Phase 5: hGH Therapy (Rebuilding Your Body)

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What you need to know

hGH is the rebuild signal. Dry fasting clears damaged cells, T3 restores metabolic power, and hGH tells your body to build new healthy muscle and immune tissue from what was freed.
hGH is not a phase everyone reaches. It enters around the third cycle, when two cycles of fasting plus T3 have not done enough: insulin resistance where food is not tolerated, extreme muscle loss, really bad sleep. It is an add-on to the T3 cycle, a supercharging of it, not something that waits until all T3 is finished.
Once you are on hGH, stay on it for at least three to six months. Two ways to run it: regeneration with continuous calories and no fasting, or keep cycling the fasts, in which case the hGH dosing pattern has to change because exogenous hGH suppresses your own output, and that pattern is set with me case by case, not from this page. At the end you wean off and allow about 30 days for your own production to come back before any fast.
Cyproheptadine and hGH work together. Injected hGH bypasses the pituitary signal cyproheptadine blunts, so you do not need to stop cyproheptadine before starting hGH.
Some people need to eat significantly more calories than they ever have during this phase. Without enough fuel, the rebuild cannot happen. In the growth-hormone-deficiency research, around nine months of treatment is often needed before people feel substantial results.
hGH is the preferred base: it is the actual hormone, so it needs nothing from your body to work, puts the least strain on the system, and gives the most benefit. If you truly cannot access hGH, CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin can be tried to help wake up your own pituitary, but it is an awakening aid, not a full replacement.

This phase is about using Human Growth Hormone (hGH) to help your body repair deep tissues and fix your immune system. I have used this myself and with my clients to get amazing results. Everyone’s body is a little different, so you and I have to carefully figure out how it works for you.

* Can’t get hGH? Real hGH is the preferred base: it is the actual hormone, so it needs nothing from your body, puts the least strain on the system, and gives the most benefit. If it is truly out of reach, secretagogues like CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin can be tried to help wake up your own pituitary, as an awakening aid rather than a full replacement. Ask Yannick in the portal for the adjusted plan.

Cyproheptadine and hGH Work Together

If you used cyproheptadine during your first T3 cycle (for appetite, sleep, or brain-gut calming), you do not need to stop it before hGH. Cyproheptadine blunts the pituitary’s own signal to release growth hormone, but the hGH phase injects growth hormone directly, so it bypasses the pituitary and overrides the blunting. The nighttime cortisol point does not change this: hGH here is for regeneration and calming the nervous system, not overnight fat loss, and its rebuilding actions stay active even with cortisol softened. Keep cyproheptadine going wherever appetite, gut tolerance, or sleep still call for it. See the full cyproheptadine context on the T3 Therapy page.

How hGH Works in the Body

Three angles on the same molecule: how hGH triggers the rebuild signal, how it directs fat burning, and how it shifts body composition toward muscle rather than fat. Read all three before starting hGH so the protocol logic makes sense.

How hGH Helps You Heal

Fixing Your Immune System: The Calorie & Building Flood.
Dry fasting cleans out the “trash,” and hGH sends the signal to “rebuild” through a massive calorie and building flood. This phase focuses on flooding the body with energy to signal abundance and regeneration. Some may need to eat significantly more calories than they ever have to force this process, which can take months to years. While weight gain is a common concern (see the Minnesota Starvation Experiment), it is often an unavoidable part of reclaiming your health. Success here involves maintaining insulin sensitivity while maximizing rebuilding, often utilizing peptides and ketone strategies as additional co-factors.

The “Big Three”: Fasting, T3, and hGH working together
For many people, using hGH by itself doesn’t work. To truly heal, you need all three parts of the Scorch Protocol to work together:

The Cleanup (Dry Fasting): This cleans out the debris and old proteins that are blocking your body’s healing signals.
The Power (T3 Therapy): This turns your body’s power back on. You can’t rebuild your body if you don’t have enough energy (ATP) to do the work.
The Rebuild (hGH): Once the fast has cleared the ground and T3 has the power on, hGH gives the command to build new, healthy cells and “power plants” (mitochondria). In practice it rides on top of a T3 cycle as an add-on; it does not wait until every T3 course is finished. See the timing section below for when it enters.

A New Way to Look at Chronic Illness

Doctors now believe that some chronic illnesses trap the body in a cycle of inflammation where low growth hormone levels stop the body from repairing itself. Using hGH helps your body stop burning sugar inefficiently and starts using its best fuel source for energy again.

How long does it take? Studies show that people with low growth hormone often need 9 months of treatment to feel better. Be patient, it takes time to rebuild your body’s energy and reverse your symptoms.

Why Fasting isn’t Always Enough: While fasting helps your body make more growth hormone at first, doing it too much or not eating enough can actually lower your hormone levels later on.

What the Research Says: One study showed that “starvation” could drop growth hormone levels by up to 50% for several months. This means some people may need extra hGH support to make sure their body keeps healing after a fast.

How hGH Helps You Burn Fat

During a fast, your body makes more growth hormone to help you burn fat for fuel. This is what helps your body make ketones, which your brain uses for energy when you aren’t eating.

The “Over-Fasting” Problem: If you fast too often or for too long, your body might stop making enough growth hormone. When this happens, you might notice that you aren’t losing much fat anymore, even if you aren’t eating. You might also feel more tired or take longer to recover. Some people mistake this for being sick again and try to fast more, but that only makes the problem worse. This is why I focus on using hGH to break that cycle.

Rebuilding Muscle, Not Fat

One of the hardest parts of the Scorch Protocol is the Refeeding Phase. After a long fast, your body is desperate for food. If your hormones aren’t balanced, your body will want to store all that new food as fat instead of muscle.

The Fix: This is where hGH therapy helps. It tells your body to use those nutrients to rebuild your muscles and organs instead of just making you gain fat.

What the Science Shows:

A study on animals showed a big difference between just eating again and eating while using hGH:

Without hGH: Rebuilding body weight was slow, and they didn’t gain extra muscle.
With hGH: They rebuilt their body weight in just 9 weeks and actually grew more muscle than they had before.

Using hGH while you start eating again ensures your body becomes stronger and leaner than it was before you started.

When hGH Starts, How Long It Runs, and the Two Ways to Run It

The most common mistake with hGH is reaching for it too early, or treating it as the step that automatically follows T3. It is neither. Here is how I place it inside the protocol.

Around the Third Cycle, and Only If the First Two Were Not Enough

The trigger:A cycle is a fast, a refeed and a 30-day T3 course, with the next fast opening seven days after the T3 course ends. hGH starts around the third cycle, once the first two cycles have shown they are not doing enough on their own. The signs that make it warranted are specific: insulin resistance so marked that food is not tolerated, muscle loss that is extreme, and sleep that is really bad. Still having problems after two cycles, with that picture, is when I say we need regeneration and bring hGH in.

An add-on, not a successor:hGH is run together with T3. Think of it as supercharging the cycle rather than as a separate phase that waits until every T3 course is over. The T3 keeps the power on; the hGH tells the body what to build with it.

At least three to six months:Once you are on hGH you stay on it for at least three to six months. Short runs do not rebuild anything. This is the stretch where the calorie flood described above has to be real.

The Two Ways to Run It

Mode 1: Regeneration, no fasting.Stop the fasting for the duration, eat continuous calories, and let the hGH do pure rebuild work. This is the straightforward version, and for someone with extreme muscle loss or food intolerance it is usually the right one.

Mode 2: Keep cycling, with the dosing changed.You can keep running the fasts while on hGH, but the dosing has to change. Exogenous hGH suppresses your own production, so a single daily dose leaves you with nothing of your own through a fast. The pattern that covers that suppression is something I set with you case by case, not something I print here: nothing published has tested fasting on hGH, and the one study that came closest found worse ketosis and no protein sparing (see the evidence box below).

Coming off: allow about 30 days before any fast.When the three to six months are done you wean off, and it can take about 30 days for your natural production to come back up. Do not fast in that window. Once your own output is back, you can fast again in future without worrying about it.

Medical caveat: hGH is a prescription or restricted hormone with real metabolic and endocrine effects. The trigger, the mode and the dosing split are decided case by case with me and with whoever prescribes it, never from this page alone.

What the Evidence Says About hGH and Fasting

Fasting raises your own growth hormone: a two-day fast multiplied the 24-hour output about fivefold in healthy men, and a five-day fast raised the number of pulses from about six to about ten a day (Hartman 1992; Ho 1988). In a 40-hour fast, keeping growth hormone present stopped the rise in muscle protein breakdown (Nørrelund 2001), which is why I read extreme muscle loss as a sign that points at this axis. The only study that gave hGH across a multi-week fast found worse ketosis, higher glucose and insulin, nausea and muscle pain, and no net protein sparing (Felig 1971), so the keep-cycling mode is my practice, not something the literature has tested. No published study has dosed hGH four times a day by injection under the skin; twice a day is the most frequent injection schedule tested (Laursen 1994).

Exogenous growth hormone does suppress your own output (Hashimoto 2000), and endocrinology does not retest the axis until one to three months off treatment (Tavares and Collett-Solberg 2021), so my 30 days is the short end of that window; nobody has measured the recovery curve in adults after months of dosing. Marked caveat on cancer: growth hormone is contraindicated with an active cancer (Kim 2020). In the largest long-term surveillance of adults on replacement doses, new cancer incidence matched the general population (Johannsson 2022), but that is replacement dosing, lower than what I use, so a past cancer is a case-by-case conversation with your oncology history in front of me, never an automatic yes.

Practical: Sourcing and the Synergistic Stack

Once you understand what hGH does, the next questions are where to get it safely and what other peptides amplify its effect during recovery. This section covers both.

Where to Get hGH

It is very important to get high-quality hGH, as many products sold online are fake or low-quality. There are a few realistic paths:

Prescription: hGH can be prescribed by a doctor in many countries for documented deficiency. This is the cleanest route if you can get it.
UGL Labs: Underground labs (UGLs) are the more accessible and affordable option for most people. Nearly every country has some way to access UGL-sourced hGH if you do the right digging in your local community. The catch is that UGL products are not subject to any pharmaceutical quality control: purity and actual dose vary, and contaminated batches do exist. The prescription route above is bioidentical and verifiable, so it is worth pursuing first. If you do go the UGL route, use a source that provides third-party purity testing and start at the lowest sensible dose.
Can’t access either? hGH is strongly preferred as the base, but if it is truly out of reach you can try CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin to stimulate and speed up your own pituitary’s awakening. These do not replace hGH, they only nudge your GH axis to wake back up, so treat them as an awakening aid rather than a full substitute.

If you have trouble finding what you need, I can help point you in the right direction.

Synergistic Peptides During Recovery

For certain people, the protocol has missing keys that no amount of fasting or hormones will unlock on their own. These three peptides address immune, gut, and energy axes that are commonly broken in chronic illness:

Thymalin (Thymic Peptide):A peptide derived from the thymus gland that directly stimulates immune system regeneration. Particularly valuable for people whose immune dysregulation is the core driver of their illness; it essentially “reboots” thymic output, which declines with age and chronic stress. Pairs powerfully with hGH’s tissue-rebuilding signal.

BPC-157 (Body Protection Compound):One of the most researched healing peptides available. Accelerates repair of the gut lining, tendons, nerves, and vascular tissue. For people with a damaged gut (leaky gut, SIBO, chronic inflammation), BPC-157 can be a critical bridge that allows nutrients to actually absorb during the rebuild phase. Also shows strong synergy with stem cell activity post-fast (see Refeeding page).

Retatrutide (GLP-1/GIP/Glucagon Triple Agonist):A newer triple-agonist peptide that activates glucagon signaling alongside GLP-1 and GIP. For people stuck in low-energy states with poor glucose utilization, the glucagon component can raise baseline energy availability in a way that nothing else does. Consider this for cases where fatigue persists despite normalized temperatures and adequate caloric intake.

Not everyone needs all three. Think of them as targeted keys for specific locks (immune, gut, and metabolic energy). Identify your weakest axis and start there.

The Final Step: Testosterone, After the Rebuild Is Underway

In my own recovery, testosterone was the last lever, not an early one. It goes in only after the earlier work is done: the fast has cleared the ground, T3 has restored metabolic power, and the hGH rebuild is already established. On that base, testosterone adds mitochondrial density and muscle and acts as the anabolic counterweight to the catabolic, high-cortisol state chronic illness leaves behind. Adding it before the prior cycles are complete is building density on an engine that is not yet running. This ordering is my clinical framework rather than a tested protocol.

How it is run:Case by case, only once prior cycles and blood work support it. Monitor hematocrit and hemoglobin (testosterone thickens the blood), and let estradiol rise rather than reflexively crushing it, since some of testosterone’s benefits run through the estradiol it converts into.

Medical caveat: testosterone is a prescription therapy with real cardiac, hematologic, and endocrine risks. Every dose and change is an individualized, physician-supervised decision, not a self-serve lever.

The Research Case for hGH in Chronic Illness

The published mechanism for why this matters specifically for chronic illness recovery: thymic regeneration, immune restoration, mitochondrial biogenesis, and tissue repair under conditions of long-term suppression.

Why hGH Works for Chronic Illness: The Research Case

If you have been sick for years, you are not just dealing with a pathogen or an immune glitch: your body has physically degraded. Muscle wasted. Immune tissue atrophied. The thymus, which produces your T-cells, has shrunk. No amount of fasting or antivirals rebuilds that. hGH does.

Thymus Regeneration & Immune Rebuilding:Clinical research, including the TRIIM trial, has demonstrated that hGH can physically regenerate the thymus gland, replacing fat tissue with functional immune tissue and increasing the production of “naive” T-cells (the immune cells your body uses to recognize new threats). These are the same cells that chronic illness depletes. Some studies show epigenetic aging reversal still detectable six months after stopping treatment, and increased T-cell output lasting up to a year post-discontinuation.

hGH vs. secretagogues:hGH is the preferred base. It is the actual hormone, so it needs nothing from your body to work, puts the least strain on the system, and gives the most benefit: strong muscle and tissue rebuilding, pronounced thymic regeneration, and a direct anabolic signal to every cell. Secretagogues like CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin only prompt your own pituitary to release GH, so they depend on your axis responding and do not replace hGH. I keep them for one narrow job: helping to wake up and speed the pituitary’s own recovery.

Safety & Immunogenicity:Modern recombinant hGH is bioidentical to what your pituitary produces. As a result, the immune system rarely recognizes it as foreign, with antibody formation rates in adults of approximately 2 to 3%, far lower than many common medications. Peptide secretagogues, by comparison, can provoke antibody responses against the peptide (usually without clinical impact), one more reason hGH stays the base. For most people, well-sourced recombinant hGH is remarkably well tolerated.

The Bottom Line:You are already doing the hardest part by dry fasting and committing to this protocol. hGH is not a shortcut; it is the targeted rebuilding signal that tells your body to use everything the fast liberated. Stem cells mobilized. Immune system primed. The only thing left is giving your body the hormonal instruction to rebuild. That is what hGH provides.

Can't source real hGH or peptides?

This is the wall almost everyone hits. Most doctors will not prescribe slow-release T3, so if yours will, take that route first. The peptide and hGH markets are full of fakes. Inside the members portal I share my current, personally verified supplier contacts for slow-release T3, peptides, hGH, and cyproheptadine, plus exactly what to order and how to dose it, worked out with you directly.

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References

Comprehensive assessment of body composition during absolute (dry) fasting.the growth-hormone surge acting anti-catabolically to spare lean mass while burning fat
Hypertonic stress promotes autophagy and microtubule-dependent autophagosomal clusters. Autophagy, 2013.dehydration stress as a potent trigger for clearing misfolded protein aggregates
Dry fasting and the immune system (Khoroshilov series).fasting as an immune reset, with sustained cytotoxic T-cell and NK-cell activity
Cahill GF Jr. Starvation in Man. New England Journal of Medicine, 1970.ketone metabolism and protein sparing that the rebuild phase relies on
Fahy GM, Brooke RT, Watson JP, et al. Reversal of epigenetic aging and immunosenescent trends in humans (the TRIIM trial). Aging Cell, 2019;18(6):e13028.recombinant hGH (with DHEA and metformin) regenerated the thymus and reversed epigenetic age markers
Ho KY, Veldhuis JD, Johnson ML, et al. Fasting enhances growth hormone secretion and amplifies the complex rhythms of growth hormone secretion in man. J Clin Invest, 1988;81(4):968-975. PMID 3127426. DOI 10.1172/JCI113450.a five-day fast raised GH pulse frequency from about six to about ten pulses per 24 hours
Hartman ML, Veldhuis JD, Johnson ML, et al. Augmented growth hormone (GH) secretory burst frequency and amplitude mediate enhanced GH secretion during a two-day fast in normal men. J Clin Endocrinol Metab, 1992;74(4):757-765. PMID 1548337. DOI 10.1210/jcem.74.4.1548337.two days of fasting produced a fivefold rise in the 24-hour GH production rate in healthy men
Nørrelund H, Nair KS, Jørgensen JO, Christiansen JS, Møller N. The protein-retaining effects of growth hormone during fasting involve inhibition of muscle-protein breakdown. Diabetes, 2001;50(1):96-104. PMID 11147801. DOI 10.2337/diabetes.50.1.96.in a 40-hour fast, suppressing GH raised muscle protein breakdown and replacing it prevented that rise
Felig P, Marliss EB, Cahill GF Jr. Metabolic response to human growth hormone during prolonged starvation. J Clin Invest, 1971;50(2):411-421. DOI 10.1172/JCI106508.the only study of hGH across a multi-week fast: worse ketosis, higher glucose and insulin, nausea and muscle pain, and no net protein sparing
Hashimoto Y, Kamioka T, Hosaka M, et al. Exogenous 20K growth hormone (GH) suppresses endogenous 22K GH secretion in normal men. J Clin Endocrinol Metab, 2000;85(2):601-606. PMID 10690862. DOI 10.1210/jcem.85.2.6377.injected GH suppresses the pituitary's own output in normal men; the reason the fasting-mode dosing changes and the reason for the wean
Tavares ABW, Collett-Solberg PF. Growth hormone deficiency and the transition from pediatric to adult care. J Pediatr (Rio J), 2021;97(6):595-602. DOI 10.1016/j.jped.2021.02.007.clinical practice requires one to three months off rhGH before the axis is retested; the 30 days here is the short end of that window
Laursen T, Jørgensen JO, Christiansen JS. Metabolic effects of growth hormone administered subcutaneously once or twice daily to growth hormone deficient adults. Clin Endocrinol (Oxf), 1994;41(3):337-343. PMID 7525120. DOI 10.1111/j.1365-2265.1994.tb02554.x.twice daily is the most frequent subcutaneous injection schedule tested in people; no study has dosed hGH four times a day by injection under the skin
Kim JH, Chae HW, Chin SO, et al. Diagnosis and Treatment of Growth Hormone Deficiency: A Position Statement from Korean Endocrine Society and Korean Society of Pediatric Endocrinology. Endocrinol Metab (Seoul), 2020;35(2):272-287. DOI 10.3803/EnM.2020.35.2.272.GH treatment is contraindicated in active malignancy (basal and squamous cell skin cancers excepted); IGF-1 is titrated to the age-adjusted reference range
Johannsson G, Touraine P, Feldt-Rasmussen U, et al. Long-term Safety of Growth Hormone in Adults With Growth Hormone Deficiency: Overview of 15 809 GH-Treated Patients. J Clin Endocrinol Metab, 2022;107(7):1906-1919. PMID 35368070. DOI 10.1210/clinem/dgac199.new cancer incidence in adults on GH replacement matched the general population; replacement dosing, below the range used here

See the full research & citations page for the complete evidence base and how each study is used.