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IN THE PAST two weeks alone, I’ve been encouraged to microdose the following: psilocybin for lightening my mood; Accutane for shrinking my oil glands (and, supposedly, my pores); doxycycline for treating my rosacea; and plyometric jumps for supercharging—apparently even shortening—the objectively worst day at the gym. I’m generally happy to humor people when they tell me how to optimize my body or my mind, but there are limits to what I’m willing to do. Some light tripping on my daily commute? I’m listening. Plyo jumps? Get real.
There is, however, one microdosing bandwagon I’ve hopped on, and I’m not sure whether or how to get off.
I’m one of those people with chronically elevated inflammation markers and no obvious reason why. Inflammation is basically your immune system’s alarm system. When you cut your finger or catch a virus, your body releases inflammatory chemicals to fight off the threat and begin the repair work. That kind of short-term inflammation is useful—even necessary. But when the alarm never shuts off, the body can remain in a state of low-grade, simmering inflammation, and over time that chronic and often invisible irritation has been linked to a murderers’ row of health conditions (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia).
I’ve known that mine has been stubbornly high since I turned 40 and started paying attention to a line item in my blood work called high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, or hs-CRP. It’s a protein the liver produces when the body is under inflammatory stress, and doctors often track it as one signal of systemic inflammation and cardiovascular risk. For years my numbers have been “something to keep an eye on”—thanks, doc!—and though I’ve been tested for pretty much everything that might cause it, there’s no good explanation.
I’ve tried the usual low-hanging fruit (diet, sleep, exercise, etc.) and none of it has worked. Then early last year a friend of mine—very fit, supersmart, aggressively skeptical of wellness BS—told me that his inflammatory markers came down after he started taking a very small dose of a GLP-1.
You probably know these drugs as Ozempic and Wegovy, and they’re best known for curbing appetites and thus rendering some of the formerly fuller-bodied people in your life—who honestly looked fine before—virtually unrecognizable. But researchers have also begun noticing something else: A lot of people taking GLP-1s show declines in inflammatory markers, too.
Some of the benefit likely comes from weight loss, but there’s also evidence that GLP-1s may help quiet some of the processes that keep the immune system all fired up. In other words: The same drugs currently reshaping how we think about our weight may also be part of a much larger—and stranger—project of quietly optimizing the body from the inside out.
I asked my doctor—the same one who has spent years tracking my CRP with mild concern—about trying a small dose. He told me the research was still early and that most of it had been done on people with diabetes, obesity, or heart disease—there was very little good data on someone like me. Plus, the drugs aren’t without trade-offs: nausea, G.I. woes, and rapid fat loss that can take lean muscle with it if you’re not careful. Still, he said, it might be worth a try.
I started with a weekly shot of a very, very small dose, before ramping up to a weekly shot of a merely very small dose. The most immediate effect was, as predicted, feeling full all the time—like, really full. Nausea is too strong a word. It was more like that feeling after your second pass through Thanksgiving dinner: the visceral certainty that another bite of anything would be a very bad idea.
The effect on my relationship with food was interesting. I still enjoyed what I put in my mouth, but the constant mental chatter about food—the “should I have a snack?” voice—basically disappeared. When I went out to dinner, I ordered normally, ate until I felt satisfied, and then just…stopped. No heroic willpower required. The plate would still be half full and I’d think, Yeah, I’m good.
Because I wasn’t eating as much and I was being super intentional with the food I chose, I did lose a few pounds. Nothing drastic, but enough for people to feel entitled to comment on how I looked. (Thanks! And: rude.) Thanks to my trusty InBody scale, I could track the changes, and I took some comfort in seeing that I was losing more fat than muscle. I didn’t experience any of the other major side effects; I’d been especially worried about the various forms of anhedonia that some users report—the so-called beige-ing of the world—but I felt pretty much okay. The sensation of feeling stuffed all the time subsided, too, and I settled into a pattern of eating smaller meals and rarely snacking. There are worse ways to live.
After three months I went in for blood work, and my hs-CRP had dropped by 73 percent from the previous year.
I am not a physician, but even I can see this is not a subtle improvement. Which is great, right? Problem solved. Except subjectively—day to day, hour to hour—I feel the same. In a way, this makes GLP-1 microdosing a bit of an outlier in the self-optimization game, which tends to value speed, sensation, and visible results. Cold plunges feel invigorating. Nootropics promise mental clarity. Even a new workout program announces itself immediately through new and foreign soreness.
This, by contrast, is optimization by way of a lab report. If your biomarkers improve but your experience of being alive does not, what exactly have you optimized—other than a statistical version of your future self you may not meet for decades, if ever? Is that worth a shot in the butt once a week, for the rest of your life?
I’m still deciding, and maybe I’ll start to feel the impact of the diminished inflammation as my body keeps aging. (God willing.) If you’ve had any experience with microdosing a GLP-1 and have some advice for me, I want to hear about it.
Richard Dorment is the editorial director of Men’s Health and Women’s Health.
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