lean bulking thread · whwido /we-do/strength/muscle

5d (edited) • General Discussion and News

lean bulking thread

ever the optimist im assuming ill soon be lean enough to start a bulk.

bearing in mind ive spent seven months in a deficit now to get rid of my carnivore dad bod i dont want to add that back while gaining muscle. so im thinking plenty of protein , carbs around rt , maybe keto on days off , 300-500 photons surplus ( thats what lyle suggests) , ill go higher on the anabolics but nothing crazy , i think motsc would be valuable and also reta at maybe 0.5 mg a week

this is copied from another site , what do yo think about this info

@Shaun Womersley

and what top tier wisdom could you offer ? id rather make slower gainz than get bigger but look absolutely Flabulous

Why Retatrutide Isn't Just Appetite Suppression (Nutrient Partitioning)

Ask GROK whether you can run retatrutide while bulking and it will tell you no, because retatrutide is an appetite-suppressing drug. That answer is built on one mechanism out of three, and it misses the one that matters most for anyone eating in a surplus.

Retatrutide hits three receptors at once. GLP-1, which slows gastric emptying and dampens hunger signaling in the brain. Glucagon, which raises energy expenditure. And GIP, which is the one almost nobody talks about.

GIP stands for glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide, a gut hormone released when food arrives in the small intestine. It tells the pancreas to release insulin before blood glucose climbs much, and it talks directly to fat tissue about how to handle incoming nutrients.

What that GIP arm is really doing inside retatrutide is optimizing nutrient partitioning, which just means your body decides, based on your energy balance and your energy requirements, where to send the food you eat.

Think of every meal arriving at a switchyard. Protein and carbohydrate and fat come in, and there are tracks going out to muscle glycogen, to muscle protein synthesis, to liver, and to fat tissue. Your hormonal state is the switch operator, and insulin sensitivity is how well that operator can hear the instructions coming in.

A lot of times people who are highly insulin resistant have poor nutrient partitioning, because the operator has gone deaf in the muscle direction. Muscle cells stop responding to insulin properly, so glucose keeps circulating, the pancreas shouts louder with more insulin, and fat cells, which stay insulin sensitive far longer than muscle does, hear the signal fine and keep taking delivery. So even though they're eating the right things, they're going to store it anyway.

This is why two people can eat an identical 3,500 calories with identical protein and identical training and end up with different body composition twelve weeks later. Same inputs, different switchyard.

The GIP arm works on this from two directions. It improves how fat tissue clears and stores incoming lipid in a controlled way rather than letting it spill over into liver and muscle, and in the brain it has its own effect on food intake separate from GLP-1.

So when you're in a surplus, what you get out of it is the ability to eat those calories and have less of that end up as fat.

Practically, a bulk on a low dose of retatrutide looks different from a bulk without it. You're using it to make the surplus land better, which means the dose has to stay low enough that appetite stays intact. Most guys who try to run a growth phase on a fat-loss dose spend the whole thing fighting their own food intake and lose the surplus entirely.

Start low, hold the dose, and watch whether you can still hit your calories. If you can't finish your meals, the dose is too high for the job you're asking it to do.

Protein intake matters more here, not less. The partitioning improvement only helps if there's a demand signal pulling nutrients into muscle, and that demand signal is hard training plus enough amino acids to build with. The drug changes where the food can go, it doesn't decide that for you.

Most of the confusion around these compounds comes from treating them as one thing with one effect, when the triple agonist exists specifically because each receptor does something the others do not. Appetite suppression is the effect people notice first, and it's not the part that changes how your body handles a meal. Anyone here run a low dose through a growth phase and keep their appetite?'

any thoughts gang ?

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lean bulking thread