I think it's time that someone created this thread. We have lots of discussion of the other aspects of this drug, but nothing dedicated to personal experience. A lot of informative anecdotes are mixed in with threads concentrating on other aspects of rapamycin. For example:
https://www.longecit...opinion-article
https://www.longecit...ave-you-noticed
https://www.longecit...pamycin-therapy
https://www.longecit...lantoin-synergy
I don't log in often, but the changes I've noticed from this drug have been profound enough to warrant a public report.
First of all, we have Rapamune, Sirolimus, and Emcure, sorted descending by price. I've taken all of them. On the latter 2, I experienced a noticeable boost in appetite, and gained weight, mostly as visceral fat. I stopped all rapamycin for several months before starting Rapamune a month ago. The only difference is that I had been taking 3 mg/week of the latter 2, as compared to 4 mg/week of the former. I suspect that Sirolimus is real, and perhaps Emcure as well, but somehow Rapamune is less contaminated in a way which matters.
At 45, I now have the body composition of a mouse in a calorie restriction study. My weight is down to 67 kg at 186 cm. This has been through no effort whatsoever on my part. I drink a liter of juice (typically, orange) for breakfast, munch through an all-you-can-eat salad bar until I'm full, and have the odd banana, dark chocolate bar, or pack of nuts or seeds every day. I studied the ketogenic Bredesen protocol for Alzheimer's prevention, prior to throwing the book out the window and heading down to the salad bar. I don't particularly watch my intake of sugar or sodium, and the only thing I actively police is my protein intake, and above all my intake of animal protein (read: methionine). In a nutshell, I'm trying to fake out the epigenetic profile of an individual with Laron syndrome. (If I were really hardcore, or had cancer, I might take pegvisomant, but I'm not there yet.) In other words, minimize IGF1. Quite the opposite of a ketogenic diet with ample protein allowance.
I do take berberine (which according to one study is superior, gram-for-gram, to metformin), fish oil (because alpha linoleic acid is hard to convert to DHA and EPA), zinc (for unrelated reasons involving synaptic glutamate suppression), vitamin D, taurine (thanks, Turnbuckle), K2 (to prevent atherosclerosis), carbon 60 olive oil (with a few weeks skipped here and there), moringa oleifera and cat's claw (sporadically, for killing cancer cells, especially after pollution exposure), shiitake-maitake pills (sporadically, for visual memory maintenance), and random bursts of Longvida lipidated curcumin. I also take Candesartan to lower blood pressure by suppressing angiotensin 2, and have done so since 2018. But, for all that, it's only after taking rapamycin, and Rapamune in particular, that my body weight collapsed and my episodic memory went into high gear.
I could go on and on about my history of blood tests, but there are really only 2 things that stand out, post-rapamycin. One is that my blood sugar has increased from the 70s during keto to 85. This is consistent with type 0 diabetes (courtesy of mTORC2). If I have to become diabetic in order to live like this, so be it. To each his own. (Everolimus, a rapamycin analog, might fix this, if it ever gets cheap enough.)
The other thing is a collapse in red cell distribution width (RDW), which I mentioned previously but has now persisted for 15 months:
1/9/2015 13.3
1/15/2015 13.5
3/6/2015 14.0
11/18/2015 14.9
12/31/2015 14.9
2/19/2016 13.6
3/15/2016 14.9
Staye on a low-protein ("lowpro") diet for a month.
6/11/2018 14.2
Stayed on Sirolimus for 10 weeks, 3 mg/week.
8/20/2018 12.7
Stayed on Rapamune for 4 weeks, 4 mg/week.
11/19/2019 12.8
This is despite the first 7 measurements representing various different dietary modalities; nothing mattered until I started rapamycin.
RDW, by the way, isn't a measure of the width one's red cells. It's a measure of the width of (the distribution of (the widths of one's red cells)). In my view, this value repesents the strictness with which one's marrow is sticking to the red cell manufacturing specification. Just like with a tire manufacturer, the less deviation in the size that there is from one sample to the next, the better. It's thus a measure of quality control. Low RDW may also imply that red cells are receiving less damage due to fewer interactions with pathological aggregates in the blood. Reducing protein intake had essentially no effect, after accounting for the existing noise level in the data. It was only rapamycin which precipitated the collapse within a matter of weeks. I suppose one could also interpret these numbers as red cells surviving for shorter periods of time due to accerlated release from the marrow, but if that were the case, then I would expect to see reduced lifespans in animals due to excessive replication stress in the hematopoietic niche.
But only Rapamune -- neither Sirolimus nor Emcure -- caused the rapid weight loss and very noticeable improvement in visual episodic memory. My only source of animal protein is eggs, of which I consume 2 or 3 per week. My memory, and certainly my sleep quality, was distinctly inferior on a ketogenic diet without rapamycin -- a diet which was rich in the very nutrients that neurons need. Part of this is no doubt attributable to my inability to sleep when eating foods rich in glutamic acid (long story, probably due to a problem with zinc transporter 3). And for the record, I eat no processed food whatsoever except for olive oil, dark chocolate, and occasionally butter. (I also consume yoghurt, but only for purposes of restoring gut bacteria after a course of antibiotics or a bout of digestive issues, both of which being rare.) And no grain products except for those composed of buckwheat, barley, quinoa, or rice, and even then, in handful-per-day quantities on average. I nonetheless have no fear of potatoes, sweet potatoes, fruit, or beans of any variety. But pasta? Forget it.
But surely all this fructose is causing my cholesterol level to explode! Let's see: LDL is 90 and HDL is 70. Meh. (Let me emphasize that my olive oil habit knows no restraint!)
And finally, at the same appointment at which the latest blood work was done, the nurse took my blood pressure. I hadn't taken my Candesartan that morning just to see what would happen. It ended up at 104/65, which I saw for myself on the hospital's digital meter. A month after my stroke in 2013, at precisely the same hospital, it had been in the 160s.
Today, life is pretty much like it was prior to the stroke. Even my tinnitus, which resulted from it, is rather quiet, although it's still present. Maybe this is all due to something else, but in fact the past few weeks have been stressful with travel and, in the past few days, a low-grade virus of some sort. And yet, my visual memory is as good as it was many years ago. I'm profoundly thankful for all the help I've received, from so many people, over several years, which, against all odds, has brought me to this point.
Edited by resveratrol_guy, 22 November 2019 - 03:15 PM.
