Reading · Eclectic Healing

What if you could get fit while sitting at home watching Jeopardy!, without changing your diet or heaping on more exercise?

And what if the only investments were a $20 blood pressure cuff and 45 minutes of your time?

I know that sounds crazy, but my experience seems to be saying that it’s true.

If you subscribe to Curious Outlier, you’ve probably already heard about Remote Ischemic Conditioning (RIC). I’m thinking that everyone needs to be doing this, so I’m trying to help him spread the word. I’ll include links to his three articles below.

What follows is my brief experience.

I started doing this on the 28th of August. I think I didn’t have the cuff on quite right the first few times, as it wasn’t until the 2nd of September that I started seeing dramatic results. It may also be that it takes a few days for things to really kick into high gear.

Whether my results are translatable to everyone I can’t say with certainty. I experiment a lot with my health, and those efforts might be making my results more dramatic than those of the average person. So RIC might be only partly responsible for my experience.

Prior to trying RIC, I had been doing the following:

For more than a year I had been taking a nitric oxide supplement. It’s possible there was a synergistic effect with RIC, meaning that not all the effect was attributable solely to RIC. My blood circulation is likely better than most people’s, so it’s possible my body responded faster to RIC than yours will.
I’ve been experimenting with various ozone therapies for a few months now, and that has greatly increased oxygenation in my body, to the point where I experienced a rather dramatic increase in athletic performance in early August. Despite that performance increase, I noticed no extra loss of subcutaneous fat as a result. Like the nitric oxide, it’s possible that the ozone had a synergistic effect, and may have amplified my response to RIC.
Around the 2nd of September, when I started seeing dramatic loss of subcutaneous fat, I also began a liver cleanse, using herbs designed to increase bile flow. So my liver function has likely improved from that, and it’s very likely that the ozone has also improved my liver function, as it will tend to detoxify the liver, and it can help stimulate the growth of new liver cells. It could be that my cleaner, rejuvenated liver is capable of greatly improved fat metabolism, allowing it to burn off my unneeded subcutaneous fat faster than a lot of people will be able to. Again, together with RIC there may be a synergistic effect.

All I know for certain is that my health has transformed dramatically over the past few months, and those three things plus RIC are the likely culprits. Based upon Curious Outlier’s articles, a lot of my perceived benefits appear to be attributable to RIC. At the very least it’s likely the catalyst that is amplifying the benefits of the other therapies.

I weigh myself every morning, and my scale calculates things like subcutaneous fat and visceral fat, based upon electrical impedance. I’ve been using it since late November, and nothing I’ve tried has seemed to help get rid of the stubborn subcutaneous fat that has slowly accumulated since I was diagnosed with a spastic colon three years ago. Until recently.

Here’s what the past month’s subcutaneous fat readings look like:

That is .8% subcutaneous fat loss in just two weeks, with no change to my diet. If anything, my exercise levels are starting to decrease as the weather starts to cool.

My muscle percentage during that same time period has increased by .8%, which I would interpret to mean that I haven’t lost fat at the expense of muscle.

In total, I’ve lost 3.8 pounds in the past two weeks. And my percentage of water has increased from 57.4% to 58%. So I’m not losing weight due to water loss.

I saw a similar benefit from a fasting-mimicking diet a few years ago, which was thought to be because it tends to reset your hormones. I think RIC might be doing that as well.

[Added 20 Sep 2025: My steady fat loss lasted for 16 straight days. It seems to have coincided with a liver flush that I was doing, as it ended a couple of days after finishing it. The flush had me taking several supplements every day, most of which I’ve used in the past without noticing fat loss. The three new supplements were dandelion root, artichoke extract and indole-3-carbinol. None are said to induce fat loss, but the latter is said to help with hormone balance. When I did an extended fast a few years ago, one of the effects was better hormone balance and an ability for several months to eat what I wanted without gaining weight. So my fat loss may have been due to a synergistic effect of two or more things. I will continue to experiment to see if I can isolate a particular cause.]

[You should read the articles by Curious Outlier to get the caveats and science behind RIC.]

My wife and I have reasonable health, and no problem with high blood pressure, so this is what we do:

We each put on our own BP cuffs. I switch to a different arm or leg every time we do this.
I keep a notepad handy to record when each iteration is complete. It’s easy to lose track when you are inflating/deflating so many times.
We inflate our cuffs to 200 mmHg, and keep an eye on it so that it doesn’t drop much below that level (reinflating if necessary).
I set a timer on my phone for 5 minutes.
At the end of 5 minutes, we deflate our cuffs, and I set a 5 minute reminder for when to start the next iteration.
We repeat the process a total of five times, and we’re done.

If you find these articles helpful, please restack them or share them with as many people as possible!

If you try this hack, I’d greatly appreciate hearing in the comments about your experience, to see how similar the average person’s results are to mine.

My feeling is that health is the body’s natural state, and RIC is a way to remind your body what that feels like. If I’m right, good health is easily within everyone’s reach.

It would be truly awesome if sharing this hack amongst our friends could help quickly transform America from one of the sickest countries on the planet to one of the healthiest.

If it helps you, please share it with as many people as possible. It would be incredible to see kids doing this at school every day! They deserve the best possible future.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing for free. Since these posts are mostly built around personal anecdotes, I have limited supply to offer. I don’t write on a regular schedule. I’m more likely to write when the weather isn’t that great. When it is warm and sunny, I’d much rather be outside, recharging my batteries!

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