“What can I add?” isn’t a good way to approach this problem, imo.
Definition is muscle mass and leanness, very little to do with supplementation.
Do you have deficiencies that your poor sleep could be attributed to? It’s not always a micronutrient thing, though. Might be a lack of liver glycogen causing cortisol spikes, stressful lifestyle, too hot/too cold while sleeping, too much external stimulus/blue light/phone and tv before bed, overtraining causing CNS fatigue, etc.
Trying to throw the kitchen sink of vitamins and minerals at those two specific problems might sound like a good idea, but they’re the 1% improvements, not the way to fix the big picture.
I say all this as somebody who takes even more supplements than this, so don’t feel like I’m having a go at you. Just trying to reframe the way you tackle the problems.
You brought the sleep up, not me. Yes, you need better sleep for optimal fat loss and muscle growth. It’s a major issue here that is a roadblock for your goals.
Like I said, if you have no actual deficiencies and don’t plan on using PEDs, then muscle definition is just a combination of having more muscle and being leaner. Build more muscle and lose body fat - none of these supplements are going to move the needle on their own.
I think you’re taking this far more personally than I’m intending it to come across; your replies seem pretty agitated at what I’m saying. Which part of what I’m telling you is not coming through clearly?
My advice would be identical for a man or a woman, because the answer is the same.
Sorry this is a personal question, but do you have bipolar dx? I have one as well and take coq10 and nac for it based on how its supposed to be helpful. I'm just saying that the trash sleep could be related to bipolar. My sleep is usually off kilter and erratic all the time. Not just during a manic episode.
two things stand out here because nobody's said them.
one: your T of 30 with no free T ordered is the most important line in this thread. before the TRT consult, get SHBG and calculated free T drawn — the women above who fixed this with HRT plus testosterone are right, but without the free number as your baseline you'll never know what the treatment actually did.
two: nobody's mentioned iron. fit 40s, training hard, sleep destroyed, recovery poor — ask for ferritin plus transferrin saturation, not just the standard panel. ferritin under 50 with your exact symptom list is a real, fixable thing that "flawless metabolic panels" routinely miss — the controlled trial in this exact population saw fatigue drop ~48% in twelve weeks against ~29% on placebo. flawless panel and an un-ordered ferritin can absolutely coexist.
NAC really messes with my sleep, I recommend taking it every other day first thing in the morning if you're going to take it. NAD+ has trash bio-availability orally.... Either do it subcu or take NMN instead (pair with Pqq/Tmg to supercharge)
Something I think that is healthy to do is to occasionally stop taking everything for a week. Then add things back in a week at a time and keep asking if you feel better, worse, or the same. Adjust WHEN (morning, day, night) as well, don't assume on how you react.
I used to go to bed at 1 am and I've found that my best sleep is about 830-430. I wake up, run, walk dogs, lift, get breakfast and now it's 730.
Took a while to dial in sleep timing and routine.
Sleep sucks to lock down, there are so many things that influence it and the more you have in your plate, the harder to nail down.
Creatine can seriously fuck up your sleep BTW, that's the first thing I'd stop for a few days. If that is hurting your sleep, I've oddly found that 10-15g gets rid of that for some reason.
That's bizarre but worth trying! I've been afraid of creatine since I found 5g or less affects my sleep but then again it seems like nothing helps my sleep
The biggest things for me: sleeping alone in a separate room (married), wind down for 1.5 hours before bed, oral hygiene and flossing, hydrate through day and stop an hour before bed and get the last bathroom in before sleep, stop eating 3-4 hours before sleep, reducing supplements, NO NAPS, working out, cardio, more meals, more antioxidant rich foods, and a colder house. But I have multiple alarms and my countdown to sleep is on the minute adherence to help.
Sleeps been a very difficult time, I used to dread the night and another struggle but getting my watch to track it and being scientific has made a huge change.
Dude, that's what it seems like this subreddit is.
I just found it a few days ago (expecting some neat biohacking).
It's just people dumping 100 supplements down their throat and asking why they feel like shit.
Probably going to unsub from this place.
As mentioned, I was hoping for some neat biohacking kinda stuff (altering genes / messing around with CRISPR related projects, genetically modifying plants, etc) not people min/maxing supplements based on whatever tiktoker they came across this week.
I have a good lady friend who is very fit, in her 40s, and was not getting the definition she wanted from weightlifting. When she went on HRT for perimenopause her doc also suggested a little testosterone “pearl” that goes like on or under her skin. She has tremendously improved definition from lifting.
Your total T was 30? That’s low. What’s your free T? You may need trt. I am 40 and started recently. Sleep has improved, better mood/confidence, and can’t wait to see gains in the gym.
Hrt and glp-1. 45f, gained about 50lbs when I started hrt but I also stopped exercising from dibilitating fatigue due to insomnia from perimenopause. I don't know if I'll ever go back to my old self again, but I'm losing the weight and have eased back into pilates. I also quit caffeine in June and that's helped a lot.
Carbs literally make your body's best energy stores.
If you don't want the glucose spikes associated with carbs, you can cook and then cool your carbohydrates (like sweet potatoes) overnight. This changes their chemical structure and allows them to act like fiber in your small intestines.
You're not getting definition from lifting because your body is starved of basic nutrition and you're not sleeping.
Eat more fiber. Eat more plants. You'll sleep better and see far more gains in the gyms compared to just pounding protein.
Take away a lot of this stuff. Make sure you are RESTING un between trainings, other wise your body accumulates cortisol and you CAN'T get fit so over training is not productive.
Are you on HRT specifically trt and progesterone? Those helped both these issues for me (47f) who did CrossFit for over a decade and didn’t look like I lifted, slept like shit.
The TRT may be the key. My sleep has been significantly better with being on all three (estrogen, progesterone, and test) i also have dayvigo if needed but I haven't used it in 2 months.
I have also used epitalon dsip sleep react protocol which I feel helped
Maybe it's a lifestyle issue? What's your sleep routine/ hygiene look like? When do you stop consuming caffeine? Are you using your phone in bed?
As far as supplements for sleep, I'm partial to using valerian root and chamomile in a tea, the valerian smells like foot but damn does it work. Or you could add some good ol' melatonin or a more targeted form of magnesium such as mag glycinate to your supplement mini mart, but I'm guessing you've already looked into the efficacy of that given your interest in supplements.
Or just a teaspoon of peanut butter, which is high in tryptophan. Lots of good foods out there that can replace the need for certain supplements entirely.
For sleep, where is your magnesium glycinate, L theanine, and melatonin?
For definition, you just need to gain muscle and lose fat, regardless of how arduous a process it is
I love my L theonine. I take it w glycine and mag citrate due to Reta. Dose is 200 mg though, don’t use a whole damn spoonful like I did. The results will give your memory foam mattress ptsd.
ziziphus jujube dried chinese dates….I eat the whole fruit and set the seeds in the fridge, the seed extracts are much more potent than the fruit….which tastes and looks closer to dried apples than dates
both of these are the best sleep quality products that for me seem have less side effects than
passion flower mulungu corydalis chamomille
This is a problem, genuinely. Unless you're deficient in something, you don't need all of this. You might be causing more damage than good by making your digestive system work harder with all these supplements depending on how many you take and frequency. You can get most of this from a properly balanced diet as well
Thats alot of useless trash you can get from just eating food and it would be significantly cheaper. The QC on supplements are dubious and you really have no idea whats inside the pill.
The first thing you need to understand about improving your sleep is to sleep at 10 pm, wake at 6 am, and go outside with your coffee. Get that red light sunrise in your face, 10-30 minutes. This will help reset your circadian clock.
No caffeine after 3 pm, or earlier if you are sensitive.
Sleep mask, blackout curtains, no screens after 8 pm, as an example. Blue blocker glasses.
I also use L theanine, glycine, and magnesium tri at night. And peptides. Pinealon, Epitalon, DSIP, and growth hormone at night, fasted state.
Last night I slept 11 hours with only a few minutes of awake time. Holy Hanna. I have been dealing with insomnia since my late 40's, and I am 68.
Going on BHRT, as well, shortly. Are you in meno or peri and also on hormone therapy?
Do you think the peptides have made the biggest difference? I've yet to try any but I am desperate for a solution and meds and supplements have not been working at all not an attempt at proper sleep hygiene
They may be, but I also believe that the timing of when I go to bed matters more. Sleep starts in the morning. The higher your cortisol spikes in the morning, the more melatonin your body produces at night. Doesn't mean pick a fight with your boss, or partner...lol
The sunlight in my eyes really moved the needle for me. The peptides bent it further for me. I am trying to improve my deep sleep and REM. DS for deep sleep, Pinealon and Epi for REM. I get drowsy when it starts to get dark.
I see in women over 40 when we look at HTMA calcium starts leaving bone and moving into tissue. This can slow metabolism and cause sleep problems, hair problems, libido problems etc
If sleep is bad stop taking vitamin D for a couple of weeks and see if it helps
Also take fish oil with some fat before bed and if you want to take sublingual melatonin (i split 1mg tablet into 4) and take .25mg
Yes, basically if u have a 10iu bottle, u take 1/5 of the bottle each time. I currently use 36iu bottles treated with 3ml bac water so I pull 17 units on my syringe for my lab rat nightly but also have a few 10iu bottles I treat with 1ml bac water so it works out to 20units. Works wonders for sleep and recovery from workouts.
I would suggest anything ingested that has B vitamins, NAD+, and Vitamin D should be taken in the mornings as they tend to boost cellular energy, metabolic health regulation, energy production, cellular aging, circadian rhythms and mess with melatonin production.
Also if you are in a calorie deficit or on a super low carb diet you’ll likely have poor sleep as well
Stop the supplements, eat whole grains, eggs, lactose free dairy and grassfed butter, fruits and honey, high dose melatonin for sleep, thats the only supplement; worked great for me
For real. Id suggest to get to the basics. Vitamin D, magnesium glyceinate (take this in the evening), creatine, protein. Maybe a nice cup of lemon balm tea at bedtime.
Then focus on sleep hygiene. Solid bed and wake times. Black out curtains. No phone or TV in your room. Read on a warm light enabled kindle paperwhite. Don't drink alcohol before bed. no caffeine after noon. Etc...
Without going into it and doing it for all of your stack, you probably need to pay a few more dollars to make sure the things you are buying are decent quality.
A sure tell is when you look at a calcium and the form comes up carbonate, or magnesium and the form comes up oxide. Both cheap, poorly absorbed, compact molecules.
Dosage is also something to look out for. The research on resveratrol wants ~1g daily, in trans-resveratrol form. Your is a whopping 4 caps for just 100mg of trans.
I'm not convinced there is no benefit to smaller doses, but you can probably find something a little higher dose, at a cheaper price per mg.
I don't mean to rag on your stack too much, there is a lot of good stuff in there :-)
Can I recommend something that miraculously helped me with sleep? I got this thing called the schumann (it puts off frequency). I bought the more expensive one that you can alternate the frequencies but I have found that 7.83 is THE frequency for me. The lower priced model keeps it at 7.83. I was very skeptical but I swear it works. I take melatonin 30 min before bed (but have done that for years) and now I turn on my device. As long as I keep my mind from racing, I am out in 5 minutes. Been using it for a year now.
If you’ve had trouble sleeping since you were a teenager, you need to understand if there are physiological, psychological, or behavioral issues with your sleep. Have you ever done a sleep study? Or have you ever been assessed by neurologist or a psychologist that specializes in sleep for any possible sleep disorders?
Supplements don’t guarantee good sleep. They can be a piece of it. But if you have an underlying medical issue or psychological issue, supplements will only get you so far. And I strongly believe sleep is the most important thing you can do for your physical or mental health.
The National Sleep Foundation usually has sleep hygiene behavioral recommendations as a place to do some self-assessment for to informally check if there are any sleep-relevant behaviors you may need to tweak. I’d check out their website.
girl you take so much but you don't take astaxanthin. not thati m sure you need much more. additionally 500mg of glycine is actually not that much. people take 10g. 3g for a dose. not that i'm going to be able to offer much advice - i don't think you need another carotenoid necessarily.
Oh and don’t forget for an extra kick, a bag of twining nightly calm tea
It’s has a mint flavor so I add it to the red rooibos tea
It has lemongrass which acts on gaba too it’s almost like a slightly stronger apigenin
All together these have changed my life
ONE MORE THING
just remembered and it sounds dumb but
Apple cider vinegar with the mother in it (brags brand)
Theo a tabelspoon in water a couple hours before bed
It indirectly helps sleep because it inhibits blood sugar spikes during sleep, which sometimes wake people up
The Apple cider vinegar is something I accidentally discovered helping my sleep even more by knocking down my wake ups from four times a night to waking up only once per night
Huge help
Good luck try it and if it don’t work please yell at me
this post screams mental illness. go to a doctor and see what they tell you about your stack, give them the same excuse you’re making here. that you cycle them week to week 🤣
Sounds like you’re trying to address symptoms of low t without actually taking testosterone. I’d drop most of these and get on testosterone. Give it at least 6 months and you’ll probably feel like a new person.
If you have constant trouble with sleep I suggest you temporarily stop taking caffeine and creatine to see how it goes. Magnesium Glycinate is the form that helps with relaxation and sleep
I have chronic insomnia, sleep phase disorder and sleep apnia (very mild SA). Perimenopause made my insomnia NUCLEAR bad. As in without meds I can only sleep 3- 4 hrs at the most- which is not enough for me or any human.
So, sorry to say but the only thing that works for me is 50 mgs of Trazadone + 5 mgs of Ambien.
I feel this. In college I could party and not get enough sleep and was loving life. Now though...had to go sober and my sleep issues can easily make or break my day.
Idk what is unclear.
Your diet should cover most of this. Yours lacks micronutrients i saw what you said you eat normally. And the dirt not being as good as before doesn’t mean you shove pills down your throat.
Oral NAD is broken down in gut/1st pass and has a very low bioavailability. You take Niacin or NR to raise levels.
You have a diet that gets zinc, and 2 supplements have zinc in them.
Your resveratrol isn’t the right form. Its not a great supplement regardless.
Based on your other comments and attitude, you seem to want advice but also know everything, and come off very unintelligent.
Learn to eat right means eating to cover all micronutrients. Your eat more butter than vegetables. You have no broad fruit range to hit different vitamins and antioxidants. Low in potassium. Very low. Low carb cooks your thyroid. Instead of worrying about soil quality, and probably anti carb beliefs, learn to eat.
Legit skip all of this shit, eat a balanced diet, and form a better sleep schedule.
If you're struggling to fall asleep, look into self hypnosis for sleep.
You'll save a lot of money and actually be able to rule out things affecting you.
If you're concerned about deficiencies, get labs done and go from there.
Edit: If you consider your insomnia to be more serious, might be worth getting professional help instead of relying on OTC stuff.
Are the Vitamin A, Lutein, Schizandra, and multivitamin necessary when you’re already taking all the other stuff?
I think Magnesium Glycinate alone would be good (sleep improvement is one of its main touted benefits) so you can avoid doubling up on zinc in order to take it with that calcium + zinc + magnesium that you have
Idk. Not according to Dr Peter Attia or David Sinclair both have research/books on the subject. It for sure raises NAD+ levels. The not for sure part is if that actually increases healthspan/ lifespan.
Attia did a podcast on these and basically said they're likely worthless. Especially NAD+. He did say that NAC might do something but it's lacking in data.
Attia kinda goes overboard on stuff. Like he was taking metformin, rapamycin, etc... for periods. He did a keto diet for a long time. I wouldn't say "copy peter attia" to most randos online.
Heavy metal infused supplements (bad brands), along with synthetic vitamins. Have you had a full blood panel to tell you if these types of pills are even necessary? I see d3/k2 - do you ever get morning and afternoon sunlight? All of these but no vitamin B12 or liver?
If your blood work is flawless, then why for the extra unnatural stress by taking all of these supplements? And I am very curious, what’s preventing you from taking vit B?
I’m going to say this down vote me but science doesn’t lie you’re taking a lot of supplements that I think is counter productive towards your goals … have you got testing panels done?
Gently—and I say this to everyone who posts these mega stacks—you need therapy, not more supplements. This isn’t healthy. Your mindset isn’t healthy. Your obsession isn’t healthy. And your ideas on getting adequate nutrients from real food aren’t healthy either. If that were true, we’d all be dead.
Your sleep will fix itself when you stop filling it with poison and address your mental health.
You might not be able to get shredded, but you’ll be far happier and healthier if you do that. And that’s what matters most.
You’re completely incoherent, wow. Maybe get your lead levels checked, as a lot of these supplements are probably tainted, and that can cause your IQ to drop (among other things).
I’m just being honest. You asked for advice, so you shouldn’t be surprised by that. Sorry for not sugarcoating it, but you genuinely need help. That’s not an insult, that’s just the truth.
Saying that you’re incoherent was a little harsh, but I honestly can’t understand half of what you say. You’re writing in broken sentences and run-ons with no punctuation half the time.
You truly do need to consult with a doctor on all of these supplements. You’re treating your body like a science experiment, and it’s clearly not helping.
Is the bad sleep a new thing? It might be time for HRT, since that’s a perimenopause symptom. Head over to r/menopause for more info.
But also, what kind of definition do you think you “should have”? The extreme leanness bodybuilders have isn’t healthy for anyone to maintain for long.
It might not be a hormonal issue then. You’ve tried all the sleep hygiene stuff, avoiding caffeine, avoiding screens before bed?
Your height and weight don’t tell me how lean you are. You mentioned lifting, so I assume you’re muscular. Are you trying to get that extreme bodybuilder look of just skin, veins, and muscles, or do you have a reasonable amount of fat? The extremely lean look isn’t healthy. Do you still get periods? Getting so lean your periods stop can lead to all sorts of health problems.
Creatine destroys my sleep! Why are you taking glycine? That can cause issues for some people. How much zinc are taking daily, more than one of your supplements contains zinc. Too much zinc can be a big problem. How much total boron are you taking (mg)?
I don’t sleep well but some nights are awful. Saw something recently about creatine and realized it might have been that. Sleep has definitely been better since I quit it. So sad because I do think creatine is good for me. Will give it another go later to make sure.
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