9th Life

Most people have no idea what training to failure actually feels like, including myself. I am on vacation today, and don’t need to rush at the gym, so I am going to test this theory by absolutely blasting my legs this evening. The end goal is crossing the “I am not going to be able to walk tomorrow” threshold but right below the point I get rhabdomyolysis.

If you asked me to choose the 3 highest ROI compounds to aid in fat loss while maintaining muscle mass I think I’d have to go: - Reta - HGH - Test What would be your picks?

If you asked me to choose the 3 highest ROI compounds to aid in fat loss while maintaining muscle mass I think I’d have to go: - Reta - HGH - Test What would be your picks?

Beginner guide to Melanotan II (MT2): the "Barbie drug" Simply put, MT2 is a synthetic version of a hormone your body already makes. It tells your skin to produce pigment without needing the sun to trigger it. It picked up the "Barbie drug" nickname in the press a decade ago because of the trifecta of effects it produces at once: tanned skin, appetite suppression, and increased libido. Tan, thin, and horny. I mean what more could you ask for during a summer cut? LOL. How it works MT2 is a cyclic heptapeptide analog of alpha-MSH (alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone). It was developed at the University of Arizona starting in the mid-1980s by a team led by chemist Victor Hruby and Mac Hadley, chasing a synthetic, more stable, more potent version of natural MSH. The goal was a UV-protective tan to cut skin cancer risk. Honestly... makes a lot sense it came out of an Arizona college. Natural MSH gets degraded fast. The Arizona team cyclized the structure, which makes MT2 both longer-lasting and stronger than what your body produces on its own. It's a non-selective agonist of the melanocortin receptors. Non-selective is the key word. It hits multiple receptors at once, and that's the whole story of both the effects and the sides: MC1R, on melanocytes in your skin. This is the tanning lever. Activating it tells melanocytes to produce eumelanin, the dark photoprotective pigment, regardless of UV exposure. More eumelanin means a tan, and it also means more built-in sun protection. MC3R and MC4R, in your central nervous system. These regulate sexual arousal, appetite, and energy homeostasis. MT2 is lipophilic and crosses the blood-brain barrier, so it reaches them. This is where the libido boost and appetite suppression come from. Not a skin effect at all. A brain effect. That's the thing to understand before running it. You're not taking a tanning peptide. For better, or worse, you're taking a peptide that lights up the entire melanocortin system. MT2 vs MT1 vs PT-141 Three compounds, same family. MT1 (afamelanotide). The cousin without the brain effects. It's a linear peptide, and unlike MT2 it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier well. It still binds the MC3R and MC4R receptors, but it can't physically reach the ones in your brain, so in practice you get the tanning without the libido and nausea. It's FDA-approved, sold as Scenesse, for a rare light-sensitivity disorder called EPP. Some people do still run it for cosmetic tanning, just less commonly than MT2. MT2. Non-selective. Hits MC1R for the tan plus MC3R/MC4R for everything else. Stronger tanning response than MT1, and it comes with the full melanocortin side effect profile. Some people actually want that part, the libido and appetite effects, and run MT2 as the whole package. PT-141 (bremelanotide). The other direction. It's a metabolite of MT2 that's selective for MC3R/MC4R, the sexual arousal receptors, with minimal MC1R activity. So it's the libido effect carved off from the tanning. PT-141 is FDA-approved as Vyleesi for low sexual desire. Easy way to think about it: MT1 is the tan without the libido, PT-141 is the libido without the tan, MT2 is both at once. The effects Tanning. The main reason most people run it. MT2 darkens your skin and, more importantly to me, it changes how your skin responds to UV. This effect is very VERY real, and it scales with dose. This is where people get themselves in trouble. Run an aggressive protocol long enough and you won't just get a summer glow, you go several shades past anything your genetics could ever produce. There are people who've run MT2 aggressively enough that they end up looking like a different race. Libido. Also real and noticeable. The MC3R/MC4R activation produces spontaneous arousal. Some guys run MT2 specifically for this and treat the tan as the side effect. More on this below. Appetite suppression. MC4R activation curbs hunger. But it's not GLP-1 style fullness/reduced food noise. More so coming from a nausea-like feeling for most people. The sides This is where MT2 earns its reputation. Nausea. The most common one. For me it's every single time. It's not stomach-bug level, it's a specific queasy, slightly-off feeling that comes on pretty quick. Scales with dose. Most people report it fades over a few weeks of consistent use. Flushing. Facial and upper-body flushing, sometimes pretty intense. For me this one is dramatic. I turn into a human lobster. Usually fades after about an hour. It's harmless and it passes, but it's startling if you don't expect it. Pic below. To be clear, that's a flush, not a burn. The appetite suppression. It suppresses hunger, but not the clean way a GLP-1 does. MT2 makes food less appealing because you feel mildly nauseated. Worth knowing if appetite suppression is something you'd want or specifically don't. Also seems like this effect is pretty short lived. Spontaneous erections. The MC3R/MC4R activation can produce an erection that simply will not go away. This has happened to me. Can be slightly painful, and can last well beyond anything you asked for with no off switch. Funny in hindsight, kinda wild in the moment if you don't know it's coming. Worth knowing that this is on the menu before you hop on. If an erection ever lasts more than four hours that's a priapism and a real medical emergency, so proceed with caution. Mole and freckle darkening. MT2 darkens existing pigmented spots, not just your overall skin tone. Freckles get noticeably darker. Moles too. I have even seen people get hyperpigmentation in their lips giving them almost a purple tint. I have very few moles so I didn't notice much, but if you have a lot of moles this matters more than any other side effect on this list. If you run MT2 and you have significant moles, get a baseline skin check with a dermatologist and watch them. One case study worth knowing In 2012, doctors at a Chicago hospital published a case in Clinical Toxicology. A 39-year-old man injected 6mg of internet-sourced MT2 in winter to darken his skin. 6mg is an INSANE dose, six times the recommended starting dose, and a normal protocol dose is measured in micrograms. Within two hours he was in the ER with a heart rate that peaked at 146, full-body muscle tremors, sweating, and anxiety. He developed rhabdomyolysis, his CPK climbed to nearly 18,000, and his kidneys took a hit. Three days in the ICU. He was discharged and recovered. The point isn't that MT2 will hospitalize you. At sane doses it is pretty well tolerated. The point is that this is not a compound you want to blast into your body. My experience I don't run MT2 for a deep cosmetic tan anymore. I run it because it limits my propensity to burn. Genetics context. I'm essentially 100% European ancestry. UK, Swedish, Irish. That's about as burn-prone as a genome gets. The photo of my dad shows what I'm working with on the genetic side. Translucently pale is the family baseline, lol. In the past I ran a real tanning protocol, 250mcg three times a week, and it built a solid tan. These days I've scaled way back. 150-250mcg as needed, only on days I'm actually going to be in the sun, roughly once a week at most. To be clear, I still wear sunscreen. The MT2 just buys me margin. The flushing is very real for me. The lobster pic is exactly what it looks like. Nausea hits every time without fail. The persistent erection effect has happened to me in the past, and the first time it was somewhat concerning. Pricing, legal status, and access Pricing: MT2 is cheap. A 10mg vial runs roughly $25 to $50 from research-grade suppliers. At 150-250mcg per dose a vial lasts a long time. Cost is not the barrier here. Legal status: This is the barrier. MT2 has no legal therapeutic version anywhere in the world. It isn't FDA-approved and isn't legal to sell for human consumption in the US, UK, EU, or Australia. The approved compounds in this family are MT1 (Scenesse, for EPP) and PT-141 (Vyleesi, for sexual desire). Neither is MT2. The 2026 regulatory picture is moving but easy to misread. In April 2026 the FDA pulled MT2 off the Category 2 "do not compound" list, because the nomination behind that restriction was withdrawn. That sounds like good news and the headlines treated it that way, but it isn't legalization. It just means MT2 is now eligible to be considered for the 503A compounding list. The advisory committee won't even review it until early 2027, and a podcast comment from RFK Jr. is not a rule. Nothing is approved, nothing has changed for buyers yet. And even in the best case, none of this touches how you'd actually get MT2. The 503A pathway is about compounding pharmacies filling patient-specific scripts. It has nothing to do with the gray-market research vials. So the practical reality for anyone running MT2 today is unchanged: it's a research-use-only compound with no legal human-use supply. Same lab-rat lane as the rest of the unapproved peptides. Given how cheap MT2 is and how little the suppliers are scrutinized, quality is genuinely all over the place. If you run it, you know the drill. HPLC purity at 98% or higher, mass-spec identity, and a batch-specific COA you can actually match to your vial. Conclusion MT2 is one of the more interesting compounds I've run. It's the rare one where the side effect profile isn't purely a cost, some people genuinely want the libido and appetite effects and treat the tan as the bonus. Proceed with caution here, especially if your goal is cosmetic tanning rather than sun protection. MT2 is not a UV force field. It builds eumelanin, which gives you some real protection, but it doesn't make you bulletproof. If you're stacking it with tanning beds or long unprotected sun exposure to chase a deeper color, the cancer risk from that UV is still very much on the table. The peptide darkens you. It doesn't cancel out the thing that makes tanning risky in the first place. Disclaimer: Personal perspective, not medical advice. MT2 is one of the more side-effect-heavy compounds I've posted about, and it's not legal to sell for human use anywhere. Always consult a healthcare professional before DIYing anything.