Offline Operator

I grew up inside
the machine.
Then I got out.

Hi, I'm Adnan Alkhalili — 20 years old, founder of Touch Grass Together, and one of the few people in the country building real solutions to the generational health crisis that screens, ultraprocessed food, and artificial living have created. I understand this crisis because I lived inside it. Everything I build comes from that.

My Story

I was the kid everyone is
worried about right now.

I grew up on Discord servers, online games, and friends I'd never met in real life. I woke up in dark rooms, stayed on screens until sleep, and ate whatever was in front of me. By the time I reached high school, I was overweight, exhausted, light-sensitive, and running on cortisol I didn't know I had.

At fourteen, I had my first panic attack. Then came anxiety that wouldn't leave — a feeling of needing to manually control my own breathing, every hour of every day. OCD followed. Doctors said I was fine. I wasn't fine. My metabolic health was destroyed, and it was dragging my mind down with it.

I lost sixty pounds in a month by fixing what I was eating. The anxiety disappeared. The OCD disappeared. The breathlessness disappeared. Not through medication — through metabolic correction. Once my body worked again, I could finally see the cage I'd been living in. And I decided I was going to tear it apart.

That decision became Touch Grass Together, a national movement that has reached over 150 million people and operates on campuses in 9 countries. It became my work with institutions across the country that are trying to solve this crisis but don't have anyone in the room who's actually lived inside it.

Today, I'm 20 years old, an EMT, a student of psychology, and someone who thinks about metabolic health, circadian biology, and the architecture of human behavior every single day. Not because it's academic, because it saved my life.

Adnan Alkhalili at MAHA roundtable
"Every institution I've walked into has studied this problem from the outside. I'm the person in the room who lived inside it."
14
Age of first panic attack
60 lbs
Lost through metabolic reset
150M+
People reached through TGT
20
Years old
What I See

The crisis isn't phones.
It's the entire environment.

I call it artificial living — the engineered matrix of screens, ultraprocessed food, chronic isolation, dopamine hijacking, and cultural disconnection working together to destroy metabolic function at scale. Each element reinforces the others. Poor sleep drives junk food cravings. Isolation drives screen time. Sedentary behavior eliminates the metabolic buffer that would protect against all of it.

No previous generation has faced all of these conditions simultaneously. And the people making policy about it have never lived inside it. That's the gap I exist to close.

Circadian Disruption
Screens after dark suppress melatonin, destroying sleep architecture and the hormonal cascades that govern everything from glucose metabolism to mood regulation.
Nutritional Collapse
Ultraprocessed food engineered to override satiety signals, delivering calories without nutrition while promoting chronic inflammation and insulin resistance from childhood.
Social Isolation
Chronic disconnection from real human contact elevates baseline cortisol, suppresses immune function, and accelerates every other form of metabolic damage.
Sedentary Default
Environments designed around sitting remove the muscle contraction signals required for healthy glucose uptake — the metabolic buffer that used to protect against everything else.
Adnan Alkhalili at the White House
What I've Built

Movements, infrastructure, and frameworks for getting a generation back to reality.

National Movement

Touch Grass Together

Co-founded in February 2025. A student-led movement using cultural production — humor, memes, events, influencer activations — to move Gen Z toward metabolic health behaviors at scale. 85 campus delegates across 76 schools in 9 countries. 150 million people reached.
Health Technology

Nano Industries

A personal venture focused on building tools, products, and partnerships that address the artificial living crisis through technology. Where Touch Grass Together moves culture, Nano builds infrastructure — creating solutions at the intersection of AI, metabolic health, and human behavior.
How I Work

Beyond the movement, I advise
the people building around this crisis.

My primary work is leading Touch Grass Together. But the artificial living crisis touches every sector — education, technology, food systems, healthcare, media — and I've found that the perspective I carry is one most rooms don't have. So selectively, I take on outside work.

01

Organizations & Companies

I advise companies, nonprofits, and institutions navigating the intersection of youth health, screen behavior, and metabolic wellness. If your organization is building products, programs, or policies that touch young people's daily environments, I bring a perspective that's hard to find elsewhere — someone who understands both the cultural mechanics of Gen Z and the physiological reality underneath.

02

Individuals

I work with a small number of individuals — young adults, students, anyone stuck in the artificial living loop — who want structured guidance from someone who's been inside it. This isn't coaching or therapy. It's a framework built from lived experience and metabolic health principles, applied directly to your environment and habits.

03

Families

For parents watching their child disappear into screens, isolation, and declining health — I've been that child. I take on a very limited number of family engagements where I assess the full environment, work directly with the young person, and deliver a concrete plan built on the same framework that changed my own life.

All engagements are selective. Reach out and I'll respond personally.

Reach Out

Let's talk.

Whether you're a parent looking for help, an organization exploring a partnership, or a journalist working on this story — I read everything personally.

Prefer email? adnan@nano.industries