Talks About

19.20 → 29.63 nmol/L. Up 54 percent.

Sex hormone-binding globulin is the protein that carries testosterone around your bloodstream. Low SHBG sounds good at first — less binding means more free hormone — but it also means no buffer. Your levels spike after a dose and crash before the next one, and you feel every bit of that swing.

Mine was 19.2 in April, which is low, and it was the specific reason I split testosterone from once a week into twice a week back in June. SHBG also tracks liver and metabolic health closely — it tends to rise as insulin resistance falls.

So a 54% increase is two wins in one number: a smoother hormonal curve, and independent confirmation that the metabolic improvement in the lipid panel is real rather than a lucky draw.

And Everything Else Held

What the Wearables Say

The blood is the instrument that matters, but the continuous data agrees with it, which is the correlation you want.

Cardiovascular age. My ring estimates vascular age from pulse wave velocity. I'm 44. Over the last two weeks it's been reading between 37 and 41 — with the best reading, 37, coming in seven years under my actual age. Today it says 41. Either way I'm running an arterial system younger than the one on my passport.

Weight: 110 kg → 104 kg. Six kilos, and not through starvation — through a GLP-class compound, resistance training and food that isn't stupid.

Blood pressure is where it should be. No drama, no medication, nothing to report — which is exactly the report you want.

Sleep duration finally moved. My seven-day median went from 5h 26m to 6h 32m — plus sixty-six minutes on the axis that had been flat for months and had resisted every intervention I threw at it.

The Part I'm Not Going to Hide

A results post that only shows the wins is marketing, not measurement. So here are the three things that need work, stated as plainly as the good ones.

1. Estradiol is at the ceiling — 43.84 against a male upper limit of 44. Testosterone aromatizes into estradiol; more testosterone means more substrate, and I'm also on HCG, which drives it further, and carrying body fat, where the conversion enzyme lives. It's technically in range. It's also 99.6% of the way to not being. This is the single reason I'm not raising my testosterone dose this week, even though that was the plan.

2. Creatinine came back at 1.24, just over the 1.18 limit. Almost certainly not my kidneys: I take creatine daily, and creatine reliably inflates measured creatinine *without changing actual filtration*. I flagged this in writing before the draw, and I've asked for cystatin C — a filtration marker that ignores muscle mass and supplements. Until that comes back, the number is uninterpretable and I'm not touching anything.

3. HDL slipped one point below range, 40 → 39. The only lipid that didn't improve — and a well-documented effect of exogenous testosterone. Worth fixing, not worth panicking about while every other lipid marker fell off a cliff.

There's also a subtler one that took five markers to see: hemoglobin and hematocrit are up, while ferritin is down 39%, serum iron down 45%, transferrin saturation down from 42% to 21%, red cell size falling and size variability rising. Testosterone-driven red blood cell production is outrunning my iron supply. Not anemia — the opposite — but the raw material is being drawn down faster than it's replaced. That one goes to my clinic rather than to a supplement shelf, because taking iron while hematocrit climbs is exactly how you cause the problem you were trying to avoid.

What's Still Missing — and the Questions I Sent

This is a preliminary report for two reasons.

First, the headline numbers aren't here yet. Total testosterone and free testosterone are still processing — expected Monday or Tuesday. Without them I can't finish the most important calculation in the panel: the testosterone-to-estradiol ratio. An estradiol of 44 is perfectly proportionate if total testosterone came back high. It's disproportionate if it didn't. Same number, opposite conclusions, and I refuse to guess.

Second, this panel is narrower than April's, and I've asked why. Missing from it:

• IGF-1 — in April it was 251 against a reference range of 76–230. Already above range, before I started. I have since spent three months on two peptides whose entire purpose is raising IGF-1. It is the marker that titrates both of them, and it was not measured. This is the omission that actually bothers me.
• HbA1c — April was 5.7%, sitting exactly on the pre-diabetic threshold. With triglycerides down 41%, this should have moved. It is the headline metabolic outcome and it is absent.
• Insulin and HOMA index, high-sensitivity CRP, prolactin, full thyroid panel, vitamin D, homocysteine.

All of those are on my prescription's own list of what to monitor during treatment. So I've sent my clinic a detailed message asking why they weren't ordered, whether they can still be run on the same sample, and eight specific questions — the target testosterone-to-estradiol ratio, whether my HCG dose is what's pushing estradiol, and critically, what hematocrit number we agree on in advance as the line where we change something. That last one is much easier to settle now, calmly, than at the threshold.

Next Week

Monday or Tuesday: total testosterone, free testosterone, and hopefully IGF-1. Then the clinic's answers. Then the full report — every number, the complete picture, and the decisions that come out of it.

And then a new protocol. More advanced than this one, built on ninety-four days of measured response instead of assumptions. Higher where the panel says higher. Gone where something didn't earn its place. New compounds where there's a gap. TB-500 comes back off pause. And this time the starting point isn't a guess — it's a dataset.

But the preliminary read is in, and I'm going to say it plainly, because the blood doesn't care how hard I tried and it said this anyway:

Triglycerides down 41%. VLDL down 43%. Non-HDL down 18%. SHBG up 54%. Six kilos gone. Liver spotless. Arteries reading up to seven years younger than I am. Ninety-four days.

At 44, with a coffee, at half past six in the morning, next to a nine-year-old who wanted to know what a triglyceride is.

Full report next week.