Life on Peptide Feels Amazing

Says everyone who's buying from looksmaxxers on Instagram or Al bots in Chinese factories and injecting them into their bloodstreams.

- BY EZRA MARCUS

On A FRIGID December afternoon, I took an elevator up to the sixth floor of a midtown office building on a busy stretch of Eighth Avenue and walked into the lobby of Atlas Men's Health. The clinic's motto: DOMINATE THE DAY. Its website features a variety of AI-generated images of smiling women in athleisure and shirtless men, including one with bulging biceps holding an oversize photorealistic eggplant advertising the “Priapus Shot,” a penis injection for erectile dysfunction. The lobby had decorative touches you might call Temu neoclassical: a plastic olive tree, replica Greco-Roman busts, a Spartan helmet. The only other person in the room was the secretary, talking on the phone behind a large marble desk. “So your son has a bodybuilding competition coming up?” she said. “We can certainly help with that.” She rattled off names of compounds, long strings of letters and numbers; my ears perked up. These were what I'd come looking for: peptides.

I consider myself a complete idiot when it comes to health and wellness. I've never tried acupuncture, creatine, cupping, lion's mane, Chinese herbal medicine, a neti pot, or nootropics. But over the past year, my rigid lack of interest in what other people are doing to their bodies started to crumble. The results were too noticeable. Friends and acquaintances were showing up at parties newly tan, ripped, skinny, with good skin. “I have so much energy! I don't even drink coffee anymore,” they would say. “I fixed my stomach/sleep/ligament issues!” This wasn't some big secret: They were injecting peptides and would happily tell you about their “stacks” and offer to connect you with their “plug.” I wanted in.