Nahum Vizakis spent 10 years in the military including a combat deployment to Iraq as an EOD team leader. After surviving roadside explosions, PTSD, TBI, and a pharmaceutical protocol that nearly unraveled his identity, he rebuilt himself through weight training, Ayahuasca ceremony, somatic work, and ruthless self-inquiry. He is the international award-winning author of The Indigo Flame and The Biohacker's Guide to Spiritual Bodybuilding, and coaches high-performing men — including veterans and special operations community members — at his practice Optimizing Human.
There are conversations that feel like a release valve — like someone finally opens a window in a room everyone has been quietly suffocating in. My sit-down with Nahum Vizakis was one of those. Not wellness influencer talking points. A man who had been blown up, drugged up, and nearly erased — and chose, against everything the system told him, to find another way.
Nahum spent 10 years in the military, including a deployment to Iraq in 2009–2010 as an EOD team leader. He got rocked by explosions more than once. He came home and spent years navigating the VA system and a pharmaceutical cascade that made everything worse — until one morning he couldn't lift his head off the ground, and he decided he was done. What followed is one of the most honest stories about rebuilding a man I've heard in years. And it connects directly to everything we talk about here: what the body is telling you, why the gut matters, why fasting is more powerful than any peptide on the market, and why resilience isn't a concept — it's a practice.
The Military, the Meds, and the Moment Everything Changed
The military's answer to Nahum's PTSD and TBI was a cascade of medications — anti-psychotics, anti-nightmare pills, Ambien, Soma, painkillers. The classic formula: one side effect triggers another drug, which triggers another, and another. The protocol kept expanding while Nahum kept deteriorating.
What the drugs were doing to him physiologically he only understood years later: testosterone levels collapsing, estrogen and cortisol spiking, the entire endocrine system thrown out of alignment. What was framed as treatment was biologically compounding the problem.
"I would wake up in the morning feeling dissociated from myself. It was making things worse. I started hallucinating — that's when I knew this wasn't treatment. This was erasure."
— Nahum Vizakis · @spiritual_bodybuilderThe morning he couldn't lift his head off the ground after Soma. The day he started seeing a phantom black van following him on base. The slow creeping realization that he was losing himself faster than combat had ever threatened to take him. So he stopped. Not the recommended path — he's the first to say that. But for Nahum, it was survival.
Many psychiatric medications — particularly anti-psychotics, SSRIs, and mood stabilisers — suppress testosterone production and elevate estrogen. Over time this creates a physiological identity crisis: the man doesn't feel like himself because, hormonally, he is being prevented from being himself.
Pharmaceutical interference with the HPA axis — combined with the cortisol load of unprocessed trauma — can lock the body into a chronic stress state. The system designed to resolve the trauma response instead gets stuck in it, sometimes indefinitely.
When testosterone is suppressed, cortisol is chronically elevated, and a person is in talk therapy being asked to identify their deficits repeatedly, the cumulative effect is an erosion of self. Nahum describes it as becoming a shell. That is not a metaphor. It is a clinical outcome of the compound he was on.
Iron, TRT, and Getting Back to Himself
The first thing that grounded him was the one thing that had always worked: weight training. It didn't matter what was collapsing in the outside world — the gym was the one place Nahum felt in control of himself. He was good at something. He had agency. That mattered enormously when everything else felt like an identity he was losing grip on.
He also started testosterone replacement therapy. Back then the conversation around TRT was not what it is today. He went with what his body was telling him — and the results were undeniable. He started feeling like himself again.
"Your body tells the truth, no matter what. If you're feeling good and you're hanging with the 20-year-olds in the gym, that's data."
— Josh Button · @thatjiujiteiroThere is an epidemic of low testosterone in Western men right now. Microplastics, nutrient-stripped food, chronic stress, chemical exposure. But Nahum draws an important line: there is a difference between therapeutic TRT — restoring levels to optimal function — and abuse. One rebuilds the man. The other creates a physique whose muscle tissue has outpaced its connective tissue, and injuries become inevitable. There is also a clear threshold for age: no one under 25 should be manipulating their endocrine system. The frontal lobe is not fully formed until 25. Introducing exogenous hormones before that stunts prefrontal cortex development and anchors identity to a physique that cannot be sustained. Max out your natural capacity first.
- Thorough diagnostics before starting — know your baseline numbers, not just testosterone but full panel
- Therapeutic dosing only — bringing levels to optimal, not supraphysiological
- HCG and ancillary support — to maintain natural function where possible
- Re-test every 3–6 months — track the response, adjust, stay accountable to the data
- Intentional detox protocol — full immersive reset every quarter, including systemic detoxification
- 25 is the minimum threshold — frontal lobe development must be complete first
Ayahuasca and the Frequency of Love
After leaving the military Nahum went to ASU to study psychology — trying to understand his own mind from the outside in. It helped intellectually, but didn't reach the depth he was looking for. So he went to massage school, where learning to read the body as a map to the subconscious began in earnest. And around that same time, in 2014, he found Ayahuasca.
The first ceremony was the first time he had ever felt what he would later recognize as unconditional love — not the attachment-based imitation of it that most people accept as the real thing, but the genuine frequency. That experience cracked everything open. It forced him to question not just his relationships, but the very core of his identity.
"That was the first time I ever felt the frequency of love. True, unconditional love. I didn't even realize I had never felt that before."
— Nahum Vizakis · @spiritual_bodybuilderOver the 14 years since, Nahum has married performance optimization with consciousness work into something genuinely singular. Biohacking before it had a name. Somatic healing before it was on podcasts. A framework that treats the body not as a machine to optimize, but as a map to the subconscious — a representative, as he puts it, of everything the mind is holding.
Residual trauma does not live in the mind alone. It encodes in the nervous system and expresses through the body — as tension, inflammation, chronic pain, hormonal imbalance, and behavioural patterns. Learning to read those signals is the first step of the work.
Once you can identify where residual trauma is operating on the surface — in your habits, your cravings, your reactions — you can slow down, become the conscious observer of your own life, and begin making decisions from a self-loving place rather than a traumatized one.
When decisions consistently come from that grounded, present, self-aware place — Nahum calls it divine alignment. Things move differently. Relationships change. Performance changes. The body responds because the signal it's been given has changed.
The Peptide Wild West — How Not to Get Burned
We spent real time on the biohacking space — specifically peptides. Both of us have seen this movie before. The nineties had ephedra. Chinese manufacturers removed one molecule at a time to stay ahead of FDA scheduling and kept pumping reformulated product back into the market. The same dynamic is now playing out with research chemicals being sold as peptides: produced outside compound pharmacy standards, potentially contaminated with LPS and pathogenic bacteria, and being injected directly into people's bodies.
When anything grows as fast as this industry has, Nahum notes, the people who are purely in it for the money don't disappear — they move in. Research chemicals are typically half to a third of the cost of pharmaceutical-grade peptides, which makes them attractive to exactly the kind of person who is coming from a scarcity mindset and not a health-first one. That distinction matters more than the compound itself.
"How you do one thing is how you do everything. If you're cutting corners on what goes into your body, that's a pattern worth looking at."
— Nahum Vizakis · @spiritual_bodybuilderThe FDA is cracking down, and legitimate voices in the biohacking space are increasingly calling out research chemical companies publicly. But education remains the primary protection. Work with someone who runs diagnostics. Source from compound pharmacies. Understand what you are injecting and why — and be honest about whether the why is coming from a grounded place or a compensating one.
- Pharmaceutical-grade compounds only — compound pharmacy, proper testing, no research chemicals
- Full diagnostics before any protocol — biomarkers establish a true baseline
- Strategic and time-limited use — not indefinite supplementation, specific goals with a clear endpoint
- Re-test to confirm response — the protocol isn't done until the data confirms it worked
- Examine the emotional driver — is this coming from genuine health optimisation or from something that needs a different kind of attention
The OG GLP-1: Fasting, Elimination, and the Art of Subtraction
One of the sharpest moments of the conversation: we both arrived at fasting independently as the single most powerful, accessible, zero-cost intervention available to men right now. We called it the OG GLP-1. And we meant it.
Two to three days of fasting triggers autophagy, resets gut health, clears intuition, and saves money. But the part that doesn't get talked about enough is what it builds beyond the cellular level: self-control over cravings. If you can control hunger — the most primal craving there is — you can control almost anything else. Alcohol. Scrolling. Looksmaxxing. The temptation to reach for the research chemical because it's cheaper. The pattern cuts across every domain.
The framework we keep coming back to at SKTP is this: before you add anything, eliminate. Most people in the wellness space are trying to add their way out of a broken foundation. It never works. The order is always subtraction first — remove the toxins, the alcohol, the ultra-processed food, the things you know are low-hanging fruit — and then begin building. One habit. One belief. One thing at a time. The body already knows how to heal. It just needs the interference removed first.
Breathwork is what you reach for when the craving wave hits on day one. This is something Wim Hof practitioners understand intuitively: a real breathwork session — holotropic or even just a disciplined Wim Hof round — takes you to places that rival plant medicine in their intensity and clarity. The natural DMT secretion that deep breathwork can activate is not a fringe claim. It is biology. And it costs nothing.
- Vibroacoustic sound lounge — daily; binaural beats; breath matched to vibration; activates parasympathetic nervous system fast
- Red light therapy panel — minimum 15 minutes layered on the sound lounge
- Infrared sauna — 3–5 days per week, especially post-training for recovery acceleration
- Cryotherapy — intuitive use for inflammation response; not daily, used when the body signals it
- Intentional detox — full immersive reset every 3–6 months; not optional, not negotiable
- Morning grounding and movement — sunlight, circadian reset, lymphatic stimulation before anything else
Jiu-Jitsu, Tribalism, and Problem-Solving Under Pressure
Nahum trained Muay Thai and BJJ through his military years — conditioning for a fight while in EOD school, going five hard rounds with fresh partners each round. A torn bicep tendon eventually shifted him toward bodybuilding, but the understanding of what combat training does to a man stayed with him.
We talked about why jiu-jitsu is growing at the rate it is. It isn't just the technique or the community. It is that every single round forces problem-solving under pressure against a live, uncooperative opponent. You cannot fake it on the mats. That's rare. Most men in the modern world never face that kind of honest, real-time challenge. The screen provides an infinite simulation of engagement without any of the consequence. The mats provide consequence without the performance.
"Problem-solving under pressure — with your body, against another human, in real time. You can't get that anywhere else. And most men are starving for it."
— Josh Button · @thatjiujiteiroThe return of tribalism — real in-person community, people putting their phones down and being present with each other — is something both of us see accelerating. Jiu-jitsu is a leading edge of it. The sport doesn't just train the body. It rebuilds the social architecture that screen culture has been quietly dismantling. And for the men who stick — who don't quit when the ego takes its first hit — it becomes something they will never let go of.
Resilience
I always close with one word. Nahum didn't hesitate.
Resilience.
Humanity is at a tipping point. The collective evolution — or purge, depending on how you read the moment — is already underway. What men need most in deeply changing times isn't another compound or another protocol. It's the capacity to move through hard things without giving up, without denying what's real, without collapsing into victimhood. To let difficulty be a teacher. To surrender to the process while still moving forward on the path.
"There is no comfort in growth. However, you can learn to accept it like a teacher. Move through whatever you're moving through. Don't give up. This too shall pass."
— Nahum Vizakis · @spiritual_bodybuilderHis autobiography, The Indigo Flame — which just won an international impact author award — is that story on paper. Raw, uncut, zero self-protection. He calls himself out on every blind spot: every place he played victim, every place he self-sabotaged, and the why beneath all of it. His second book, The Biohacker's Guide to Spiritual Bodybuilding, covers the full framework — peptides, PEDs, the emotional architecture behind every physical habit, and what it actually means to biohack from a place of self-knowledge rather than compensation.
If any of this conversation reached you, share it with someone who needs it. The full episode is on The Josh Button Podcast, everywhere you listen.
Optimizing Human · Wolf's Gym · Boca Raton, FL
Nahum coaches men through his practice at Optimizing Human — in person at Wolf's Gym in Boca Raton and remotely worldwide. Every engagement starts with a 30-minute consultation. He will feel out where you are, give you a clear picture of next steps, and hold you accountable to the work. Battle Zone runs every Sunday at 4PM with Kai Greene, streamed live on TikTok.
Stay Dangerous. Stay on the Mats. Hard to Kill in Midlife.
