It’s coming up to two years since I “went grey,”
and in this Substack, I want to share what that actually means in real life: my journey into grey, my life inside the grey-market community, and how I ended up creating K-Hole.
Everyone arrives here through a different door.
People have different backstories, different motivations, and different lines they won’t cross. But if I strip it right back, most of us end up in the same place for the same reason: we want access to good quality peptides at prices that don’t feel like punishment, so we can feel better, function better, and be the best version of ourselves.
My route in was “normal”.......until it wasn’t
On paper, my route into grey probably looks similar to a lot of other people’s.
It started with the mainstream, brand name path, the Facebook groups, the before and afters, the hope that appetite suppression would give me my life back, and then eventually it led me into grey.
But my why was probably different to most.
I’d been struggling disordered eating and after reaching the lowest weight I’d ever been, my body basically snapped.
It was like it decided, enough is enough, and suddenly I was hit with extreme hunger cues, intense, relentless hunger that didn’t feel like“normal hunger” at all. I joined online support forums and the message was essentially: eat.
In eating disorder recovery circles, there’s a very common belief that “extreme hunger” is a primal response to starvation, the body’s way of trying to restore energy balance and weight.
Along with that, there’s another popular belief:“overshoot weight.” The idea is that the body can shoot past your previous weight to restore what it needs (including muscle mass), and then, once everything is repaired, it will naturally drift back down to a comfortable set point without dieting or effort.
Foolishly, I believed it.
So I did what I thought you were supposed to do: I kept eating to satisfy the extreme hunger.
But the hunger didn’t settle. And the weight didn’t stabilise.
It just kept increasing, steadily.
When I look back at photos of myself from that time, I don’t recognise the person I see. And I can honestly say: that was the worst time of my life.
I’d never been that size before, and as someone who had tied far too much of her self worth to her body, I felt completely worthless.
At some point, I realised the path I was on wasn’t leading to “recovery.” It was leading to obesity, ill health, and unhappiness. And I decided to do something that’s basically heresy in many ED spaces:
I decided to diet and exercise again.
But I also knew I needed help, something to take the edge off the hunger, something to quiet the noise enough for me to make consistent choices without feeling like I was fighting my own biology every hour of the day.
That’s how I ended up looking into GLP-1s.
The first injections: hope, fear, and a lot of research
At the time, there was so much fear mongering around these meds. I was cautious. I researched. I weighed up the pros and cons, and I decided the benefits outweighed the risks.
I was excited, honestly, I was expecting a miracle.
I ordered Saxenda from an online chemist, and by then I’d already joined the Facebook groups, so I was primed for those “first week magic” stories. I took my first shot fully expecting appetite suppression to kick in quickly.
But it didn’t.
The only effect I noticed at first was that I could go between meals without snacking. Looking back, I think a lot of that was placebo, the belief that something had changed, so my behaviour changed.
Still, I kept expecting the “real” appetite suppression to arrive, so I followed the normal escalation schedule.
During my time on Saxenda, I probably had about seven days total of proper appetite suppression. The rest felt like nothing, or like I was trying to convince myself it was working because I wanted it to.
And yet... I still managed to lose weight.
Eventually, once I’d escalated to the top dose and accepted it just wasn’t working for me the way it seemed to work for other people in the groups, I switched to Ozempic.
When Ozempic “wore off” and the decision got real.
Ozempic was slightly better, but it still wasn’t working well enough for me. It would “work” for the first two or three days, and then by the end of the week it felt like it had worn off.
Even though I tried to escalate as slowly as possible, I soon hit the max dose (2.4mg).
Around that time there was news that Mounjaro would be available in the UK soon, so I kept telling myself to just hold out until then.
While I was waiting, I even pushed the dose higher, up to 3.6mg per week, because I was desperate for something consistent. But again, it wore off... and it came with a side effect I couldn’t ignore: that nasty skin pain/allodynia that a lot of people report.
And that’s the point where things changed.
Because once I’d accepted that I couldn’t keep chasing a “maybe this week it will kick in” effect, I made the decision to look for tirzepatide, which, at the time, was only available in the “research use only / not for human consumption” world in the UK.
That was my first baby step into grey.
The day I actually “went grey”
Once I’d made the decision to try tirzepatide, I had one priority:
I wanted something that at least looked legitimate on arrival, properly labelled, not anonymous mystery powder.
I eventually found a WhatsApp group run by a couple of people who were already known in the GLP-1 community. The very first thing I asked was whether the product was labelled. I needed that small bit of reassurance, something I could hold in my hand and not immediately feel like I’d done something insane.
They confirmed it was labelled, I placed an order; £95 for a 10mg vial, and it turned up two days later.
At the time, my plan was simple: combine it with semaglutide and hope the missing “consistent appetite suppression” finally arrived. But within days I realised the lower dose wasn’t touching me, which meant l’d need more product, and sooner than I expected.
The message that changed everything: “You can order direct”
And while I was doing all of that... something happened that basically changed the direction of my entire life in this space.
Someone from another GLP-1 group reached out to me privately. To this day I’m genuinely grateful, because that message is the reason I ended up understanding what “grey” actually is.
He told me he was ordering GLP-1s direct from China, and that the price difference was almost unbelievable, the kind of difference that makes you stop and stare at the screen for a minute.
My immediate reaction was: absolutely not. I wasn’t brave enough. I didn’t trust it. I didn’t even know what questions to ask.
But he explained that XCE was a supplier that was already well known across the GLP-1 corners of the internet. He also warned me about practical realities I wouldn’t have thought about, like seasonal shutdowns around Chinese New Year and the knock on impact that can have on deliveries.
Out of curiosity, I looked at the XCE website he mentioned and I was in awe..... it looked like a sweet shop for peptides. Rows and rows of products, neat little vials, coloured caps, and prices that made my UK costs look ridiculous.
If I’m being honest, the price is what got me. At that stage, I wasn’t thinking about testing groups or third-party reports, I barely even understood what any of that meant. I just saw that I could get ten vials for the price of one UK vial, and my brain couldn’t unsee it. I kept circling back to it, even with my anxiety about buying from China and all the post-COVID baggage that came with that.
At that point, I also didn’t even know what Discord was. I didn’t understand what “group buys” meant, but I was able to find some XCE test results on the Janoshik website and they looked good to my untrained eye. I sat with it for a few days, going back and forth in my head about the risks of ordering direct from China.
And then, on 22 January 2024, I placed my first direct order: one box of 10mg tirzepatide (10 vials). I’ve lost my record so I can’t remember how much I paid.
That moment was the real start of “going grey” for me, and, eventually, the start of my journey to K-Hole.
Next episode: “Dear,” disappointment, and how I ended up on Discord
In my next episode I’ll cover my experience with XCE, including the first time I was called “dear” by Peter (and yes, I was secretly flattered at first), how I was ridiculed in a Facebook group when I dared to post about my disappointment with the XCE tirz, and how I found my way into Discord via another online forum and one kind person who patiently explained how the whole system actually works.
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