I did Dr DIY, hopefully you don’t have to

I went in for a crown. Routine appointment, half an hour, home by ten.

They put the cuff on and it read 170/110.

I don’t get white coat syndrome, so I knew that wasn’t nerves. They sat me in the corner of the room and told me to relax for a while, then took it again. And again.

It wouldn’t come down.

Eventually the dentist came back and said he wasn’t going to do the procedure. At that blood pressure, he said, going ahead could cause a stroke. I sat there for a second trying to work out if he was being dramatic.

He wasn’t.

I’ve had high blood pressure for years. More than a decade. My parents both have it, so I’ve always given genetics a decent share of the blame, and I’ll take the rest because I eat a rich western diet and I like a drink. I was already on two blood pressure medications, both at the highest dose, and it was still badly controlled. A good reading for me was somewhere in the 130s over high 80s.

I’d tried supplements. I ran. I used a sauna, which brought my blood pressure down beautifully for about three hours before it went straight back up. So it’s not like my head was completely in the sand. It just wasn’t bad enough to make me really do anything about it beyond complaining.

That’s the honest truth of it. High blood pressure doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t make you feel sick. It doesn’t stop you playing golf or going to work or having a drink with your friends.

Until a man holding a dental drill tells you he won’t touch you because you might have a stroke in his chair.

I went home and started reading.

The first thing I tried was a three-day water-only fast. I’d read about people getting extraordinary results from fasting, and there was a version of me that liked the drama of it. Rather than just eat a bit less and go for a run like a normal person, I took myself away for three days and consumed nothing but water.

My blood pressure went up.

I never got the famous day-three high everyone talks about either. And the thing nobody warns you about isn’t really the hunger. The hunger was fine. It’s the boredom. Seventy-two hours with nothing to consume and nothing to enjoy is a very long time to be alone with yourself.

I decided to keep going anyway and went keto for two weeks. Lost a few pounds. Cut out the snacking and processed food. Felt reasonably virtuous about the whole thing.

No impact on blood pressure whatsoever.

Then I stopped keto and my body appeared to decide carbohydrates might soon become extinct. I put the weight straight back on. For a while I was eating relatively healthily and gaining weight daily, which is its own special kind of demoralising.

Two swings. Two misses.

By then, though, I’d gone properly down the rabbit hole. One of the more interesting things I learned was that I’m what’s called a non-dipper. Most people’s blood pressure falls while they’re asleep. Mine doesn’t.

That sent me down the sleep-breathing path. I bought a home sleep apnea test. Then an oxygen ring. Then I became convinced that maybe I had some kind of nighttime breathing problem driving the blood pressure. So I got a CPAP, and I was genuinely optimistic about this one.

It was a disaster.

My Oura sleep scores went through the floor. My HRV collapsed. I could barely breathe comfortably with the thing attached to my face. More late-night research suggested BiPAP might work better for somebody like me, so I exchanged the CPAP for one of those.

Somehow that was worse.

I’d wake up after a few hours feeling like death. I tried different masks, different settings, different ways of sleeping. I gave it a proper go and eventually had to accept that I simply wasn’t going to sleep wearing one of these machines.

So within a few weeks I’d fasted, done keto, diagnosed myself with a nighttime breathing problem, bought two different machines and achieved almost nothing except becoming significantly more knowledgeable and significantly more annoyed.

That turned out to be useful.

Because I finally stopped looking for the one thing that was going to fix it, and started looking at the whole system instead. And that’s when I really disappeared into it.

Hours of reading became days, then weeks. Papers, forums, podcasts, clinical trials, Reddit, PubMed, whatever I could get my hands on. And a lot of AI. Not as an oracle. More like an extremely patient research assistant I could argue with at eleven at night. I’d ask a question, get an answer, interrogate the answer, ask for the evidence, read the paper, come back with another question, then disappear down another branch of the tree.

I learned a shocking amount about blood pressure. Mostly I learned that saying somebody “has high blood pressure” doesn’t tell you very much about why they have high blood pressure. There are a lot of different roads that end at the same number on a cuff.

That was when the experimentation got more serious.

Weight was the obvious lever. I was 193lbs and while I wasn’t obese, I was carrying more of it than I needed. I went with retatrutide, sourced grey market. I’m telling you what I did here, not what you should do. I liked what I was seeing in the emerging data, particularly around weight and metabolic health, and my liver was part of the picture too.

I was also paranoid about losing muscle. I’m 46. Getting lighter while also getting weaker seemed like a terrible trade. So alongside it I started lifting again and, for the first three months, experimented with ipamorelin, CJC-1295 and kisspeptin. I had no interest in becoming thin, weak and gaunt.

Then, if I’m being completely honest, I went full biohacker. NAD+ for a month. Couldn’t tell if it was doing anything, so I switched to NMN. Then glutathione. Then MOTS-c. Then thymosin alpha. Some of it had decent evidence behind it. Some of it had interesting evidence. And some of it I probably tried because by that stage I was curious enough to want to know.

My bathroom cabinet started to look slightly unhinged.

The part I was more systematic about was my bloodwork. I’d had mildly high fasting glucose for years. My cholesterol markers were always on the wrong side of where I wanted them. Inflammation was higher than I’d like. So instead of taking random supplements because somebody on a podcast mentioned them, I built the supplement side around the actual numbers I was looking at. Nattokinase. Fish oil. Taurine. TMG. Vitamins B, D and K. CoQ10. A handful of others.

When I show friends the full list, they laugh. Fair enough. It looks insane until you know why each thing is in there.

I had baseline bloods from January and got my doctor to re-test me every couple of months. I also check my blood pressure on a home cuff most mornings.

The weight moved first. 193lbs became 185. Then 180. Then 175. By the end of sixteen weeks I was 170lbs, five pounds past the goal I’d originally set myself, and thankfully that’s roughly where I’ve stayed. According to my body-composition measurements, I’d also added around four pounds of muscle while losing the weight.

Then one afternoon I stood up from the couch and got properly light-headed. I checked my blood pressure.

97/60.

I’d spent more than ten years trying to make that number go down and suddenly I’d overshot it. That was when one of my two blood pressure medications came out of the regimen. My readings now tend to sit in the 110s over 70s and 80s.

I have never had numbers like that. Not once in more than a decade of checking.

Then the blood results started coming back.

Every time a new panel came back I was waiting for something to have gone badly wrong. It just hadn’t.

And here’s the bit that really annoys people when I tell them about it.

It never felt like dieting.

I ate what I wanted. Just less of it. I didn’t give up alcohol. There was no white-knuckling, no Sunday afternoon meal prep, no staring sadly at a bowl of chicken and broccoli. It was about as hassle-free as losing 23 pounds could possibly be. When friends see me now they can tell something happened, even though I was never particularly fat to begin with. I’m 46 and I’m in better shape than I was at 36.

I know how all of that reads. Too good to be true. I get it.

So far, it isn’t.

And I’m also not pretending I know exactly which part did what. I changed too many things. My guess is that losing 23 pounds did far more heavy lifting than most of the exotic stuff. Some of the rest probably helped. Some of it probably did absolutely nothing.

That’s part of what became so interesting to me. Because when friends started asking what I’d done, and they all started asking, the answer wasn’t simple.

I started sending people these absurdly long messages explaining things I’d spent the previous few months learning. Then somebody else would ask me basically the same question, and I’d explain it all again.

At some point I realised I had accumulated this enormous pile of notes, papers, protocols, biomarkers, calculators and explanations.

• —What I’d taken.
• —What I’d rejected.
• —What had decent evidence.
• —What had shaky evidence.
• —What appeared to be mostly internet folklore.
• —What to measure before you touched anything.
• —What I wished I’d known before I started.

And I remember thinking: why doesn’t this just exist somewhere?

The information isn’t hard to find because it’s secret. There’s too much of it. It’s spread across papers and podcasts and forums and doctors and Reddit threads and supplement sites and people trying to sell you something. AI makes navigating all of that dramatically easier, but there’s still a catch.

You have to know what question to ask.

Back in March I didn’t. I was just a guy who’d come home from the dentist wondering why the hell his blood pressure was 170/110.

So I built the thing I wish I’d found that afternoon. What each compound and supplement actually does, and how good the evidence really is rather than how good somebody selling it says it is. What your markers mean, scored twice: against what your doctor calls normal, and against what’s actually optimal. And how to put a stack together for your body and your goals rather than somebody else’s.

I called it Whatstack.

That’s really the whole story.

Anyway. It’s live now.