Conversation With A Rare Dinitrophenol Accident Survivor (DNP For Weight Loss)

hello dr bernard here this is an interview with christopher east who is maybe one of two or three people who are documented to have survived an accident with 2-4 dinitrophenol a weight loss chemical his case was published in literature and i also made a video about it with parts of this interview in there christopher is also a youtuber as well and he has a channel where he also talks about his case link in the description below well i guess we can just start chris thanks so much for coming into the interview can you tell me a little bit more about yourself i saw your video about dnp and i wanted to know a little bit more about you uh so yeah my name is christopher east i run a relatively new youtube channel i started creating content because i've gone through a lot of unique and hard situations in my life and i think there's lessons to be learned or like things to take away from that so i started just taking these experiences that have been rather difficult for me ranging from overdose to other things especially with my overdose people talking about their experiences of it being safe or them being fine but the difficult thing with an overdose especially something like dmp is that those that pass away once you get into that territory of danger there's no real coming back and so i have a really unique perspective of someone who's actually managed to uh survive an overdose and i thought that'd be an interesting experience to share so can you tell me a little bit more about how you got into lifting in general because you know i think we all have those stories of you know like back when we were in school with our friends in the weight room and trying to see like how much each other can lift right um how how did you first get into the weight room and fitness most of middle school i i was pretty much bullied relentlessly for a variety of things i i was kind of on the shorter side still to say kind of short i was overweight very nerdy didn't have a lot of friends and so i was bullied for a lot of things all throughout middle school a little bit in elementary school and then that transition period between middle school and high school i took a summer school and that's where you could just basically take some of these extracurricular classes but i took a weight lifting class for football now in 8th grade i was in football but i was absolutely terrible i i was afraid to hit anyone i wasn't particularly strong wasn't particularly fast and so i went into the weight room and i absolutely fell in love with lifting weights and at the time it was just something fun to do it was nice to be around a bunch of people that i saw as popular or likeable and it was interesting because i really fell into loving weights but what really solidified it for me going back into high school as a completely different person i came into ninth grade and no one recognized me i looked radically different i was all of a sudden starting in the like freshman football team and so i went from this person that had no friends very unlikable very out of shape and i was starting to really grow into my body through weightlifting and that sense of relief of going into high school on a radically different page of where i was in middle school and for me weightlifting saved me from bullying it saved me from being an outcast i was by no means ever particularly popular but i went from being kind of on the bottom rung of you know like school hierarchy to all of a sudden being at least in the middle of the pack yeah you know i had a similar situation when i was in high school because i was always kind of a little bigger kid and i think i was like almost 200 pounds when i was in sixth grade and so when i was a junior year summer to junior year of high school had a group of friends come up to me and they said hey bernard why don't you come to the gym with us and i think they were trying to make fun of me because they they were just like oh haha you know bernard's the fat kid let's see how much he can lift i bet you can't lift as much as us and so i remember the first time i bench pressed we put the 135s on the one plates and i was able to do it for reps and they couldn't they were like what how do you do that and then looking back on it now you know i'm still friends with those guys they're like the one group of friends that i've kept in touch with and they're you know the one guy has such long arms like it was no wonder why he couldn't bench 135 right but he could deadlift crazy amounts right so it was always a little bit of a perspective there and so now when you got into the gym what was your perspective on lifting up until you know the like throughout high school and into the end of high school well lifting was this this double-sided thing where it was honestly just like a source of being able to like make friends and like you talked about becoming ultra competitive about pushing your body because like growing up i was always you know like in challenge classes and i always valued myself for my mind but having weightlifting all of a sudden gave me this new avenue to see value in myself through you know pushing my body getting very strong and it was crazy because this ultra competitiveness and then also wanting to do well in football you know i got into these crazy places where like i think my max my max squat in high school was like something like 500 pounds my max bench was 315. and so it's crazy because 16 year old me is way stronger than i've ever been since so weightlifting was really this way to all of a sudden open all these doors for me uh that i never really thought was possible and i really fell in love with weightlifting through up until junior year of high school when a lot of things in my life changed so you you were the guy who could squat the five plates and like you know i because i remember i was going to play football i got kicked out after the two a days summer to senior year yeah and it was funny because i was a senior and i got i remember getting tackled by people on the jv team and just like getting knocked out and i'm just like what am i doing right and i thought i was you know like i could bench 185 you know there were those guys who could squat like five or six plates and like everyone in the gym would just like gather around them right it was just awesome right you had mentioned that there was an event that happened at high school and then also into college in the very tail end of my junior year in high school a month before my 17th birthday my father tragically passed away from a sudden heart attack it was completely unexpected you know one morning he's fine i go to school the next thing i know i'm getting pulled out of school and my father's gone and um i'll probably get into it later but i really blamed myself for the death of my father um but his sudden passing threw me into this this realm of you know kind of pain and loss that i didn't really understand i also have six siblings so it was such a massive loss for not only me but in my entire family and the second that happened everything else didn't really matter to me anymore like the way my body looked didn't matter all of a sudden chasing these things like uh in high school we had these different clubs for you would combine your uh your squat your deadlift and your bench and you would chase these these massive clubs of the 1000 pound club and things that i used to really care about like you know all these things just fell away and not only did they fall away not only did i no longer care about football and weightlifting and being competitive because all those things seemed so abstract now and and couldn't even begin to replace the loss of my father and so the next thing that happened is i started binge eating to try to fill that void i really turned to food to cope and within the first year so finishing out high school i had gained roughly between 60 and 80 pounds and because i wasn't taking football as seriously or weightlifting i just naturally fell into this place where i was gaining all this weight it was difficult because you know moving from middle school i had this conception of myself as unfit and then i really earned this identity of being someone who's in shape and athletic and everyone saw me in high school as this really buff kid and so it was hard to see that weight gain i didn't really notice i was gaining weight i didn't really notice that i wasn't fitting into my clothes and anytime i did notice i didn't particularly care and so by the time i started my freshman year of uh college i had gained over a hundred pounds i think at my heaviest i was about 254 260 and you know i was about 170 in high school you know i'm in college and and it's difficult because there's all these things happening um something i touch upon in my video where i talk about the experience in high school everyone understood me as like the really buff kid that got you know overweight because of the death of his father but the second i moved across the country and went to school in florida i'm from indiana and my freshman year everyone just saw me as one of the fat guys in fact there was this comment that was made to me it was this aha moment and how much weight i gained um one of the other people who were overweight on my like dorm room floor he kind of made this remark to me he was like oh chris you're one of the fat guys and it wasn't the fact in fact he called me fat that bothered me it was that sudden realization that these people don't know me as anyone other than overweight and they also don't know what caused that weight gain they don't understand that i lost my dad they because in my school because i had so many siblings like nearly every grade even down to middle school had heard about the passing my father and then but in college like no one knew and so they only saw me in this rather limited context of being overweight and so that was really difficult but at the same time i had this you know high school girlfriend i moved across the country it was really hard on both of us and at that point we had been dating for like a year and a half two years and she starts to cheat on me and cheating in any context is difficult but you know she cheated on me several times and the thing that really kind of started to develop a body dysmorphic mindset is that not only you know were these people very lean but they're also very tall and lanky and these kind of wiry frames and even when i was in high school like i'm five eight i'm never gonna be six foot um i'm always gonna be a stocky guy i'm always gonna have some layer of muscle and so it's really hard because not only had i gained all this weight and it made me feel like it was my fault but these these other guys that she was kind of cheating on me with looks so drastically different and you know like it's hard because i had just lost the death of my father and this was a girlfriend that knew my dad and so i really clung on to that relationship and it was easy to make it feel like oh it's my fault because i'd also gained all this weight i looked radically different than when her and i met and so for me it really became this thing of like okay this is my fault and to earn my to like keep my significant other i have to lose that weight when i was in college two i gained about 60 pounds in like a semester right there was the winter break of my freshman year i went from 190 to 225 right and that was i remember my dad was the the only time in my life my dad has ever cooked for me was during that winter break and you know i would be drinking a gallon milk i would have the family-sized stouffer's lasagna for dinner before going to because i worked at like a retail as a college kid right he would cook me um eggs inside of like creamed corn as a soup with like chicken soup inside and he was like yeah you gotta eat up you know you got to get big and so like i i did i did get big and then that second semester of my junior year like i went from probably 220 to like 250 and everybody that i knew because usually people don't transfer out halfway through the year so people who knew me at the beginning of the year then saw this like you know 60 70 80 pound heavier bernard like the reaction to it was always different so i guess my question to you is like how much of an impact did like outside people have on your realization of oh you know these people don't know my backstory and now it almost seems like it feels like they're passing judgment on me when they they're not really sure and they didn't know that previously things were different well i think in regards to how outside opinions affected me um like i said i was so sheltered from the opinions of others in high school because you know who's gonna make fun of the kid whose dad died um people aren't going to make that commentary but the second that kind of bubble or protection as a way like i said like from innocuous comments like the person on my floor that said you're one of us fat guys like he wasn't saying it to hurt me he wasn't saying it to be rude he was it was like a it was just like a companionship thing of like oh you're one of us um but i did face some other kind of comments i i remember the day i finally decided to lose weight it's funny i don't think i've ever told this story i was in my like kind of like you know college cafeteria where like the chick-fil-a and all this other stuff is up and like i said one of the difficult things is i wasn't really aware they had gained this weight i had still this previous conception of who i was and i had a general idea that i was like starting to become really overweight but like one of the side effects of that is like none of my clothes fit i wasn't buying clothes that fit properly and so i had this horrendous um muffin top and someone in my cafeteria like across the way pointed at it and made fun of my muffin top and i overheard it and just this random girl and which is just such a weird thing to say but it was that moment that snapped me into this this blinding clarity of like oh my god i'm 260 pounds like how did i get here like what happened that was really the moment that shattered any kind of idea of me ever being lean like that that part of me or that identity of me really kind of died in that moment and so it was difficult because i became suddenly so self-aware and so self-conscious yeah and it's that self-conscious it like just kind of like bleeds into your mind and it doesn't stop and it's like you know everything that you do you almost feel like well this is what this person would say or like what are these people thinking they're like you know you might walk by somebody i i we can't walk by people now because of quarantine but it's like you know you walk by somebody and then you look at the side of your eye like did they just look at me funny like you know did they pass judgment or something right and so like i remember that happening too on my end too because it was like the backlash i got from my family they didn't see me for the whole semester and then they come pick me up in may and they're like you're like 30 pounds heavier and then they they would actually rub it in i tried to tell them like like i got bigger because i realized that at six feet tall you know if you wanted to compete with bigger weights like you would need to just have like a bigger frame in general yeah and you know if my like natural natural body weight when i was like i don't know 15 16 like you know i ended up going down to around 165 it's a lot of work to get up like another 110 pounds from there yeah stouffer's lasagna gallon milk every day and then they they just they weren't gonna have it and it was like every time i would go home it just wouldn't stop you had mentioned right like once you had that clarity of self-awareness like things all of a sudden changed so how did it how did you get right back into fitness how did you get back into that that mindset the way i got back into fitness is to kind of touch on your previous point to launch into this new question uh something i talk about is that there's this interplay between being our souls or our our minds and body and you know our bodies are these kind of unthinking things and our beings are what kind of goes through the suffering and the anguish and it's through that relationship our bodies become often the embodiments of our pain so for me like the death of my father became embodied in my body like that was a direct trauma response all this binge eating and overeating and trying to cope with death with food and it's difficult because my body changed and i understood that relationship and i understood what the extra weight was but there's nothing about a body that conveys that naturally to someone right like you didn't you couldn't look at me in college like my peers you wouldn't just look at me and see someone overweight because they lost their father you think these other things and because of our society we have a propensity to make statements like that person's lazy that person doesn't have hard work and it was kind of maddening because like not only had i been so fit and so crazy at 16 but now i was seen as this person is overweight and every single pound of body weight i had gained was intimately tied to my dad and so for me the the way i got back into fitness not only because of the you know my ex cheating on me but i held this belief that to get over the death of my father was a minifold kind of thing i needed to tackle but one of the most important ways to do it was to lose every single pound of body fat i had gained because of his death and so it became this fixation that like the solution to my grief was to go to through this like sort of hero's journey of like losing weight and kind of all these other things and as i talked about earlier i really blame myself for the death of my father because on the day he died i i knew something was wrong he was showing all the classic signs of a heart attack i have this kind of you know painful story of we have this tradition of a handshake and that that morning he could barely grab my hand and that moment um despite every part of me screaming something is wrong i chose not to say anything i chose not to say anything because my dad and i were fighting and i'm 16 and i'm rebellious and i decided to be petty and the next time i see my dad he's on a hospital table gone and that was such a powerful and overwhelming feeling of blame of replaying that moment again and again in my head like what if i'd said this what if i'd done this maybe i could have saved my dad and so when it comes to fitness it was this two-sided thing of you know trying to lose weight as this way of processing his death and also losing weight to atone for the mistakes in the way i i blamed my dad but because i had this feeling of needing to redeem as or atone it was a lot of punishment i needed to punish myself to achieve those things like going into fitness you had mentioned that there was a little bit of a plateau that you had reached and so what was the initial regimen like because you did you go like directly into the mindset of like now okay starting tomorrow 100 the only thing i'm focused on now is is getting as little body fat as possible was it like that or was it more like uh you know as the weeks went on it just started to really tighten into something that became that um i think the process was just full bore immediately um one of the pros and cons of doing four years of weightlifting in high school i also one of the reasons i was so strong in high school is because i had such an amazing athletic coach we call russell russell's a legend in our high school we we love him to death um but that man had such a meticulous program and because of that i really learned how to put on muscle quickly i learned how to develop my own programs and so all that skill i jumped immediately back into the gym knowing what to do um but in in combination with that i started i i went to school in florida so it's pretty warm year round i i started taking up uh cycling because i tried to run on the treadmill but at 260 pounds like i wasn't burning enough calories because my body my body couldn't handle that weight and so i decided to start cycling and road biking uh this whole time i i developed binge eating disorder as a coping strategy when my dad passed and all through my fitness even kind of to this day i struggled with binge eating and so it was this difficult interplay of absolutely mercilessly um destroying myself with four or five hour workouts where i would go on like a two hour bike ride i'd come back to the college gym and work out but the whole time i was struggling with the eating aspect of it so at 260 pounds your body's so overweight that it's at first it's really easy because like kind of no matter what you do as long as you're putting some effort to it you will start to lose weight but because i was never really addressing the side effects of you know my poor diet and my overeating uh it became more and more hard even though i was doing these insane amounts of lifting and the other kind of negative side effect is that it required me to make other sacrifices not only was it extremely painful where my knees would hurt my body would ache all the time because i was not giving myself rest but it got to the point where i was starting to sabotage my academics it's my freshman year college i'm going to school for aerospace engineering i'm in flight school i start skipping classes i start putting all my attention into working out and that was the it was never a gradual thing it was an immediate jump into that and that's when i started kind of looking for ways to supplement that weight loss through supplements got it and so what were the supplements to to begin with because like i know for me when i was in the power lifting gyms in illinois back around like 2006 2007 right they always recommended you know just creatine right now and then as as they get in like for the fat loss stuff uh it depended on who you talk to right whether or not they would go uh with just green tea extract or if they would go a little bit you know further so so where did it start all through high school my brother who's also my oldest youngest brother if that makes sense also got really into weightlifting he's a year younger than me um we both got really strong at the same time and so it's funny because over those years we must have bought every single kind of scam gnc product possible from the crazy creatines to the test boosters that aren't even effective and all this other stuff and i had all this experience of getting burned by normal supplements right or just any kind of like out there supplements so once again when i went back into it you know i took like maybe beta alien for endurance creatine which is a normal protein uh the only thing i really took for weight loss is i took like can't really remember the not the name it was one of those like cut something and in the beginning that was effective one of the downsides is i already struggled with a lot of anxiety and anytime i took that you know supplement to help lose weight i would have some pretty intense er panic attacks anxiety attacks and so it's this interplay of like that's when the first kind of desperation where even though it was having some awful side effects on me personally i was starting to be willing to take you know some anything that would help lose weight you know that's interesting because for me i remember initially like i was a little bit hesitant with even just like creatine and protein powder and then like you know you kind of hit the plateau and you're like all right you know what why why don't i try a scoop of this protein powder right and then yeah then why don't i try a scoop of this you know creatine or whatever and then like it then all of a sudden it becomes like stacked up and you're taking like five different things right like creatine and the citrulline malate was was a thing back then and beta alanine as you had mentioned and then i just remember like you know even just for like day trips you know you have to bring like all these like plastic jugs with you in your car and then like you just have friends that are like looking at you like what are you doing man and i'm just like no man i got to take it yeah in high school and sophomore year i would come with these lunch bags with you know all these different supplements these like little pill things from like oppressed creatine to fish oil all this crazy stuff as a sophomore in high school and twice i had teachers pull me aside and be like what are in these lunch bags and it's funny because you know one of the difficult things as this story progresses is the toll this has taken on my mom in particular um but the number of times my mom has gone to some you know random medical site uh because she saw we were taking a new supplement um i remember one time she printed out a 24-page document on how creatine is bad for your kidneys and she was always trying to rally so firmly against us but unfortunately um just with my family structure especially my brother and i i think to some way that pushed us harder into supplements as you know kind of a rebellious thing there was some pretty crazy times where i was just taking like eight different things at once it was ridiculous and just to like reiterate for people watching like i mean those aren't steroids right because when i did my fat loss video there were so many people saying like oh yeah you're taking steroids or whatever like none of those are hormones like they're like creatine is something that your body actually makes and by putting additional more you're you're kind of giving it more atp so to say right more energy and it does help i always felt like it really did more by like pushing water through into your muscles and like that way then you get like crazy pumps when you're first taking it like you know when you're in that loading phase yeah i think people used to take like what 20 grams a day for like the first week or something and then like basically you'd take down like the the scoops and then you just like go to the bathroom like right away just like just pee because like kidneys are flushing it out as hard as they can right you mentioned t3 you had mentioned clenbuterol you had mentioned dnp so what was the transition from those gnc you know supplement store products into the the kind of other things that they can help wouldn't recommend them but you know it's like so i started losing weight i set out on my like weight loss journey uh probably november of 2011 and so by years roughly like six months by the end of my first year in college i lost probably 30 to 40 pounds and i decided to transfer back to a state school i transferred to purdue um i live in lafayette so it's right there so i came back and i lost 30 to 40 pounds and everyone was commenting on it everyone was like making observations up until that point i had all done it through you know abusive amounts of working out and then takes taking like hydroxycut or something like that nothing extreme a lot of my weight loss was really the fact i was dedicating three to four hours every day just really pushing my body as hard as i could and so i came back and then i hit this plateau i hit this plateau at 2 20 and nothing i was doing was making a change i was biking around 40 miles a day but once again like a common theme that i'm going to reiterate is i never addressed my eating i never cleaned up my diet i still struggle with binge eating as i lost weight there there became these self-sabotaging mechanisms that would pop up where even though i was doing all this brutal stuff to my body i was i was starting to like kind of try to sabotage that with my diet as well so it's just this two-pronged attack of having kind of what borders on an eating disorder and then also being inherently self-sabotaging and it was in this plateau where no matter how much i was working out no matter what i was doing where i went to the internet to find something different i knew nothing they could buy a gnc was gonna help me out and so i went on to you know the shady forms and like even stuff like bodybuilding.com and all that and the first thing i ran across was the ephedrine t3 t4 uh stack and so i researched it and i at that time i had ran across clem butrul and t3 but computer on t3 that that was too much for me that was too crazy and so i started out with ephedrine in t3 and you know i sourced it from these questionably legal places and you know all these get arounds and i started taking that and once again i i see this increase where even though my diet's bad and all these other things are bad like i can still maintain weight loss with all these variables that i'm not willing to change i'm not willing to work out less or more i couldn't work out more even if i wanted to i'm not willing to change my diet but you know i was noticing it pushed me past that plateau and i started losing weight again interesting what was it like being on t3 and ephedrine it's interesting because the first couple times you take ephedrine it's a pretty nasty experience because it's kind of like a stimulant that you don't really have any exposure to in any other context it's not like caffeine it's not like nicotine so the first time you take ephedrine it's pretty brutal um but in comparison to what i was doing with to my body and you know a completely natural context of working out i was able to kind of quickly push through it and i wasn't having the same anxiety attacks it was still cardiovascularly very uncomfortable and a lot of these other weird side effects but you know ephedrine at least in my experience is like something the body kind of quickly adapts to and that was one of the big issues is because at first ephedrine is effective but for me personally my body adapted to it so quickly that um and also ephedrine is a regulated substance so you can legally buy it but you're only allowed to buy so much of it in a month and that's tracked federally and so i came up this wall where like i was only allowed so much ephedrine a month and i was getting quitting pretty quickly used to it and so that's when i started kind of looking for other alternatives to ephedrine and t3 as far as being on t3 i can't really say any noticeable like uh psychological differences i couldn't really pick up on anything like that got it and so what was the next step where did you look and you know because like for me i i know that frustration it's like you know i remember like even for like lifting right you would get stuck at like you know benching what 275 or whatever and it's like no matter how hard you try like you know 285 just doesn't happen like every time you try it you know just it like the attempts go worse and worse and like i remember losing weight too in 2012 i had given a go at it and it just kind of like stopped at like 30 pounds lost and it's like you know six weeks later and you're at the same weight and you're just like what's going on right i've been doing more i've been trying to eat less and it's not going anywhere so so where did you turn to next once again i hit a pretty brutal plateau at 210 i couldn't push past 210 no matter what i did the only times i would ever dip below 210 i was just pure water weight and so i went back to the same forms and all of a sudden because i was willing to take ephedrine in t3 i was willing to take that gamble all of a sudden clenbutrol in t3 you know i it was it seemed like a mild step up i'm not talking about it it went from jumping into something that like is legal but questionable for health and then jumping into something where the legality and the dangerousness both drop down or i guess you know the way you want to look at it increases in risk increases in you know the question of the uh how ethical is this and because i had already made that commitment to do ephedrine jumping up to clint clembutrol was it was almost a no-brainer and everyone and it's tough because the bodybuilding community sometimes they they have this way of challenging each other and in some contexts that is an amazing thing like challenging you to push for a certain aesthetic or push for a certain goal but you know when people were advocating for clenbutrol you know it was kind of this idea of like it's not really that dangerous it's not really that bad you know it's great for weight loss like just suck it up kind of thing and so once again i kind of made that commitment to jump on the train wagon uh for uh clem butrul and t3 so what was clean but all like oh so clenbutrol is one of the most agonizing experiences i've ever put on and it's difficult because you know you go to these same forms where people are giving you these schedules or these kind of like these these amounts to take and you you know ramping up and ramping down and i remember the one i kind of settled on was seen as like conservative and the final dose i can't remember if it was milligrams or micrograms of clenbuterol but was around a hundred you know let's say micrograms of clembutrol but at least in my personal experience anytime you start pushing past 40 to 60 you're just bed bound because the whole time you're having heart palpitations you're having insane amounts of anxiety it's nearly impossible to have a conversation with anyone once again i was in school and it became this this thing that was difficult because and also clenbutrol lasts forever um ephedrine has a nice quick half-life uh you take it um you feel most of its side effects i would say for me personally three to four hours clem butrul is a different monster you're strapping into an experience where you feel like you're about to have a heart attack uh for six seven eight hours of just misery i i hardly ever hear people saying that they're looking forward to taking clan yeah something we talked about in a pre-interview that maybe you could touch on a little bit more is the mechanism by which clem vuetrol works is it affects a lot of other muscle systems that ephedrine doesn't really in my experience didn't really kind of interact with and so one of the different most difficult parts of clembutrol is because it is such a powerful central nervous system stimulant was just the way it affected heart breathing just entire body stimulant yeah and it's um what i think they said that farmers use it in livestock sometimes to increase like muscle mass and you know the beta-3 agonist so beta is an adrenergic receptor so adrenaline associated and so typically like epinephrine adrenaline you know they'll touch the beta receptors and also the alpha receptors it's non-selective but when we go to beta 3 you're starting to select and so you can hit the smooth muscle you can hit the skeletal muscle and so you know that kind of stimulation can then affect the nervous system which then moves somebody towards like a fight-or-flight mode and just makes the experience all that more difficult and so dmp how did you come across dmp so um clem but trouble and t3 wasn't that effective in general i don't really advocate people have asked me about that sack before i think you're looking at marginal increases in weight loss um you're taking it's it's expensive you know it's really dangerous the benefit it gives you is so easily compensated in diet changes or exercise changes overall even though i was taking a lot of these chemicals they weren't really helping me push past that magic 200 to get under that 200 and move towards you know the weight i was before so once again i turned back to these bodybuilding forums and at that point i had heard of dmp but it wasn't really talked about and i just saw it mentioned once in this random you know bodybuilder form because on bodybuilding.com you know like they stay away from pretty stigmatized chemicals for the most part but someone had mentioned it and i started looking up dmp and it's insane because you know the stories you hear immediately are both extremes you hear about people dying but you hear about people losing 10 15 pounds in the course of like a week or two and then you have all these anecdotal stories of people saying they took dmp and as with anything on the internet it's pretty challenging because like there's no way to verify who is or isn't taking dmp and then so i i turned to youtube i i looked at videos by um you know i don't want to really name anyone by names but i saw these people that would be like hey listen like this could kill you this this may be dangerous but i've taken it i was able to navigate it plenty of people have been able to navigate it like use at your own risk and looking at everything in that place of desperation seeing three or four different youtubers at the time all these forum posts of people being like yeah you know dmp is tough to be on but like i did it it's fine you'll be fine sort of thing i i decided to make the commitment and find a source for it and what was the experience of being on dmp like oh man uh the way i describe this is it there's no other way to describe it than feeling like you're in hell with dmp there's kind of three main there's four principles or pillars that make dmp use uncomfortable the first one is heat your body is kicking off all this excess heat i would commonly be in my room during the winter with the thermostat set to 60 with a giant fox band blowing over me and even in that state i would sweat through my clothes and sweat through my sheets at the time i worked at a texas roadhouse and sometimes when i was on cycle we had this industrial sized freezer and i would go stand in the industrial sized freezer it would take five to ten minutes before i felt any measure of cold so that that's just the sheer amount of heat your body's putting off and with that heat comes sweating uh so not only is all this you know metabolic activity producing a lot of water but you're also really hot and so one of the most uncomfortable experiences both societally and personally is you're just constantly sweating like you're in a sauna and you can be in like i said i was in a 60 degree room with a box fan i would sweat through my sheets i would sweat through everything and so it became really challenging is because once again i was in a lot of social situations i was in college i would sweat through my clothes in class i would sweat through everything and i'm not talking like pit stains i'm talking sweat through the bottom of my my shorts the back of my shirt uh sweat through everything and or sweat beads running down my face in class i remember one time we had a particularly cold winter uh while i was at purdue and so you know dmp i guess is mildly nice when it's like negative three out and you're trying to get to class but the second i would step into these classrooms with the heat cranked up i i was profu like hair damp and it was hard because there's a lot of social stigma around that because like you look like you're on drugs because you are on a drug and you're having this experience that no one else is happening and it becomes pretty societally weird at first in in the video that you know i wrote the script and i wanted to check the dnp part for like scientific accuracy so i actually asked one of my peers who actually knew me from college to check it and when they were reading through it they said to me weren't you like ultra sweaty during class like half the time in college and i was like yeah but i swear i wasn't taking this stuff and like they were just kind of like giving me crap for it just like laughing and saying like because because i remember when when i did the power lifting stuff like at the peak right like there was there was one winter where it was like you know chicago midwest winter right it was cold it was you know it wasn't even snow anymore just because it was that cold and you were just drenched in sweat right and even though it's like it's cold outside like you can actually see the heat like radiating like for me i didn't even need to wear a jacket i'm just like walking around in a hoodie and people are like looking at me strange but you know it so that that sweating is such a stigma because it's like then then you're like drenched and there's like a ring around your collar of just like wet and people are like looking at you like what's wrong with you man right and then the same with sweating i um once again i never let up on the abusive amount of working out which really elevated dmp use um working out on dmp is is really hard because you're exhausting all your carbohydrates you're exhausting all your atp so to work out on eight on dmp is just about sheer willpower and at that point it was sheer self-hate and self-loathing was the only thing that kind of pushed me forward with working out but when i would work out especially in a gym like leaving literal puddles of sweat at like the deadlift station all my clothes completely dressed through like i jumped in a pool and then the next kind of byproduct of any kind of combustion reaction or all this metabolic activity is co2 um so the other kind of difficult thing is i could be completely laying in bed and i would be panting literally panting my body trying to get rid of this co2 these really shallow and quick like deep pants so you're in these social interactions i had my girlfriend at the time she didn't really quite know what i was on she knew it was on something but every time i was around new friends they'd be like why are you breathing so hard why why why are you breathing like that like literally like i just walked up a set of stairs even though i'd been sitting completely still for hours so how long did you take dmp4 well i see it's kind of tough because over this i am from when i first discovered it and first bought it i i bought it in two different rounds the first time i bought a really small amount and kind of went through that uh when i first started taking dmp i kind of followed the guidelines right um don't take it any longer than a week or two weeks stay kind of relatively conservative doses and i did that but what was hard was you know the results were so tempting right and it was just such an addictive feeling to to raise my my metabolism in this way that was not possible in any other context and uh you know i kind of developed this strange form of bulimia where one of the unfortunate side effects is i would binge eat and i started taking dmp not necessarily to lose weight but to counteract the calories i was eating and one of the most difficult feelings of dmp is you have the heat you have the sweet sweating you have the breathing but the hunger you have this insatiable and indescribable craving for simple sugars for carbs for anything and what's challenging is the second you give your body something that's really easily broken down like a simple sugar it kind of puts that dmp machine into motion and so i remember one time i went with my friend and i had ate some pasta at oh charlie's and the second you ingest any kind of carbs you start profusely sweating and profusely generating heat and so it's difficult because to kind of manage the the side effects you have to avoid certain foods but those are the precisely the foods you're craving precisely the foods you have a desperation for and it was tough because i would have these little seven thousand eight thousand nine thousand calorie meals and no matter how much i ate i was always hungry because by the way mechanism of dnp works it's constantly telling your body that we don't we don't have energy we we need more we need more and so one of the other difficult things um unfortunately during my time i had some close friends in the bodybuilding community weight loss community and i gave dmp to my friends and i everyone else i gave it to actually gained weight on dmp um because yes you're increasing your metabolic activity but the the increase in hunger if you don't have that dedication it's ironic because the only people that could push through that hunger are precisely the people that don't need dmp because they're already so dedicated and really the only reason i was able to lose weight despite you know binge eating all this other stuff was the sheer mercilessness i worked out um so it's tough because a lot of people have reached out to me and been like you know where can i find dmp is dmp effective and it's hard for me to attribute yes i took dmp and yes it helped but like it's i've known people who have gained weight on dmp it's just crazy it's it's pretty much utter agony it's i've put my body through a lot of miserable experiences um but there's nothing that really kind of relates to that experience and so back to your earlier question of how long i took it um i took it pretty consistently on and off for these week cycles um for roughly like three to four months and then i ran out and i kind of took a break from it for a little while because it was kind of hard to find more sourcing actual dmp is a really difficult process um not something i'm ever willing to talk about but so it took me a while before i could get back but the thing that's difficult is i would also one of the other reasons i advocate against dmp use for weight loss is i think an apt metaphor is taking testosterone to gain muscle testosterone and dmp are tools and you know in the right context sure they can do amazing things for your body um they're supplementing and raising your body to the superhuman level of you know whether it's protein synthesis whether it's metabolic activity but the downside as many people know with testosterone is the second you remove that superhuman aspect all your gains start to fade away and it's the same with you know fat fat loss is yes you will lose weight but um one of the craziest thing i noticed is that my body's eagerness to replace that fat i lost almost in this in probably twice the amount of time it took to lose it so like say i lost x amount of weight in a week on dmp i would gain that weight back in two weeks because once again one of the things i was refusing to do was address my diet and so in the same way people get into these tricky positions where they become behaviorally addicted or dependent on steroid use i became very behaviorally um and dependent on dnp use to even not only lose weight to but maintain the weight loss i had lost the day of september 3rd 2015. what do you remember happening it's it's challenging because um so there's a couple things happening around that time period i had recently started up a cycle again and at that point i was pretty consistently on and off dmp for about eight to six months i was really struggling with body dysmorphia at the time and i went through this phase where all of a sudden i felt really fat even though i was extremely lean at the time even though i was in one of the best shapes i'd ever been i got into mind that like i i need i needed to keep pushing i needed to keep losing weight so i uploaded cycled up into that point i had been very careful about weighing out my dmp making sure when i took it but i had been doing it so long i was getting to the point where i could you know fairly reasonably eyeball my dosage because i'd done it so frequently but i had recently up regulated the amount i was taking and so i think it was a combination of up regulating is also a very hot september and so i took a dose and i remember immediately feeling awful and so i decided to go to bed and somewhere in that time period i woke up and i think in confusion due to heat exhaustion or something was going on with this dmp i was kind of delirious and kind of out of my mind and not really knowing what was going on when i woke up it was still light out and because i'd slept through the night i'd gone to bed maybe like in the middle of the afternoon and so i i thought i was much further along in my dose than i was and i i re-upped kind of in that 12-hour window and for those who don't know um you know the kind of the window in which dmp is active is somewhere in the order of 24 to 36 hours and so when you take that dose too soon um you're you're moving that kind of effective dose that you're on up dramatically and one of the most important things i kind of want to highlight with dmp use at least in my personal experience is there's not a linear relationship to the misery of your side effects in the dose you're taking so like say you have you know some sort of experience at 50 milligrams it's not double that experience when you take 100 milligrams it's it's almost triple that so it's more of this kind of polynomial curve where like the more you're taking like the side effects ramp significantly that combination of overdosing having some still in my system it quickly pushed me radically into this dangerous zone got it and what do you remember happening after that or do you not remember much like what what were some of the details that were told to you of that day answer the details so a lot of this is going to be second hand um for instance there's a lot of things that make sense um they found my wallet two miles from my house um on the day i had overdosed i don't know where i went i don't remember any of that i don't know if i try to go on a run i don't know why i took my wallet with me um they found my id literally two miles from my house and it came back and the one memory i have i vaguely remember taking the second dose and being confused and the next solid memory i have before i wake up in the hospital is being completely naked in my shower um with it set to as cold as it can be and so i'm in the shower i'm kind of in pain i'm groaning i'm not doing well the door's wide open my brother-in-law kind of walks by and immediately knows notices something is wrong he's trying to talk to me and all i would get out is um get me coca-cola and a melt shape from steak and shake because at this point my body is ravaging every store of energy i have i'm already very lean i don't really have much fat to feed it my muscles and my body are completely depleted of any carbohydrates and i was so desperate for simple sugars i kept on being like uh i need coca-cola and a milkshake i'll be fine and he went out and got it but by the time he came back i had lost responsiveness and so he calls the paramedics by the time the paramedics get there the first time uh i'm response i have no memory of this um this is just all accounts from my brother-in-law i'm responsive enough to answer kind of you know the the status quo questions of who's president what year is it what day is it sort of thing and so i send them away i wouldn't go with them i was under the assumption that ownership of dmp is illegal uh i was also worried about some other things i was also very stubborn so to admit that i was in any kind of danger was difficult and also i didn't really want to in like incur that financial cost of an ambulance ride and so i sent them away but once again i lost consciousness and once again my brother-in-law finds me and he calls the paramedics a second time and luckily one of the details i didn't really cover in my video is that my brother-in-law who lived in the house with me my sister was living kind of separately but her best friend and roommate was like an army ranger medic and so they were literally on the phone with this medic and he was like whatever he says it doesn't matter you need to get him to the hospital and so the second time the paramedics came around um they picked me up and took me to hospital the way i make light of this is it sort of sucks because i finally i always wanted to go an ambulance ride but it's one of those things that's difficult because you know i don't ever want to be an ambulance but i don't remember that at all and they took me to the hospital and that's when events quickly kind of just spiral at that point and you had mentioned in the video so basically nothing in the emergency room and the transfer to the intensive care unit you remember right and it was it's tough because the stories i heard of me are so unlike me i i'm genuinely a pretty nice um person i don't really like to put people out of their way i'm from the midwest and so i was cussing out nurses i was telling doctors like get away from me it got to the point where i was combative i was trying to fight to leave i was trying to pull out ivs eventually when things were starting to get more serious i try to pull out my central line which is a huge no-no and so at first they tried to restrain me but i would not tell them what i was on i i was lucid i was having conversations i was understanding questions but i don't remember any of it from my first arrival to the hospital talking to the paramedics talking to doctors i don't i don't have any memory of it in the report it wrote that on i think hospital day three or four you were extubated which means that you must have regained consciousness and pulled the tube out of your throat yourself usually they let the patients do that and like the moment you wake up you're like what is this thing and you pull it out what was do you remember like that moment when you woke up because some patients don't because they're still you know sedated under medicines do you remember that moment or do you remember like the next like 45 minutes to a couple hours afterwards um yeah i remember the exact moment i woke up it's kind of a running joke in my family because i woke up and my sister was there margaret and she was kind of crying um because they kept on telling my family they were going to wake me up but then you know when they first put me under of course things got to the point where they were telling my family i was going to die and um to say their goodbyes and then i kind of passed the threshold of where my life was out like no longer was i gonna die but we don't really know what's gonna happen and so they eventually kind of made the decision to wake me up from my medically induced coma and i remember waking up and seeing my sister and everything was so strange because i was still heavily sedated even though they were waking me up and my feet were really swollen and my hands were swollen i had like everything around was a weird color and i remember looking at my feet and starting to cry and i was like because they didn't look real they weren't the the color of skin they were bloomed up and i was like are those my real feet and that's the first thing i asked and um my sister was like yeah those are real feet and i was like for some reason i decided they were going to take my feet i was like promise those are my real feelings don't let them take my feet and there was never any moment where like amputation was like anything that was up for discussion but um i i didn't even know why i was in the hospital it would have been different had i remembered some of these details leading up but i at that point i didn't even remember overdosing i'll i just wake up i ha i'm in this place i don't know what's going on i can't move that's another thing is i i couldn't lift my arm i couldn't move my legs i kind of i thought i was paralyzed temporarily because i was so incredibly weak i took everything just to kind of turn my head to the side yeah what was the um physical therapy like after the icu i think i think one of the most bittersweet ironies uh to this was the physical therapy aspect uh here i am you know pushing so hard to have this body and pushing myself in all these ways and then during my overdose um a lot of my muscles were so incredibly batty badly damaged either partially like cannibalized or some other kind of mechanisms they're a little bit outside of my understanding but sufficient to say um you know i couldn't lift my arms i couldn't do anything i had to relearn how to walk um i took forever to stand i i had no strength i went from this person that was so strong and could run miles and miles and lift weights and all these things i go from this place of being incredibly strong to being so indescribably weak and it's so embarrassing because there's a lot of moments in the hospital i can't go to the bathroom by myself but i have to have nurses help me and i i had to relearn how to walk it took me about a month and a half to the point where i could walk any kind of considerable distance it took me several months to get to the point where i could even go for a jog it took me over six months to get to a point where i could even lift weights i went from such a high to such a low and so quick and it was it was such a detriment to my on my identity and who i was in in every respect a lot of the physical therapy was focusing on regaining my lung capacity that was another thing i lost a lot of lung function that i ultimately got back there's questions and concerns because of the heat about cognitive functions um it's it's hard to tell to this day whether my cognitive functions were strongly affected for the most part i feel like i'm fine yeah um but yeah so physical therapy was a lot of band training a lot of trying to throw myself into the back into lifting any kind of weights and just as perspective it went from being this place where i could deadlift 500 pounds to where lifting a 10-pound dumbbell up to my sides was a monumental task yeah i've always had this theory thinking that it's like the years that you turned 22 and 26 those are like kind of like two like events like it could be good could be bad but something happens to you that that you just kind of like you change a little bit right and so like 22 was like for me that was like one of the first ones because i got hit by a car that year twice actually then 26 i remember like everything just changing again and so like i've always had this theory that those are those are the two years that kind of like usher people into like early life to adulthood in that light how did the event change your relationship with the gym and the fitness and how has that relationship evolved to what it is today i mean the fir the first thing is waking up and being hit with this sledge slammer uh or this this huge realization had nearly died um coupled with the weakness coupled with all these things coupled with all these lines in my body and these pictures my family was telling me and my family telling me that they had to say goodbye another kind of unfortunate and tragic detail is i had just started dating someone and our one month you know first anniversary was uh during the peak of when they said they were gonna have to go so this new girlfriend i have uh is is potentially saying her last goodbyes on what was supposed to be our you know our first month together and so the first kind of thing was waking up from that experience and in general um you know kind of the details but my life was kind of going downwards at that point um i had flunked out of college i was really struggling i had always seen myself as an engineer i didn't want to do that anymore i didn't i didn't know what i wanted to do and i put all my value and all my sense of worth in my body and fitness and so after that i had this new lease on life i had literally almost died for something so silly and so dumb as is even though to me it made sense it was about the death of my father and about all these other aspects still even in that context um it was that wake wake-up call it was it was this moment i needed to regain the desire to want to live and um i took it and i ran with it i completely turned my life around and i just didn't care about fitness for a while um of course it's kind of difficult because i got into this relationship with someone with their own relationship with eating and fitness and stuff that was pretty unhealthy but for a long time like i kind of detached from it it was something i still loved something i still did but i didn't see my value in my body anymore during that period of my life to someone who might be thinking of dnp to someone who might be have a different backstory but be in kind of like a similar situation what what is your suggestion to them would you suggest them take dmp and then two if you could go back in time you would tell yourself like how would you have done things differently i i just want to really highlight how i shouldn't be alive today had i lived alone i would have been dead had my brother-in-law just left me alone in the shower i would have been dead had i just gone up to my room instead of going into the shower i wouldn't be here um the only reason i'm here is is a set of you know kind of fortunate events for instance i wouldn't tell the doctors i was on dmp finally my brother reached out and told them in the nick of time and so the biggest thing i kind of want to advocate here is that like you know so many people die from this drug and don't have the opportunity to tell this story i'm sure there's a lot of people that take it you know safely and have good experiences with it but it's it's such a gamble and it's such a risk and one of the things um we kind of talked about in our you know pre-interview is that there's no antidote to dmp the second you take dmp you're strapping yourself into experience that has to run its course now there is a drug that kind of like plays a part maybe it might it addresses some of the side effects but one of the most important things is i talk about is like when you go into the er with a knife wound a gunshot wound like all those medical professionals know what they're dealing with they know how to save your life you go in and you won't tell the doctors you're on dmp they've never even heard of dmp before you're putting yourself at a significant disadvantage to getting medical care and the other thing is yes dmp is this super you know kind of tempting idea of radical weight loss but it's interesting because if you are the kind of person that like struggles to lose weight in other ways like there's the extreme hunger that you'll experience with dnp um there's the misery that you'll experience with dnp uh so it's not nearly the promised miracle chemical that you're believing it i i strongly advocate to create real healthier relationships with your body create healthier relationships with your mind explore weight loss in in terms of changing things for the better and that's what will lead to sustainable and healthy you know kind of changing your body chris thank you so much for sharing the story i remember when you reached out to me i watched your whole video in its entirety like i think it's 45 plus minutes and i remember thinking in my mind you know the experiences that that you described obviously our backstories are different but kind of the mindsets from what i remember when i was in college and you know you having that you know that mindset about the gym having that mindset about you know one's self-image and then you know just kind of like the stress that can come up from the environment and for me like it it just kind of reminded me of so much and then i looked at your whole channel and it reminded me of like my 2016 videos and i'm like it almost like even the lighting and everything and i was just thinking you know this is like at the at the very minimum it's an experience that like because i can't relate 100 to the back story i can relate somewhat to the experience of of in between and just thinking especially in context of toxicology it was you know such a great story to hear that you're able to come out and that you're making a youtube channel and that you're talking about all the self-improvement and everything that has come up but also as like a creative outlet with some of your spoken words um you know just there's just so much beautiful work on there and i think there's so much potential on there and i'm excited to see as time goes on um all the different things that you develop yeah no i really appreciate it and i i think one of the coolest aspects of this is just how full circle it is um when someone originally put forth your name i recognized it and i i went to your channel and you saw your more more recent body of work and i didn't really recognize it and i scroll and i scroll and then i see some thumbnails i used to watch all the way back in the day when you first put out videos and it's interesting because i watched your videos when i was trying to lose weight and in your experience of the way you were navigating it and stuff like that and so to have this full circle and share a similar experience on a channel i remember so clearly you know years ago now has been honestly really cool and i want to thank you for the opportunity awesome thanks yeah no it's great to hear because it's like you know things have gone so long for me on youtube now to see you know there's people now who may have said oh i remember the videos from you know 2016 or 2015 even right um you know i'm just i'm glad to hear your story and that you know everything is going pretty very well for you now and just seeing your body of work i see so much potential in it and you know i i'm so excited to see what comes next appreciate it man thank you so much

Channel: Heme Review

Views: 277,873

Rating: 4.9283242 out of 5

Keywords: dnp, dinitrophenol

Id: o15HCjtSkug

Length: 62min 54sec (3774 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021

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[u/-Notorious]

This is an interview I just came across from one of my favorite youtubers (Chubbyemu) and it deals with a case involving Body Dysmorphia, Self Image and drug usage among men pushing the limits of their bodies.

Feel people here would appreciate it!