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Are we becoming too reliant on supplements to do all the work for us? Are we believing that there's magic pills or things that can just take over and do all the work for us? Have we lost perspective on how this works and tried to turn what should be a marathon into a sprint? I want to talk in detail about so many of the prevalent problems that I see and the more people that I deal with and the information that I'm obtaining from people, their expectations, their work ethics and their misinterpretations and misunderstandings. I am Dylan Gemelli. I am here to educate. I'm here to give insight from my years of experiences of my own with thousands and thousands of clients, with people I interact with, everywhere, all over the world. When it comes to my podcast, my YouTube, my Instagram and my in person events, I hear it all, I see it all. I've been through it all. Good, bad and ugly. And in between my whole thing with any video, any podcast, anything that I do is to not be someone that lectures, to not be someone that looks down or talks down to people. It's to let you know that I may have an audience, I may have numbers. It doesn't mean anything. It means nothing. All it means is that I may be good at what I do. Everybody's good at what they do and we're all equal in terms of we're all children of God, we all have something special we're good at and we all have a lot of problems that we need to fix and that there's not a human alive, no matter how glorious they make themselves look on Instagram or Facebook or X or TikTok or whatever it might be. We all need each other and we all need each other's help. So infighting, disagreeing, all of this stuff that should never matter. I'm here to hopefully try to help people to get away from that, that part of life. So what I want to do today is talk about an over reliance and a misunderstanding on supplements, peptides, performance enhancing drugs, you name it. Let me start by saying this. I am one of the biggest advocates on the planet for peptides, for many different types of supplements, things like testosterone replacement therapy, all of these things. But what I'm going to talk to you about today is the misuse and the misunderstanding of how these work and what they're going to do for us. See, one of the biggest problems amongst many of the problems I'm about to divulge into is the way things appear. And that is media driven, that is influencer. And I say that if you're listening on audio with the, the two finger hyphenation influencer and I'm going to get into that too, ways of making these things appear and putting them in a different sort of reality. And sometimes it's for clicks, which really angers me. Sometimes it's to make a quick buck, which really angers me. And sometimes it's people that are parroting information without looking at it stuff, studying it and then regurgitating it, which also really irritates me. And I'll tell you why these all three irritate me. Because it puts every single one of you that's listening into what I see as like a hysteria of confusion. And I do not blame any last one of you for what you're going through. See, I've said this on some podcasts, I've guessed it on. I don't read comments to see what you're saying about me. What I care about is that people are learning something and that it's helping them change. I don't care about anybody saying anything so great about me being so great. It's about the message I'm conveying. And I also don't care if anybody insults me. That is the least of my concerns with the way that my plate is full. So mind you, if you're taking a shot, I don't care. You're wasting your time. But what I do care about is your questions and your concerns. Now I can't address every single question. I would love to. There's not enough of me and not enough time in the day. But I do care about the consistent comments of confusion and so Many people that I see, even to some of my colleagues that I hold in high regard, they do get confusing because it makes it appear like you can't eat anything in the world, you can't go outside, you can't breathe anything, you can't wear anything. By the time you're done sifting through everything, it looks like, well, how do I even exist? And so I get it. What I like to do is break these things down to make them as understandable as they can and to give you the. The warning signs of things that you do need to be aware of, but also with the understanding that we all have to live here and we all have to do our best with what we have around us. But mentalities and mindsets and understanding are a big thing. And you being tricked, duped, misled, all of that is a problem. Some people don't mean to do it on purpose, but. But their problem is, is they just don't. They. They start talking about things they don't understand and other people just have bad motives. Listen, there is no shortcut in really anything that we do in life. All shortcuts lead to longer roads. And when you try to take shortcuts and try to maneuver around things, it always eventually catches up to you. It may not at first, but it always will. Trust somebody that has been to prison, that has made every mistake in the world, that's tried to take every shortcut in the world, that now does not, because I understand the realities. I understand that it takes a lot of effort to stay consistent. It takes a lot of strong mindset to make yourself work out when you don't want to. To not eat that extra ice cream or whatever it is that you want to eat. And I just threw that in. There could be anything that's bad for you. I understand there's a lot of temptations. I understand that you have kids and lives and everything else. But what I want you to understand is that you still have a choice. You have a choice to say, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to take the extra time, whether it's getting up early or sacrificing something else I'm doing to make sure I get a workout in. I'm not going to feed my kids crap, which in turn doesn't mean I have to eat it. And if I am going to feed them that, that doesn't mean I have to eat it. I can't tell you how many parents have said, well, you know, I've got kids, so I've Got to. I'm feeding them macaroni and cheese or pizza or whatever it is, so I got to eat that too. No, you don't. You absolutely do not. I, I can't stand cop outs and I want to teach people that that is just not accurate. It's not acceptable. It's not an excuse, it's a reason and it's a bad reason. It's something that tells me a lot about somebody's will or actual want, I guess, is what I'm looking for. If you want the things that you say, you think, then you have to put in the work and the effort and make the sacrifices. Supplements themselves, work. If they're good quality and they have, have what they say they have in them, they have tested the time and they're proven they do work, but they can't work for you. They can work with you, but they can't do the work for you. If you're not doing the work. If you're taking COQ10 for your heart and you're eating terrible, you're not working out, you're smoking and drinking, it's not going to do anything for you. If you're taking a GLP1 and you're abusing it and you think it's just going to make you skinny forever, you're eventually going to have to get off of it. And when you do, your mind's going to open back up to realize you're hungry again. And if you haven't put in work and effort, eaten protein to keep your muscle on, done the right things, you're going to end up far worse than when you started it or before you even used it. If you get abusive with these things and we, and I, I'll do separate videos and concepts on GLP1s themselves. So I give you a further understanding of everything that goes wrong with those and why. If you're abusing these things, using too much, even stuff that you need, like you could drink too much water and drown yourself out. There are so many things that you could do that are things that are actually good. If you abuse them, that can cause you a lot of harm. If you're not using things in their intended purposes and ways, you're going to create problems. And I want people to be aware that when I said at the beginning, this is a marathon, it's not a sprint. Our whole societal makeup is now, now, now, now, now. Trust me, especially as a kid when I wanted something, I want it right now. And I've had to kind of really work on that's one of those things that it's a big problem for most people, not everybody. Some people just aren't wired that way. But most people, we have this right now mentality. So trust me, from somebody that's gone through this most of their life, that it's taken me so long to. To teach myself and put in the practice and effort to not be that way, to practice patience. When you want everything right now and aren't willing to put in the work, that's where it falls into attempting to take a shortcut. And that's where you create yourself a bigger problem. You cannot outwork a bad diet if you think that working out every day gives you the license to eat like crap and do all of these things. You might not gain weight, but what you're doing to yourself internally is a thrashing. I would bet 99.9% of people are just eating like crap all the time. And you think they're getting away with it. They're not. They're. You're absolutely not. You know, some people will say, well, my grandpa did this forever and lived forever. And you gotta understand something if you're making those kind of comparisons or bringing up those kind of subjects, there's a lot different way of life 50, 60 years ago, even 30 years ago. And what was in our foods, stresses and toxins and things that we're exposed to. And there's always anomalies and outliers built into that as well. And things have changed, and they have changed drastically. That's like me saying, well, gas used to be 99 cents when I was in high school. Well, we're not in high school anymore. So you have to look at things from how they are now. We can use experiences and things in the past, but you have to realize that things consistently change. And a lot of times not for the good. There's a lot of things I wish I could bring back from when I was a kid or back in time. And there's a lot of improvements that we've had. But sometimes trying to fix something that's not broke is a big problem. And I want to stress to everybody that this takes effort, it takes discipline, and it takes consistency. And there's going to be days where you don't have it, and there's going to be days where you slip and fall and you probably do something you wish you wouldn't have. It doesn't mean that it's the end of the world, and it doesn't mean you're a horrible person. And it doesn't mean you ruined everything. Just remember, these things can be fixed. You just don't want to turn them into bad habits. You need to practice patience. You need to take the time to read and understand and not be in a rush to accomplish everything that cannot be accomplished in one to two nights or a week. I mean, building health requires a lifelong effort. I've had times of terrible blood panels and then I get them in line and then you go back four or five months later and they're not in line anymore. It's a constant struggle and a constant effort and a constant reminder that you'll never be perfect. And it's always going to take work and that's okay. That's what makes life great is accomplishment. And working at things, it is. Nothing feels better than actually sitting down and making something truly good happen and accomplishing it. But we forget that. And so many people never get that feeling because they are always going the shortcut route and never feel that sense of accomplishment. And that's part of the reason for anger, emptiness, lack of gratitude, and higher levels of disease and inflammation. There's so many things that cause disease and inflammation. But I, I have found over the years of not just studying diet, nutrition, wellness, anti aging, longevity, even like cardiology, when I started to study neuroscience and cognitive function and behavior and then I started to really study people more intricately. What makes them tick, what makes them go, what makes them happy, what makes them sad, how their work ethics are their efforts, what they really live for, what's their drive. And there's a lot of people where I, they can't tell you what that really is. They don't know or it's something that they just try to create or come up with that's really not true. And then they never find their true meaning of life. And it's because there's a lack of work ethic and a lack of discipline and consistency and some of that's fear. I've been there, I've been scared to do things and try things, trust somebody that's had an eating disorder most of their life. How scary trying to make a change is, how terrifying it is living in a dark hole of fear. And it's crazy because I've been able to always run that extra mile, always be the one that was the last one to leave the gym or the one that's always willing to go in that extra day or when I'm not feeling well. I've always been that person that never misses a day. But then there's always something that we have, there's always a fear, a demon or something. You have to tackle it head on. And you have to ask yourself, what am I doing wrong here and how can I fix it? And so much of it just comes down to our mental way of handling and looking at things. How we handle stress, how we handle challenges, how we handle fear. What are we actually scared of? I've asked myself that several times. And when you can't answer the question and you don't know, and what does that tell you? There's nothing to be scared of. And there's not, there's nothing that God puts in front of us that we cannot handle or do. But if you don't ever overcome anything, how do you know if you've even accomplished anything? If you don't ever get challenged, if you don't ever fail, how do you really know how to be successful? And then what happens when hits the fan? Then what? Are you prepared to handle it? Or do you just fold and roll over? What I noticed when I was in prison, how many people came back over and over and over. One of the things that I've been happy with myself is regardless of the amount of mistakes I made, once that happened to me, I stopped making the same mistakes twice because I realized, I kept thinking I could get away with stuff and I could do it over and over and mistake, mistake, mistake. Same one. When I realized it's not how life works, it's not how health works, it's not how relationships work, it's not how anything works, it's how everything fails. That's how we lose hope. That's how we bring on doubt, shame, anger. I'm, I'm the, I am the polar opposite of perfect, like to the max. But damn it, I know it. And I am completely open and vulnerable about it. And I don't care because I. I feel like not only does it help me to say it out loud, but I feel like it, it shows everybody else. Sheesh. He's an open book and he deals with it every day. And I help everybody that I know deal with it every day the best I can. You know, I can't sit and talk to every single person that I would like to, but I could sure put out stuff like this that hopefully resonates and people can utilize and use. And I just want everybody to understand you can't be reliant on modalities. Drugs, and I'm not saying street illicit drugs. I'm saying conventional medicine drugs, non conventional medicine treatments and therapies. These are great tools, supplements, fabulous tools. Peptides, I, I couldn't be more pro peptide. But being dependent and reliant on these without putting in the work and the effort first, doesn't work, never has, never will. No matter what somebody tells you, no matter what some study says, no matter if somebody got great results once. Look at it after math, look at lifespan, look at blood panels, look at longevity, look at after effects. And I'm telling you this, it always, always, always reverts backwards if it's not done the way it's supposed to. I am here to teach you the right ways, the ways that I've learned about doing things. It's not always going to work. Nobody bats a thousand. No human, no athlete, no famous person, whatever that even means. Because I don't know what that even means, because it's not really famous to me, just because you can act in a movie that's neither here nor there, that's a totally different topic. But I think the most famous people are the ones that make the biggest impact. The people that save lives. Anyway, point being, take the time. Ask yourself, am I putting in the work and the effort? What's my reason for fear? And if I can't find one, there's nothing to be scared of. And if I can, how do I address it and overcome it? Make your fears your strengths, same with your weaknesses. Make your fears something you look forward to saying. Okay, I got a challenge today. Okay, bring it. Don't be reliant on anything aside from God's help and from your discipline and consistency and your know how. Nobody knows everything, so I'm not sitting here telling you I do. But I know how to convey messages and I, I try to not give information that I haven't found to be the most accurate. I have made mistakes. I'm going to always make mistakes and I'll own them. But if you are putting out information and content, do your best to vet everything that you do. Look into it and be as clear and concise as you can because there's a lot of people listening that you don't even realize. One of the things I tell my wife sometimes is, you know, I never knew how many people are actually listening. And even if it's only one, I need to treat it as if it's a million. Because even one, if I give them something bad or wrong, it could hurt them and I could have a bad day. It could make you lose hope. Anybody that believes in me. So whether it's speaking to one or a million, you're gonna always get my best or I'm not gonna put out the video and the content. I'm just not gonna do it. So I love everybody. Even if you don't like me, I still have love for you. I do. I don't look at life that way. I don't look at people that way. I look at people as we're all God's children. Some people, they just don't have it in their hearts. We all were built with it. Sometimes it's blocked for whatever reason. Sometimes somebody says something you may not like or agree with or care for. I. It's not like I agree with everything my wife says or my mom. I love them. I would do anything for them and some of my best friends, and I'm sure they don't agree with everything I say. But that's not how this works. So love me or hate me, I love you. And I'll do everything I can to help each and every one of you. So God bless. Stay tuned for plenty more to come, because there's a lot I have barely just scratched the surface and begun. Dylan Gemelli signing off. Sam.
Shortcuts Lead to a Longer Road! Discipline and Consistency, Faith and Trust, Putting in the Work to Achieve a Healthier, Happier and Fulfilled Life!
April 25, 2026
Host: Dylan Gemelli
Dylan Gemelli delivers an impassioned solo episode focused on the dangers of shortcuts in health and life, emphasizing the irreplaceable value of discipline, consistency, and inner work. Drawing from his personal experiences, years of coaching, and deep engagement with the health and fitness world, Dylan critiques society’s “quick fix” mentality, the overreliance on supplements and drugs, and the misleading influence of media and unqualified “experts.” Instead, he advocates for sustained effort, self-awareness, and faith—arguing that true change comes from within, supported by sound strategy, and not from external crutches alone.
Main Message: There are no real shortcuts to success in health, well-being, or personal fulfillment. Attempts to bypass effort often backfire and “all shortcuts lead to longer roads.”
“Listen, there is no shortcut in really anything that we do in life. All shortcuts lead to longer roads. And when you try to take shortcuts and try to maneuver around things, it always eventually catches up to you.”
[09:45]
Dylan reflects on his own history, including past mistakes and periods of trying shortcuts, to caution others against similar paths.
Society is deeply conditioned to crave immediacy (“now, now, now, now!”), but patience and sustained effort are essential ingredients in any real transformation.
“When you want everything right now and aren’t willing to put in the work, that’s where it falls into attempting to take a shortcut. And that’s where you create yourself a bigger problem.”
[16:59]
Dylan, an advocate for quality supplements, peptides, and therapies, warns against the fallacy that these tools can replace effort, healthy behaviors, or good decision-making.
“Supplements themselves work. If they’re good quality … but they can’t work for you. They can work with you, but they can’t do the work for you. If you’re not doing the work, it’s not going to do anything for you.”
[13:01]
Using drugs or supplements as “get out of jail free” cards (e.g., abusing GLP-1 drugs for weight loss) may provide short-term results but ultimately leads to greater problems.
“Even stuff that you need, like you could drink too much water and drown yourself out. There are so many things … that if you abuse them, can cause you a lot of harm.”
[14:39]
Media and “influencers” often project misleading, incomplete, or unverified information for attention or profit, creating confusion and unrealistic expectations.
“Sometimes it’s for clicks, which really angers me. Sometimes to make a quick buck. And sometimes it’s people parroting information…which really irritates me.”
[05:17]
The resulting “hysteria of confusion” among listeners and viewers is not their fault, but a result of irresponsible messaging.
“By the time you’re done sifting through everything, it looks like, well, how do I even exist?”
[06:44]
The core of lasting health and happiness is built on consistent effort, discipline, and personal responsibility. Occasional mistakes don’t define the journey—what matters is returning to the path.
“You need to practice patience. You need to take the time to read and understand and not be in a rush to accomplish everything that cannot be accomplished in one or two nights or a week…Building health requires a lifelong effort.”
[21:10]
Excuses such as “I have kids, so I have to eat what they eat” are challenged as destructive rationalizations.
“I can’t stand cop outs … that is just not accurate. It’s not acceptable. It’s not an excuse, it’s a reason, and it’s a bad reason.”
[11:44]
Everyone faces temptations and obstacles, but there is always a choice to do the harder, better thing.
Facing and overcoming fear—whether related to health, change, or personal growth—is key.
“There’s nothing that God puts in front of us that we cannot handle or do. But if you don’t ever overcome anything, how do you know if you’ve even accomplished anything?”
[27:09]
Personal anecdotes: Dylan speaks openly about past struggles, including time in prison and working through an eating disorder, showing vulnerability to encourage others.
“I am the polar opposite of perfect…but damn it, I know it. And I am completely open and vulnerable about it.”
[30:36]
True “success” is measured by consistent self-improvement and resilience, not by never making mistakes.
Content creators and educators have a duty to vet their information, knowing that even a single person misled can have serious consequences.
“Whether it’s speaking to one or a million, you’re going to always get my best or I’m not going to put out the video and the content. I’m just not going to do it.”
[35:35]
Dylan reaffirms his core purpose: To serve his listeners with honesty, humility, and a commitment to their betterment, regardless of numbers or popularity.
On shortcuts and regret:
“Trust somebody that has been to prison, that has made every mistake in the world, that’s tried to take every shortcut in the world, that now does not, because I understand the realities.”
[10:12]
On discipline and parenting:
“No, you don’t. You absolutely do not [have to eat unhealthy because your kids do]. I can’t stand cop outs and I want to teach people that that is just not accurate.”
[11:44]
On self-awareness and growth:
“If you don’t ever get challenged, if you don’t ever fail, how do you really know how to be successful? And then what happens when shit hits the fan? Are you prepared to handle it? Or do you just fold and roll over?”
[27:24]
On authenticity:
“Even if it’s only one [listener], I need to treat it as if it’s a million. Because even one, if I give them something bad or wrong, it could hurt them and I could have a bad day.”
[35:15]
On self-acceptance:
“I am the polar opposite of perfect, like to the max. But damn it, I know it. And I am completely open and vulnerable about it. And I don’t care because I feel like not only does it help me to say it out loud, but I feel like it shows everybody else, ‘Sheesh. He’s an open book and he deals with it every day.’”
[30:36]
Dylan Gemelli’s message is clear, compassionate, and insistent: there is no replacement for hard work, discipline, and authenticity on the road to a healthier and more meaningful life. While tools like supplements, medications, and expert advice have value, they cannot substitute for personal responsibility and consistent effort. The temptation of shortcuts is both timeless and amplified by today’s culture, but, as Dylan earnestly reminds us, embracing the “long road” is the surest—and ultimately the only—way to true fulfillment and health.