Everyone knows what TRT is, everyone wants to ask about, and
one of the downsides of that is that a lot of the time people
who come in wanting TRT treatment, metabolic dumpster
fires. And this is a real problem
because these guys have often destroyed the endocrine system
from years or decades of poor health practices.
When we're looking at low testosterone symptoms, things
like anxiety, depression, poor sleep quality, lack of energy,
anxedonia, which is where people don't feel pleasure from things
that should be pleasurable and enjoyable, lack of focus, lack
of motivation, lack of drive. And the factor that connects
these things as well is that poor diet and lifestyle will
also suppress the testosterone levels.
In all aspects of improving health, whether it's mental
health or physical health, you have to meet the medicine
halfway. And we are live, Dave.
How are you, Sir? My brother, thank you for having
me. Hey man, I'm excited to be
chatting with you. I've had like multiple guests on
talking about all things hormones, TRTHRT.
It's like a super hot topic right now, but I kind of want to
just. Wipe.
The slate clean. Assume I don't know anything and
just start with a clean slate with you, man, because I've
heard nothing but good things about you.
You're super knowledgeable on the subject, so let's just dive
in man. First of all, what gets you into
this realm of information to begin with?
Yes. So it's, it's a little bit of a,
a long back story that I won't bog you down too much with, but
I had no interest in science at all when I was younger.
I was a musician. I did my undergrad degree in
digital marketing and I had a brain injury when I was in my
mid 20s. And every Doctor Who I spoke to
said that there was no way of recovering and I was going to
have this permanent Vertigo state for the rest of my life.
And if it wasn't for initiating TRT during those very dark,
challenging spaces of my life, which was coming up on 10 years
ago now, I don't think I would have had the mental resolve to
go back to university, get a postgraduate degree in science
and, and learn about how to heal the brain.
And also to learn that endocrinology is a very key part
of human health, which I think it's been neglected for a very
long time, both in mental health and physical health.
And that transitions me into becoming a researcher, becoming
an author, becoming a health coach, and now being a part
owner as well as partner of clinics all over the world.
And my key mission has been to educate.
Originally it was to actually raise awareness around TRT
existing, but I think that that's kind of being done now.
Five years ago, no one knew what it was.
Now everyone knows what TRT is, which I think is great, but it's
created this new problem where you can get TRT everywhere, but
no one knows what the hell they're doing with it.
And I think that it has the capacity, of course, more harm
than good. So my mission has been to
educate as many people as possible, both practitioners and
patients, on how to do TRT properly, number one, but #2 how
to do all the other important lifestyle factors that you
ultimately have to do in order to get the results that people
are hoping to get on TRT. Totally agree.
So when you had the injury, how old were you when you got on the
TRT? 25. 25 and I'm assuming, I mean
I've had, I've got one employee actually that had like this
crazy injury and it messed up his endocrine system and he got
on TRT for that reason. But I would assume the majority
of the people that are getting on TRT now are kind of by way of
just lower testosterone in general, low libido, things like
that being the primary draw. Yeah, I would say so.
I think that if we look at the traditional literature and
approach for hypogonadism, that would tend to be like the male
version of menopause. Like a guy gets older, hormones
decline, and then we were still youthful levels, but we've got
this whole cohort of younger guys.
There's a there's a subset of men who messed themselves up
with anabolic steroids and damaged their endocrine system
from that. But we've got this new wave of
younger guys who were coming up who either were unhealthy during
development or for unknown reasons, which I think are
related to environmental factors, that we've got this
whole cohort of younger men who were doing everything right, who
still have the testosterone level of a 90 year old.
And unfortunately, they're going to the doctors or they're going
to healthcare providers. They're being told their levels
are normal. They're getting put on
antidepressants and all kinds of other psychiatric medications.
And the issue is that they just have 1/4 to 1/3 of the
testosterone levels and they should have to thrive.
And they're wondering why they feel like crap, sleep like crap,
have a terrible sex drive, terrible results in the gym, and
ultimately it's because the biologist is completely out of
whack. You.
You probably understand it's way better than me, but isn't it
something like over the last 50 years test average testosterone
has dropped by like 50% or something like that?
It's difficult to measure because we haven't actually been
able to measure or we haven't wanted to slash being able to in
science and measure testosterone levels for that long.
So we've only got a handful of decades of data to look at.
Like we don't know what a healthy 20 year old in the 1930s
or 1940s had because we weren't able to measure levels in serum
not far back. But there's been some
interesting research that's come out in this field showing
massive declines in testosterone and sperm levels.
The most interesting study that I saw, it wasn't actually
intending to measure this. It was actually an
interventional trial using estrogen blocking medication.
And when they noted the participants, they had
participants under the age of 30 and participants over the age of
65. And the authors, authors noted
that before starting the trial that there was no statistical
significantly different level of the younger man versus the older
men's testosterone levels. So the way that I describe it to
people is the average 20 to 30 year old these days has the same
amount of testosterone as the average 7 year old these days,
and that's the problem. That is pretty well man.
What what do you think the it's, it's a myriad of things I'm
assuming, but what do you think like the primary drivers for
that average is decreasing over time as a result of?
I think that there's a huge amount of factors that we don't
know which one is causing the lion's share of the issue.
So we know that there's the environmental disruption.
So I call it the three PS, the plastics pollutions and the
pesticides. These are the environmental,
what are called xenoestrogenic estrogenic chemicals, meaning
that we're taking unnatural synthetic molecules and they're
getting into the human body and trace amounts through just
living and exposure. And when they bind to the
internal estrogen receptor, they have a much stronger effect than
natural biological estrogen does.
And this can cause some negative feedback in terms of the way
that the brain produces hormones.
The other factor though, which I think is often overlooked, is
the obesity epidemic and also the lifestyle factors that come
with that, the processed food, the lack of exercise, the lack
of sunlight, etcetera. And I think one factor that
people massively overlook, but it becomes abundantly clear when
you start to look for it in clinical practice, is obesity
during puberty. I mean, this is a new thing.
I mean, in the 60s and 70s, kids weren't obese during puberty.
It just wasn't a thing. This has been a modern
phenomenon. And I think when the endocrine
system is developing, if someone is metabolically significantly
diseased during that period, I also think antidepressant
medications might be a factor as well.
But I think particularly obesity and inactivity, while that
system is developing, stunts its capacity to reach its full
potential. That's just what I've seen, and
I hope that the literature catches up and looks into this,
because it's pretty damn obvious when you look.
Yeah. Do you think there's much of an
impact from like a genetic and epigenetics standpoint?
Because like, I look at my life, you know, personally and I'm
healthy, I'm eating all the right foods.
I've like removed all the negative chemicals, the soaps,
like I purify my water. Like I I do all the right
things, check all the boxes, so to speak.
But I've never had particularly high testosterone.
So I'm in my mind, it's like, well, maybe I'm coming from some
genetic standpoint that just doesn't have that high
testosterone to begin with. So do you think there's that
much of an impact? Epigenetics are really big, and
epigenetics is a much more exciting field for people to be
looking into than genetics because epigenetics are how
things express. So you've got genetic things,
for example, like the color of your eyes, like nothing is going
to change that in terms of how you're living.
That's passed down in hereditary.
So when we're looking at epigenetics, there's a lot more
research now showing that. I mean, it's what we all know
just from common sense. Healthy parents have healthy
kids, unhealthy parents have unhealthy kids.
And we're learning more about how the health of the parents,
both the mother when she's pregnant, but also both parents
in the years prior to conception, will impact the
health of the child in the way that child's genetics will
express. So I think it is a huge, huge,
huge factor. And I think that there are some
things that people can do in terms of their diet and
lifestyle factors to change the way these epigenetics express.
But I also think that some of us are just dealt a certain hand.
And I don't think it's ideal that younger people need hormone
replacement therapy. I think that's a big shame.
I mean, hormone replacement therapy is a big serious medical
intervention, but so is being hypogonadal for your entire
adult life. So if we're in a situation where
we're saying, OK, this is something that people are being
born with now and it's an issue of the modern diet and
lifestyle, If it's not something that we're able to correct, it
is something that we're able to intervene with.
And the outcomes that we see from intervening with that are
absolutely life changing, which is why I dedicated my whole life
in Korea to advancing this field and also, you know, champion and
advocating for men to really be educated on the topic and also
be able to have informed conversations with seeking out
therapy to improve their life. Totally.
And if people go to like get their blood drawn, I mean all
these tests have like a window of what they say the ideal range
is. But like when you look at total
testosterone, that window is like from 200 to 1200 or
something crazy. So you could be in range at, you
know, 20250IN. You working with people over the
years, Like what would you say is the optimal range that people
should strive for? You know, more narrowed down
than what that broad range exhibits.
Yeah, it's, it's really challenging when people are
looking at the ranges, especially when people are
interpreting their own blood work.
And I think access to information is great, but I also
think that access to information that you don't understand can
lead to bad decisions. So one of the challenges is that
when you're looking at your blood tests and it says that you
should be between X&Y, the question is what does that
actually mean? And people think that if it's
below that or above that, you've got a problem.
And if you're within that range, then you're fine.
You know, if it comes up bold and in red, then there's an
issue. And for some blood markers,
that's absolutely true. The ranges absolutely do
represent what is healthy and what is unhealthy.
But the problem with a lot of these blood markers is that
they're just adjusted based on averages.
So when we look at science, the terms that we use would be the
mean, which is like the average, and then standard deviation,
which is basically how far away from the average these things
are. And this is how they calculate
the range. So when you're looking at your
total testosterone blood work and it's got a range of let's
say like, you know, 200 used to be like 200 to 1200.
Now it's often like 200 to 700 because it's falling in absolute
freefall. Like I've witnessed it fall
dramatically, like significantly just in the five years without
in doing this. But if you're looking at that
number, all you're looking at is the average and then the
standard deviation of the last 100 or 200 guys that got their
testosterone level checked. It's not a benchmark or a
standard of what it is to be healthy.
It's just a representation of the average cohort.
The problem that we have is that the average healthy athletic
young man is not the standard population that's getting that
testosterone checked on average, because the indication for
measuring testosterone levels in the blood from a medical
perspective is for prostate symptoms.
So what we're typically looking out on paper is actually the
average of elderly men with prostate symptoms, and it's not
age adjusted. You know, when you look at a
woman's progesterone level, they've got different reference
ranges for if she's postmenopausal or where she is
during a menstrual cycle. But if you're looking at a
testosterone level for a man, it's the same reference range if
he's 18 or 80. So this can create a lot of
problems for people. So because the reference range
has fallen so dramatically in Australia, we use the units and
animal per liter for total testosterone.
So the numbers look a little bit different.
But when I started, the reference range was 10 to 35.
The reference range is now 6 to 24.
That's massively different if you're looking at where you sit
relative to like the middle of the court bottom quartile or the
top quartile of the range. So what is now mid range used to
be bottom quarter. So unless you're in the top
quartile of the reference range when you're getting your
testosterone levels checked, it doesn't necessarily mean and go,
OK, well, I'm below the top quartile so I need TRT, I've got
a problem. But what it does mean that if
you are having some negative symptoms and you're not feeling
100%, it's really important to not just look at testosterone,
but you look at the entire blood panel.
And when I say you look at it, I mean that you solicit someone
who knows what they're doing. You can see the whole picture
together. And also who is advocating for
your best interest? Unfortunately, there's a lot of
people out there who just sell you testosterone and peptides
and injectable beers and whatever pills because that's
how they make their money. But if you work with someone who
actually knows what they're doing, they can look at your
symptoms and how you're feeling and say, look, this is actually
something that you could and maybe should intervene with to
have a better quality of life. Or if they know what they're
doing, they can say, well, actually your levels are pretty
average, but the way you're looking after yourself is pretty
damn average as well. And if you're not sleeping
properly, you're not eating properly, you're drinking a
bunch of alcohol, you're not exercising, you're able weight,
then you're not going to have optimal testosterone levels.
And that's what you should expect.
So it's important that people understand that sometimes this
condition can be intractable, meaning it can't be solved and
it requires intervention. But other times people's
testosterone levels suck because they're looking off themselves
like shit. And that's just how the body
works. Yeah, no, I think lifestyle
factor is huge for sure. When you when you're looking at,
you know, you mentioned kind of like you look at women, they're
going through menopause, their different menstrual cycles are
going to expect different ranges in in the realm of males, what
would be, you know, textbook expectation throughout their
livelihood, like a different ages, puberty as they get older.
Like what? What can someone expect if they
are healthy? If they are doing the things
right? Like what?
What would be an ideal trend line, so to speak?
If we're going to talk about total testosterone, which is a
measure of what the body produces, so there's two lab
markers we typically look at for testosterone 1's total, which is
either how much you're making or how much you're taking.
And then freeze testosterone, which is more of an indication
of what's working at a receptor level.
But that's going to be impacted by other binding proteins and
their production in the body. So if we're talking about total
testosterone, I think a good healthy level for a young man is
1000. If it's got 4 digits and that's
really healthy, you definitely want to be closer to 1000 than
500. I think that's a good rule of
thumb. The problem is that guys are
walking around with A200300400 testosterone level.
This is what we would expect for a guy in your 60s and seven.
So if you're in your 30s or if you're in your early 40s and
you're thriving and doing well, 708 hundred testosterone is
good. If you're younger and you're
kicking ass and you're looking after yourself really well, 1000
plus is fantastic. Anything on the 500 or mid 5
hundreds I would be looking at as suboptimal and anything below
that you're looking at maybe needing an intervention in terms
of therapy. Now there are differentiating
factors in terms of something called receptor availability.
So hormones don't do anything in the body unless they activate a
receptor. Kind of like if you're playing
pinball, you don't get any points until it hits the
bumpers. So we can't measure things like
receptor availability. So some guys might feel great at
500 because they have this genetic expression where they're
more sensitive to the antigens. So it's not a hard rule or
anything like that. But you want to be shooting for
4 digits or close to that to have good testosterone levels.
And then when we optimize testosterone levels exogenously,
we can sometimes look to push it a little bit higher, because
what we find in practice is that external testosterone isn't
quite as efficient as naturally made testosterone.
So sometimes levels have to be a little bit on the higher end to
achieve a result. But we're also in a situation
where we're saying, well, we've already shut the endocrine
system down. It takes just as much work to
inject this much as it does to inject a fraction more.
So now we can actually achieve what the optimal level of
testosterone could have been all along.
And that's where the magic can happen.
You can turn a bad situation into a good situation.
Got you. If someone has more sensitive
receptors, for instance, if we can't test for that, do we do
things based more so off of symptoms and how they're
feeling? And I'm, and if so, what is it
you're looking for? Like who's a good candidate for
TRT in that regard? Because I again, use myself an
example. I've never had super high
levels, but I don't really feel any of the things that people
that reportedly have low levels are expressing.
So I would assume that maybe my receptors are more sensitive.
Absolutely. So it's very important to look
at the cross section of symptoms in lab work.
The problem with low testosterone symptoms isn't that
very broad and very ambiguous. So one thing is that low
testosterone symptoms and low thyroid symptoms are virtually
identical. So it's always important that we
also screen the thyroid dysfunction as well because that
can also be a factor. But when we're looking at low
testosterone symptoms, things like anxiety, depression, poor
sleep quality, lack of energy, anxedonia, which is where people
don't feel pleasure from things that should be pleasurable and
enjoyable, lack of focus, lack of motivation, lack of drive,
sexual dysfunction, not waking up with erections, things like
this. The problem is that those
symptoms can all be caused by poor dying lifestyle, and the
factor that connects these things as well is that poor diet
and lifestyle will also suppress the testosterone levels.
So the body is a very complex series of interconnected systems
and one of the failures of many aspects of healthcare,
everything from fitness and nutrition all the way to Western
medicine, is that we view everything in isolation.
It's like going to five different types of mechanics and
having them all service one individual component of your
car. It doesn't make any sense and it
doesn't deliver the best outcome.
So the challenge for a practitioner who actually cares
about their patients or clients and knows what they're doing is
that we have to look at how the individual's feeling, look at
their blood work, and say, are these symptoms actually coming
from the levels being suboptimal?
And if so, are the levels suboptimal in a way that we
can't resolve? And there are markers in the
blood work that we can look at to see if testosterone
production is being suppressed. If the testicles are failing, we
can also look at other blood markers to suggest, hey, is this
person pre diabetic? Do they have something like
fatty liver disease? Are they eating a garbage diet
that's jacking their triglycerides up?
We can get a lot of indicators that really give us some good
insight on how someone's looking after themselves, but it's also
incredibly important. This is why 15 minute doctor's
appointments don't work, is that people need to be upfront and
disclose all aspects of how they're looking after
themselves. Because some people have those
symptoms because, you know, they've got a newborn baby and
they're an entrepreneur and they're not sleeping properly
like that. There can be so many factors
that will lead to these symptoms in a transient way.
And if you come in and supercharge the engine by
cranking up the testosterone levels, if the body is naturally
suppressing that system, you're not going to end up with a
smooth ride forward. If the body's pumping the brakes
and you're pumping the accelerator, you're not working
with the body now, you're working against it.
So when you go and see someone with these symptoms and
comprehensive blood work, it really has to be a skillful
practitioner or an expert looking at this to actually make
the diagnosis to say, yeah, look, TRT would be in your best
interest. Or maybe you just need to fix
these other factors and see how you go and then come back over
time to see if you're feeling. Yeah, I definitely want to talk
about the the landscape of TRT as you see it.
Real quick before I forget though, Andrew kept messaging me
about this graph that he's seen you illustrate that basically
just talks about, you know, lifestyle factors in current day
society, like as as people get busier, they have kids, they're
young professionals. It's kind of like corresponding
with what's happening naturally in the body with testosterone.
I don't know if you know what graph he's talking about, but if
you do, can you elaborate on that?
Yeah, interesting story with that one.
So I was, I was emailing the team at the Mark Bell Powell
Project to ask if I could be a guest for like a year.
And, you know, never heard that. Totally fine.
I'm sure they got a whole bunch of emails.
And then when I did my speech at the Silverback Summit, I did
this graph the night before in Canva with like squiggly lines
that I just, you know, I don't have any graphic design skills.
And after the speech, Andrew saw my speech and he was like, hey,
you need to come on the power project and you need to bring
that graph. And I was like, well, I need to
do the graph a little bit better because the one that I did looks
like absolute garbage. So the power project came out a
couple of days ago, the graph presentations at the end, but
I'll explain it to you now. So the, the way that I look at
it. So I'm, I'm very interested in
behavioral psychology and I'm very interested in
neuropsychiatry. So the difference between
psychology and psychiatry. Psychology is more about
behavior, mood, emotions, and psychiatry is more about the
architecture of the brain and neurotransmission and how this
facilitates the psychology of the individual.
So I'm very interested in both of these things.
And when I did my post grad, it's called a postgraduate
diploma, so you can do a master's in a field that you
didn't do your original undergrad in.
I did that in biomedical science so that I could do
neuropsychiatry to learn how to heal the brain.
Turns out psychiatry is just about drugging people, so I
dropped out of it pretty quickly.
But the reason I got into looking at testosterone was that
when you look at it from a psychiatric perspective,
testosterone is basically the perfect pharmacological
antidepressant for men in terms of how it impacts
neurotransmission. So when we look at how
testosterone levels work in in, well, both men and women, but
particularly in men, basically you flatline the testosterone up
until you get puberty. And then you get that big spike
that everyone's aware of when you're 18 to 21, depending on
your development. And then assuming that you look
after yourself in a relatively consistent way over the course
of your life, you get a relatively linear decline.
You know, women more so get a crash when they get menopause.
Men get more of a really gradual insidious decline over their
lifetime, but it peaks when you're 18 to 21, and then it
gradually declines after that. And when we look at how life
tends to work, again, assuming that people don't have a
traumatic childhood and assuming that things go relatively OK to
people, life's pretty crazy when you're a toddler and when your
testosterone's low, you don't have any responsibilities.
You're going to school, you're playing video games, hang out
with your friends. And then as you get older,
there's this increased burden of performance that men have.
You know, I think that we really become adults at 30, not at 18,
you know, 18 year old boys and not adults.
They can just legally drink and drive.
They're not adults. I think men become adults when
they hit 30. And then as you get towards your
40s, you're more expected to have some degree of mastery
either over a skill over yourself, over leading a family,
over leading other people. It's expected that a 40 or a 45
year old man is going to have his shit together, whereas it's
kind of acceptable for a 20 to 25 year old guy to still be like
finding himself and goofing around a bit from like a
societal standpoint. So as the burden of performance
goes up in life, the testosterone levels are there to
buffer that, and that all works out pretty well.
And then as the testosterone levels go down over time, the
burden of performance also goes down because as you get older,
you've built your family, you've built your legacy, you can kind
of sit back, put your feet up, retire, and chill out.
The problem that we're having though, is that that burden of
performance in society hasn't gone away.
Absolutely not. But if the testosterone levels
are peaking at half of where they were before, all of a
sudden now the burden of performance for men is still up
here, but the testosterone levels are at that 7 year old
level when you're 20 or 21 and it's all downhill.
So the problem that I think, and what I see is that we have these
younger guys who don't have the biological foundation to buffer
them against the stresses of life.
Because when we look at what testosterone does internally in
terms of your biology but also in terms of your psychology, it
buffers against the effects of stress.
So things are still difficult in life when you've got higher
testosterone levels, but that challenge of pushing outside
your comfort zone feels better. You know, I think it's Andrew
Huberman who says that testosterone makes effort feel
good. And that's a very good way to
summarize how it works because it facilitates dopamine
transmission, which is like our pleasure neurotransmitter, but
it buffers and offsets for a lot of the activity of cortisol and
adrenaline in the body. And when we look at what
leadership is, which I think if people say, well, what is
masculinity, Masculinity is leadership is testosterone
creates the capacity to develop leadership because leadership is
being cool, calm and collected and rational in stressful
situations that would overwhelm other people.
That's what leadership is. So if men are lacking that
leadership and that that drive and that ability to push outside
their comfort zone and make something of themselves in the
early phases of their life, I think it can be quite
challenging, demoralizing, guilt inducing, anxiety inducing to
get into your 30s and 40s and feel like you're behind the 8
ball. Feeling like you don't have
something to show for it, feeling like you're still a
shadow of who you should be even when you're trying your hardest
and doing everything right. You're feeling fatigued and
tired and drained like a 50 year old when you're 30.
And I think how that impacts the trajectory of where you end up
and the life you can ultimately live is very sad.
And I think that that can lead people to developing and living
a depressive life, which ultimately resolves in a
depressive mental health disorder.
So it's it's more so looking at this idea that if testosterone
is not there to create the foundation for someone to deal
with the challenges of development and life, that as a
result, they can get very easily overwhelmed.
They can become avoided, they can become passive and
complacent, and they can become almost a victim of their
circumstances. And I see that play out and I
think it can be devastating. Yeah, it's, it's it's unsettling
how much more rampant the use of antidepressants SSR is.
And things of that nature have come.
I mean, like, I don't know, so many people that are on it now.
It's like, I don't recall any of that ten years ago.
You also make a good argument with that for like kids,
adolescents, teenagers having more hardship and responsibility
bestowed upon them at an earlier age to kind of just build that
foundation up while their natural levels are significantly
higher, which is also totally counter to all our system as it
sits currently. I mean, kids go to high school,
which is super chill, and they go to college, which is also
typically pretty chill. They may be broke, but like
there's not that much responsibility and they graduate
college and they go, you know, maybe corporate America, who
knows, But there's not generally a ton of responsibility until
30s and beyond from what I've seen in general day-to-day
society. It's, it was interesting when I
was at university. I mean, at every point that
you're at in life, you know, you're probably dealing with the
hardest challenges that you've developed in terms of like, you
know, where you're at. You know, I remember year 12
exams seemed like the end of the world.
You know, looking back on that, that was just a piece of cake.
Universities seem to be challenging when you've got all
these assessments and deadlines and you're working a part time
job. But at the end of the day, the
burden of performance and the responsibility is so low.
And one of the things I see a lot of guys really struggling
with, especially when they start to have a family before they've
learned to look after themselves properly, which I think a lot of
the time can be a real challenge and sometimes a mistake as well
if they're not ready for it. But when you become an adult,
and especially if you're running a business or you're providing
for a household, there's only 24 hours in a day.
You need to sleep for about 7 to 9 of those hours.
And if you're not effectively managing your time for the rest
of it, you don't have the resources to work a fulfilling
career, look after your health and fitness, and also have
healthy relationships and healthy spiritual development as
well. So a lot of the time people get
very overwhelmed with realizing just how much execution and
planning goes into proper self-care.
Because if you're managing your nutrition, managing your
training, and you're working 40 hours a week, you don't really
have time to get wasted on a Saturday night and be hungover
all day Sunday. And for the guys who continue to
do that as they get older into their 30s and 40s, they're
really behind the 8 ball and that's when things can start
catching up with them. So when you don't have that
internal drive and energetic resources of having a good
energy metabolism, which is also supported by the endocrine
system, it can be very difficult to live a life that is not
overwhelmingly stressful and still have something to show for
it at the end of the day. Yeah, completely agree.
When it comes to like we're also in this like weird state where
infertility rates are significantly high.
Is that how tightly linked is that to total testosterone, free
testosterone? Is that more so the health of
the sperm, sperm motility, things like that?
Like how closely linked is all that?
There's not a lot of data linking the two, which doesn't
make any sense because obviously the sperm and the testicles are,
you know, kind of interconnected in virtually every way.
So there's absolutely a connection.
It's not really deniable with this stage.
One thing that's interesting for me, So if I look around at women
who I've met over the course of my life, who've been about my
age, give or take, more than half of them have had issues
with their menstrual cycle. Whether it's like brutally
painful periods, endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome,
losing their period when they're stressed, all that kind of stuff
is rampant in women under 35. When my parents were that age,
they didn't know anyone with those problems.
This wasn't the thing. And when it comes to men, those
issues are still prevalent and present.
The symptoms of them just don't really show up until it comes
time to fire the children. So it's very concerning how many
young and relatively healthy people are having problems with
fertility. And it can be very scary and
very devastating when guys in their mid 30s are having trouble
conceiving. And one of the challenges that I
see when guys do their sperm analysis is a lot of the time
the issue is in the lack of sperm production.
It's a high percentage of sperm that are not healthy.
So either they're lazy and the sperm aren't moving properly, or
they have a higher rate of deformity.
So there's always going to be some deformed sperm in an
ejaculate load when they do a test on it.
But we're seeing guys who are having all kinds of deformities
in their sperm and I think that this is a downstream effect of
long term metabolic dysfunction. So people being a little bit
overweight for way too long is basically causing them to be pre
diabetic or sometimes they're even in type 2 diabetes realm
and they don't realize it. This has huge negative effects
on sperm parameters and fertility.
But the other factor which unfortunately I mean the SSRI
hypothesis of depression, which was called the monomine
hypothesis of depression, which was this theory to monomine
meaning 1 neurotransmitter, in which this case was serotonin.
There was this theory in the 80s that people were depressed
because their brain was broken and it didn't produce enough
serotonin to make them happy. And this theory was thoroughly
debunked in the 90s. Both in terms of looking at the
mechanisms of how depression works, but then also looking at
all the massive amounts of data on interventional trials with
SSRIs where they found that the placebo beat the SSRI.
So the SSRI didn't work, or the SSRI was outperformed by other
interventions like diet and lifestyle.
But unfortunately, even though that research was so, so
abundantly clear, we're like 3 decades down the line from this
and this is still the modern paradigm that's being practiced
in psychiatry. When someone goes to the doctor
and they're saying I don't feel good in my life, the doctor
isn't looking at anything in terms of their diet, lifestyle,
blood work, anything like that. They've just got a little
handbook that says if someone's sad, give them this many
milligrams of Zoloft and send them on their way.
And the problem is that not only does this not actually help the
issue, but it's leading to downstream ramifications.
And I'm seeing this show up a lot of the time in fertility as
well. So psychiatric medications for
men as well as hormonal birth control for women.
You know, it's, it's crazy to me that women are getting pushed
onto the pill by their doctor for acne when they're like 14
years old and they're not looking at other factors for
that. And then, yeah, we're getting
into our 30s, wanting to have kids, and we've got a decade of
psychiatric or hormonal birth control medication use.
And all of a sudden the fertility complications are
there. And we're not really sure how
this is going to affect the next generation of kids.
And I think that's a little bit scary.
Yeah, from an epigenetic standpoint, man, this is super
scary because like you look at your lifestyle decisions having
a profound impact on like the next three generations.
And if we've got the infertility issues or if you've been, if
you've been fathered by lazy sperm, quote UN quote, like
that's not a positive thing either.
And people on all these medications as they're getting
pregnant, that having an impact on the fetus.
Like I don't know what the solution is to all this, but it
seems like it's going to be by way of like some implosion at
some point, not too distant future.
It will definitely reach a critical point.
And, you know, we have the declining birth rates at the
moment, which I think it's scary.
But when we reach the point, I think in the next decade, there
are some projections that the majority of adults will be
infertile in a decade. I think that's when people are
going to get a wake up call because a lot of people are
having a wake up call on an individual level.
But from a societal standpoint, I think it's swept under the rug
because when people have problems paying their bills or
paying their rent or affording food at the grocery store, this
kind of stuff isn't a priority. And that makes perfect sense.
You know, we have this Maslow's hierarchy of needs and, you
know, basic food, food, water, shelter is the foundation.
So when that's under stress, everything else falls by the
wayside. And that's just human nature.
There's nothing wrong with that. But the chronic disease
epidemic, including mental health, obesity, autoimmune
disease, all of these things that we're seeing a huge
percentage of young people who have chronic disease.
Now, when we eventually realize that it's all to do with diet
and lifestyle. I mean, I live in Eastern
Europe. I traveled to America, in the UK
and Australia multiple times a year.
And the difference is stock. You know, when you're just
looking around in the street at the average people in the
average supermarket, the West is significantly sicker than places
like Eastern Europe, even though we're much poorer over here.
There's a lot more economical challenges here.
It's a lot darker in winter here.
There's a lot more alcohol and smoking here.
There's all of these factors which people think would be
worse, but the modern diet and lifestyle in Western countries
is death by 1000 cuts. And it's exciting that so many
people are waking up before they get sick in terms of saying,
hey, I'm in my 20s and in my 30s and I want to focus on longevity
now. I want to start looking after
myself now so that I have a better chance to be around my
grandkids and live a long, happy, healthy, you know, high
quality life. But then the challenge is, well,
how do you do that? Because depending on which
website you go on or which YouTube rabbit hole your
algorithm puts you down, you could come out with a completely
different strategy with the same goal.
Yeah, it is. It is interesting, man, because
I feel like there's definitely an abundance of information,
Internet, technology, social media has made that apparent.
There's no shortage of that. And it's like the people that
are invested in their health that want to get better, Like
there's definitely a demographic of population that's growing in
that. But it seems like at the same
time, there's this growing demographic that's just getting
worse and worse and worse. And I think that latter
demographic is growing at a bigger, more expedient rate than
the, you know, the the other. So I feel like that implosion
point is bound to happen and it's just going to be a a
widening of the haves and have not gap in health.
Typically people think of that in finances or wealth, But like
in health, at the end of the day man, if you don't get your
health like everything else is for naughty.
You know, I have to say my, there's two points there.
So my mentor Paul Check has this saying, which is that sooner or
later everyone's health becomes their number one priority, which
is absolutely true. But the point that you raised
there is very true. And I hadn't made that
connection before, which is that, you know, we looked at
like during the COVID era and the destruction of the middle
class, which was basically, if you took 10 people who were
middle class, nine of them got pushed down and then one of them
went up via entrepreneurship and became wealthier based on the
situation. And I think exactly what you
just alluded to, the same thing is happening with health is that
one or two people out of 10 are reclaiming their health and
getting better. But eight or nine people out of
those 10 getting worse and worse because there's more hyper
palatable food, there's more things like Uber Eats, there's
more stimulation you can get from the screen in your pocket
than ever before. And it's never been easier to
live a terribly unhealthy lifestyle than it is right now.
Like it absolutely is effortless to treat your the body like a
dumpster fire. And also with the working from
home movement, you know, that creates opportunity for people
to live a much healthier life, but it also creates A tendency
and an impulse for people to be way lazier because you can just
stay at home and do whatever you like all the time, but no
supervision. So people are like, oh, I'm not
trapped in an office all day. So the people who were actually
proactive with the health can go, OK, instead of commuting, I
can, you know, get some workouts in.
I can go for a walk during the day.
Like, you know, I can maybe get some workout equipment at home
and stretch out and do some yoga or some body weight work, you
know, between my calls or whatever.
And I can have healthy home cooked food at home in the
fridge. There's so many benefits to it.
But then I'm also seeing by and large, the majority of people
that step count goes down to like 3000 steps a day that then
on your dedicated exercise movement just completely falls
by the wayside. They roll out of bed, they roll
straight onto Microsoft Teams. They're not going for a walk,
they're not getting any sunshine because they're just following
the impulses and they're saying, well, it's just never being
easier to be lazier. And then when they're.
Looking on Instagram and they're making this upward comparison to
all these other people who are projecting a version of their
life which looks so much more attractive and sexy and
desirable and successful. I think that it's just leading
people to absolutely destroying their physical and mental health
because they're not taking agency and it's easy to be like
everyone else. It is easy to be complacent.
It is easy to be compliant. It is easy to follow the path of
least resistance. I mean, that's baked into human
nature is to conserve resources. But people have to wake up to
realize that the modern diet and lifestyle and environment, if
you don't proactively work against it and take initiatives,
it'll destroy you. Yeah, It's interesting.
I had Mark Bell on the podcast earlier this week, and we were
talking about this very thing. And it's like, you know, humans
are very vain creatures. Like, we're creature habits.
We want things to be convenient. We want things to be easy.
It's never been easier to be unhealthy, but it's also never
been easier to like be healthy too.
Like you got so many tools, so many wearables, so many tracking
devices and technology, so many good quality food options that
are out there. And like he's got standards for
himself. I've got tension for myself.
You do as well. Like we would not tolerate, you
know, putting on an additional 30 lbs of pure fat.
Like we would fight against that out of our own self-interest and
preservation. And you would think like people
that you know are feeling unhealthy or obese, they would
want to feel better and have a higher quality of life.
But it's almost like society's standards, what's what's deemed
acceptable by society has decreased so drastically over
the year, over the years due to body positivity or just
whatever. And it's like people's
individual standards have rather than held stable and true, have
just like followed suit with what society is accepting.
And it's a sad reality to to witness, but man, it's
definitely happening. It's it definitely is.
And you raise a really good point on food there.
And this is something I bring up all the time.
So one thing that blew my mind when I was in the States, I
mean, there was two things. One is the junk food over there
is incredibly delicious. Like I see why so many people
are fat. Like the burgers and the stuff
you guys have over there. Incredible.
But the other thing that you guys have there is you have the
most incredible meal prep services that just blow my mind.
The two that I tried obviously don't have any affiliation with
anything in the US, but like I tried the Nutrition Solutions
meals and the Icon meals when I was at my friend Ellie Gilberts
house. Meh.
Like in Australia, the best meal, like the fitness meal prep
stuff that you can get all tastes like garbage.
Like some of it tastes OK, but you'd never look forward to it.
It's like a 5 out of 10 at best. I was eating those nutrition
solution and Icon meals and I was like, this is unreal.
This stuff is awesome. And because you've got so many
companies, it's in the best interest of the consumer because
they're all competing, so they have to compete on prep.
So it's affordable. But when I was doing rehab for
my brain injury, like I started exploring back when Dominic
d'agostino was first on Joe Rogan talking about the
ketogenic diet. So that's when I kind of first
looked into food to be like, okay, maybe there's more to food
than just macros and how this tastes.
I mean, this was many, many, many years ago.
So I had to learn how to cook. I had to learn how to, you know,
buy the right ingredients. But because I was also doing
rehab for a brain injury and I couldn't work, I was on a
budget. So, you know, I learned how to
cook things like Stan Efforting's Monster mash.
I learned how to meal prep properly.
And then through experience, I learned to go and hang on.
This isn't just about how I look in terms of, you know, calories
and macros. This is the food that is
building every cell in my body that's driving me to feel the
way that I feel every day. And the stuff that I teach my
clients is going, look, you can every now and then you can eat
out in a way that fits your macros.
You can go to the restaurant and you can order your thing.
And you know, you could be out and about travelling and find
the place on Uber Eats that does the healthy thing and get it
delivered. And that's fine to do every now
and then. But you can't live on take out
food, even if it's macro friendly, you can't do it
because there's just so much crap that goes into all those
processed foods that people are buying that over time it causes
a problem. So either you have to learn how
to cook, you have to hire someone to cook for you like a
meal prep company, or if you're doing really well financially,
you can hire a chef, or you can do what I did and marry a woman
who cooks. But you've got to do one of
those four things. And for most people, it's going
to be learning to cook or doing the meal prep delivery thing.
And if people don't look at that as a foundation of going, like I
see people obsessing over their supplement stacks and they
obsess over milligrams of this and milligrams of that, but they
completely neglect the kilograms of food they're putting into
their body. So when we're looking at taking
agency over our life, the first thing that we have to look at is
the fuel. Like when I like my dog just
turned 1 year old, beautiful black Labrador.
And when he meets up with the other puppies from his Lissa,
which I think is awesome, we do it every few months, He looks
significantly better than the other puppies in his litter
because we're very meticulous with the diet that we feed it.
And when you start to look at that in people as well, you can
tell the quality of someone's diet by their skin, by their
mood, by their energy levels, by how they act.
And that's why, you know, I, I, I love Mark's content.
I've been following Mark for a long time before I did his
podcast. You know, he's had a very
interesting kind of journey over the, the foods that he's kind of
advocated in the way that he's eaten through self
experimentation. But the thing that I think he's
done very, very well for people who disagree with the to and
froing over certain macros is that there's a huge onus and
emphasis on being attentive and being aware of the quality of
the stuff that you're ingesting. Because once you swallow that
food, all of that stuff is being absorbed into your bloodstreams
through the mucous membrane in your body.
It's literally becoming part of you, and you're having a
biochemical reaction to the last meal you ate for about up to
three days to completely eliminate that from the body.
So that's the first thing in America that people need to be
focusing on is saying you guys have the so many options and so
many temptations to eat so much extremely hyper palatable
garbage that is so tempting and it's everywhere and it's super
available. But you also have such
incredible food that you can get prepped for you or that you can
buy from the supermarket or that you can buy from places like
Whole Foods and you can work out a strategy that fits your
budget. If you don't have any time,
spend your money on meal prep. If you don't have any money and
you have an abundance of time, learn how to cook.
Everyone sucks at cooking. When people say, oh, I can't
cook, that's like saying, oh, I can't roll the blade.
It's like we just haven't learned how to do it.
It's a skill that you don't have.
You're not. So like some people are born
master chefs. Like it's a skill.
So when I first started cooking, my meal sucked.
By the time I got good at cooking monster mash because
it's all I could afford for like a year, I would be like drooling
when I was microwaving that next meal because I was so excited.
Like I think one of the ultimate bio hacks because I'm so sick of
all these bio hackers just selling affiliate code nonsense.
The ultimate bio hack is learning how to cook a meal that
you look forward to more than anything that you can order off
at Uber Eats. That's the buyer. 100 percent,
100% man, 100% It's it's funny because like, I wouldn't think
that someone that's £400 and obese would argue that, you
know, fast food take out from McDonald's is healthy.
I don't think anybody is delusional to thinking that.
But I feel like people are ignorant to how much that truly
impacts things, especially when compounded over a lifetime.
And I was on a podcast the other day and they were like, look, if
you had a Lamborghini car that you'd saved up years for and
bought, you're not going to put the cheapest, you know, fuel in.
You're going to put the premium quality fuel in it.
It's like, it's the same thing with your body.
Like your body is your vehicle for life.
It's your vessel. You've only got one of them.
And I feel like if people just simply made that association,
they would at least hopefully think twice before putting
something in their mouth. And like, for me, I've been
following the same diet for over a decade now because I've tried
multiple diets and know it works for me.
I know it feels optimally. And if I go out and eat
something that's even slightly off my plan, I feel it the next
day. And that's not a worthwhile
trade off for me. And if people, just people just
don't know how to be in tune with their body and know what
feeling good feels like, I think is also often times the issue as
well. When it comes to food and you
having such an emphasis on optimizing hormone levels, is
there a specific dietary protocol or macro split or
certain foods that you try to incorporate on a regular basis?
So I've I've done and tried everything nutritionally.
I'm a very big advocate for both learning in terms of science,
but also learning by experience as well.
So when it comes to supplements or medications or nutrition
strategies, I don't even work with or recommend anything that
I haven't worked with myself personally and also understood
in terms of science as well. So I did a ketogenic thing when
I had the brain injury. And if it wasn't for that, I
wouldn't have been able to function enough to go back to
working three days a week at a minimum wage job.
There was something about the ketogenic diet, and I assume
it's the way that it reduces neural inflammation, increases
GABA signaling that allowed me to function when I was in a
brain injury state. And I also did the carnival
thing for a little bit. I didn't find that that worked
particularly well for me. This was back when it was, you
know, first kind of popularized. I never did a full vegan thing
because that just didn't make any sense to me to even try.
But I have done like a very heavily kind of plant focused
diet with just a small amount of meat.
And then I've also kind of done the inverse with like a very
heavily meat focused diet and small amounts of fruits and you
know, bittersweet potato and stuff like that and everything
in between. If people are looking for a
framework to follow, I think Stan Efforting's vertical diet
is a really good model that obviously you adjust areas of it
because unless you're a high level athlete strongman, you
don't need to be eating, you know, 600 grams of carbohydrates
from white rice. But from a model standpoint, in
terms of looking at what are the easiest foods to digest, which
are the highest in micronutrients that match the
requirements of of the human body, I think the vertical diet
is a foundation. And then tweaking and changing
that based on what you digest. Well, what you do and don't like
is a good model. I also think Mike Dolce has a
fantastic approach in nutrition. If people want someone to follow
and look up to and just have a framework or someone to just
look at and go, I don't want to learn every aspect of this.
I don't want to spend hours on YouTube learning about
nutrition. You know, who can I just listen
to? I think Mike Dolce gets it right
in terms of the foods for supporting hormone levels.
There's a lot of debates and arguments around whether people
should or shouldn't eat meat, whether people should or
shouldn't eat plants, that the way that it works is that you
can absolutely survive on a carnivore diet.
That's true. But to thrive, we do benefit
from phytonutrients. So phytonutrients are not
necessary for human supply, but they are necessary for a lot of
helpful biological factors for the human Organism.
So I think the best diet is something that includes
nutrients that are fat soluble in bioavailable form.
So for example, if you look at something like a carrot or a
sweet potato, they're orange. So they contain beta carotene,
which is the precursor of the vitamin A vitamin A is one of
the five fat soluble nutrients being AEDK and cholesterol and
vitamin A is very important. But a lot of people,
particularly Caucasian people, in terms of genetics, don't
metabolize beta carotene into retinol very well.
So getting the fat soluble nutrients in the most
bioavailable form is objectively important for hormone
production. And people will say, well, yes,
the body can make cholesterol on its own, That's true.
That's a survival mechanism because all your hormones are
made from cholesterol, and if your cortisol goes to 0, you
will drop dead and die. That's the way the human body
works. So you have to be able to make
cholesterol endogenously. Otherwise if you didn't get a
kill during evolution, you would have just carved out and dropped
dead. But the idea that we can
generate enough cholesterol endogenously by a survival
mechanism to optimize hormones is also objectively incorrect.
So we need some degree of animal based food in the diet.
And for me and a lot of people I've worked with looking at
their blood work, I've never seen someone's health get worse
from eating more meat. I've only seen people get
healthier from eating more meat. So meat's great for you.
Red meat is higher per gram in micronutrients than white meat.
But chicken, fish, pork, pork in Eastern Europe is much better
because it's more like boar than like domesticated pig.
It tastes way better too. But beef is a super food.
And then organs are higher in nutrients as well.
But you know, that's not for everyone's palate.
And I also think that fruits and vegetables should also be
included in abundance. I think that raw leafy green
vegetables are not great for a lot of people's guts, just based
on what I've seen. I have a lot of guys come to me
who are eating like meticulously, and they're
bloating is just through the roof.
Their digestion's horrible, and they're eating a big bowl of raw
leafy green salad with pumpkin seeds and all this stuff.
And that just doesn't go well for some people.
But I think cooked vegetables are fantastic.
Potatoes and sweet potatoes are super high in minerals, very
high in potassium. I think fruit is wonderful.
Some people will equate like a glass of orange juice to a glass
of Coca-Cola and say, well, it's all sugar.
That's a silly reductionist model.
When we look at things in nature, they contain things that
buffer. So fruit is full of sugar, but
it's also full of vitamin C, which buffers the oxidative
processes when it comes to metabolizing sugar.
Same with coffee. You know, coffee is full of
caffeine, which is a stimulant, but then it's full of
phytonutrients and all the minerals that caffeine depletes
in the body. It's almost like they were put
together for a reason. So I think fruit is fantastic.
I mean, obviously you can overdo it if you try, but it's very
difficult to eat too many bananas.
Like you just get a satiety mechanism kick in.
So me, eggs, fruit, vegetables. And then if people digest them
well, I think grains are fine. I mean, I wouldn't be eating a
huge amount of calories from grains because they're not as
micronutrient dense. But some high quality bread with
some with some, you know, good quality butter on it, you know,
if that fits your diet plan or if that makes the meal more
enjoyable when it's home prepared, fantastic.
But meat, whole eggs should be the cornerstone of the diet.
I don't have any problem with dairy.
If the if the estrogen and dairy is bioavailable, then so is the
testosterone and the growth hormone.
None of it is. But dairy is fantastic as well.
Full fat dairy. I mean, obviously you can overdo
it from a caloric standpoint and it's not very satiating, but I
don't think there's any problem with dairy either.
So I think that the diet can be a very rich and diverse diet,
but some people will do better with higher carbohydrates.
Some people do better with lower carbohydrates.
I think that that comes down to how the individual performs from
a metabolic level. And I think that some people can
do great on a low carb diet and some people can do great on a
high carb diet. If they're going to do a high
carb diet that's low fat, they need to make sure they're eating
nutrient dense fat sauces. Jiffy peanut butter is not
healthy fats. I see bodybuilders saying this
all the time. That's just so dumb.
But you can also get a full day's worth of micronutrients
from 4 egg yolks, which is like 20 grams of fat.
So you don't have to have a huge kind of fat to get
micronutrients. You know, seed oils are not
helping people's hormone production even though they're
fats. But you can also have a
relatively low amount of carbohydrates in the diet and be
just fine, as long as those carbohydrates sources are
healthy and ideally have antioxidants and other nutrients
in them as well. So there's a lot of ways people
can do nutrition, but starting out with the vertical diet or
Mike Dolce's approach to nutrition, I think is a
fantastic way to begin. Totally agree.
Do you go out of your way to eat much like fish and seafood?
Cause like a lot of people are, you know, deficient in iodine,
things of that nature. I'm very big on the high dose of
Amiga 3 supplement, so I use 4 grams of EPADHA per day, which
is equivalent to eating about half a pound of salmon a day.
From a palatability standpoint, I don't like fatty fish very
much. I just don't have a taste for
salmon. In Australia, I love barramundi.
Barramundi is wonderful. We got some really good mackerel
in Australia. I have this rule that if you
can't see the ocean, you should question the seafood.
So growing up in Perth, WA, we're on the coast, amazing
seafood. I mean, oysters are a superfood
as well. Things like this are wonderful
for you over here in Lithuania getting good quality fish.
I'd be more concerned about the food poisoning.
So I don't eat very much fish, but I am a massive, massive
proponent and I push it very hard.
Is if you're not someone who eats a large amount of fatty
fish in the diet, you should definitely be getting a high
quality omega-3 supplement to bring the omega-3 index over a
tent. The, the, if we look, if you go
on pub Med and you search omega-3, there are 10s of
thousands of studies showing a positive impact of omega-3
supplementation on every single health condition known to Matt.
So, and the other thing that I see is that when I get guys come
to me with their blood work, because I review about 20 or 30
client blood panels a day for my clinics.
When I see guys who have these incredible lipid profiles, like
the lipid profiles that a cardiologist would print out and
put on his fridge, every single one of them is taking a high
dose omega-3 supplement. Every single one.
So I very strongly recommend that people support their
omega-3 intake, whether it's through diet or supplementation.
I just did a experiment, got blood work on both ends.
It was like a two week experiment, kind of like in
response to a lot of Mark Bell sugar diet stuff, doing the
opposite of it with high fat. But I doubled my testosterone in
like a two week, three-week span.
And I started, you know, maybe because of the macronutrient
manipulation I was making super high fat, minimal protein, very
low carbs, but I also added in a can of cod liver more often than
not throughout that span. Super high in vitamin D Vitamin
AI. Would imagine that had a pretty
profound impact on hormone levels as well.
Cod liver is also a superfood. I mean, it's not for everyone's
palate as well. I mean, it's got a taste for
sure. But so you do a ketogenic diet.
Yeah, I've been doing keto for almost 11 years now.
Yeah. So the ketogenic diet, like it
has, I mean, you can do a garbage keto.
I mean, you can eat KFC and just call it a ketogenic diet if you
want to. I mean, it would technically
still be one, but you can also do a ketogenic diet with
incredibly nutrient dense sources of fat.
And that's where I see people thriving.
I mean, I get guys come to me who are doing ketogenic diets
all the time and their blood work is absolutely garbage.
But when you ask them what they eat, they go, I eat keto.
I'm like, no, like, what do you actually, what foods do you
actually eat? And it's just crap.
But when you when you have guys come in who are doing a healthy
ketogenic diet and they're eating good quality fatty meats,
sometimes they're eating some organ meats.
They've got things like avocado in there.
They've got really healthy nutrients and sources of fat.
And I have a bunch of guys who still follow something like Dave
Asprey's Bulletproof diet, which I guess is kind of like a keto
derivative spin off kind of thing.
But they're focusing on getting a large intake of fibrous
vegetables as well. Their blood work is like
incredible, like absolutely amazing.
And it's similar you. When I was talking to Mark Bell
when I was out there for his podcast, he kind of just started
the sugar diet thing and he was explaining it to me and I was
like, oh, that just sounds like what Ori Hoffmechler was talking
about in his book The warrior Diet, which basically spelled
out what they're now doing is the sugar diet, but exclusively
with fruit during the day, which is obviously a healthier way to
do it than eating gummy bears because there's more nutrients
in the fruit. But just like you could be doing
a high carb diet, you know, drinking nothing but Coca-Cola
or eating salvage kids or you do a high carbohydrate diet, eating
multiple servings of fresh organic fruit per day.
The macros are going to be the same, but the micros in the
inflammatory response to the food is going to be completely
different. So I can imagine that if you've
been doing a ketogenic diet long term and you're thriving very
well, you would have also tuned into saying, hey, the quality of
the fats that I'm eating. Like I used to teach, I used to
teach mindfulness meditation. That was my job before I did
this. I used to teach like science
based meditation. And one of the things that we
did, the organization I was at is we'd run like a community
based, like one hour guided leaded meditation that I do, you
know, at a Community Center. And this was when I was doing
the ketogenic diet for a period. And I remember one time before I
went, I had a 12 egg omelette before I went, just the 12 egg
omelette. And I went and sat down and
meditated. And my mind had never been more
calm and steady and cool. And I was just sitting there
being like, this nutritional intake of cholesterol and all
the vitamins I've had, my brain is just completely thriving on
this. So I think, you know, just like
yourself, if you've been following a diet approach for 11
years, it's because you've been like, hey, this works for me.
I'm doing really well on this. And I think one of the problems
is that people have just been eating for taste their whole
life. They haven't eaten well for long
enough to then veer off it and realize how crappy that food
makes them feel. Yeah, 100% agree, man.
Pivoting back to TRT specifically.
So like I I compete in natural bodybuilding.
So like it's pretty much totally banned, outlawed, all that jazz.
However, you know, we've learned so much, especially in the last
decade around, you know, hormonal impacts, endocrine
system, longevity, health, well-being, all that all that
good stuff. Is there, like, is there ever an
instance where you know someone just not a good fit for TRT?
Like if you're looking at it from a performance standpoint?
Like This is why professional bodybuilders competing on the
IFBB stage take steroids. Like it's obvious they got a
performance benefit. But I guess the question is,
what would be a use case in which they would not be optimal?
It could be detrimental. What would be the point of
diminishing returns for someone that's trying to optimize?
Look like I just kind of flesh that out a little bit if you
would. Yeah.
So this is a, and this is something that I actually teach
a lot of. So when I come to the States and
I'm running seminars for either at the Super Back Summit or the
Olympia or for clinics that I'm parted with, one of the things
that I teach in terms of how to work with these patients is that
one of the problems is that now that TRT and I don't want to say
it's a problem. One of the caveats to TRT
becoming more mainstream is that a hot like back when I started
doing this five or six years ago, the only people who were
coming to me for consults on TRT were like health and fitness
enthusiasts, because it wasn't a mainstream thing.
There was no YouTube channels about it.
There was no Joe Rogan talking about it.
I mean, people would ask me like, what the hell is TRT?
Like, they had no idea. Whereas now when I tell people
what I do, everyone knows what TRT is.
Everyone wants to ask about it, and one of the downsides of that
is that a lot of the time people who come in wanting TRT
treatment, what my friend Jay Campbell affectionately refers
to as metabolic dumpster fires. And this is a real problem
because these guys have often destroyed the endocrine system
from years or decades of poor health practices, and they want
to get back on track. But their body is just so
screwed up that if they take TRT in the way it's traditionally
prescribed, their blood pressure will go through the roof and
they'll be riddled with side effects that people typically
call estrogenic side effects. So they can get things like gyno
water retention. Their face swells up.
They start crying when they watch a Marvel movie.
All the stuff that you don't really want when you're taking,
you know, exogenous testosterone, you're having a
whole bunch of the side effects and all the good stuff.
The problem is, though, that these men need the treatment.
And there's two ways that we have to work with this.
So 1 is that there's this saying I was taught by a mentor of
mine, which is that in all aspects of improving health,
whether it's mental health or physical health, you have to
meet the medicine halfway. So if you want to become a
better driver, if you buy yourself a better car, that's
not going to fix the problem in and of itself.
You also have to get the driving lessons.
You have to meet the medicine halfway.
So a lot of the time when people take an antidepressant or they
take a stimulant or they take a sleeping pill, they just expect
the drug to solve the problem. They're not actually trying to
work with the drug to allow the drug to give them the foundation
to help them change their circumstance.
This is how medical interventions are supposed to
work. So the first thing that we have
to look at if someone comes in who TRT would be a
contraindication for, which people who are generally insulin
resistant, have liver disease or have basically metabolic
syndrome, meaning they're overweight.
These guys need TRT, but they're also going to get side effects
from TRT. So it's a real catch 22.
So typically a practitioner will either prescribe them an
estrogen blocker, which will solve one problem and create two
more, or they'll tell them that the side effects are all in
their head and there's nothing that can be done to fix it.
Both of these problems are wrong.
So not only do we have to start working with guys in terms of
fixing their habits, which is often a bit of a progress, we
have to go, OK, what do we start with?
And the way that I like people to look at that, which again,
this doesn't apply for everyone, but it applies for most people,
is you can make a list of all the things you're doing that you
know you shouldn't be doing. And then you can make a list of
all the things that you're not doing that you know that you're
supposed to be doing. Fix that shit and fix it
gradually. Find the easiest things to fix,
but fix that equation. But the other thing is that we
can look at the delivery mechanism of testosterone.
So typically when we look at TRT, we're looking at
injectables. So testosterone cypionate,
testosterone ananthate, These are basically Coke and Pepsi.
They're basically the same thing, slightly different, but
they're interchangeable. Now, when this stuff is
prescribed, the little handbook that the doctors get in medical
school says 1 injection of one mil, which is 200 or 250
milligrams every two to three weeks.
This is a train wreck because even if you're healthy, it'll
Jack your levels through the sky for a few days and then they'll
crash out and they'll be terrible by the time you do your
next injection. Men do not do well with a
hormonal rhythm over the course of weeks.
We're meant to have flatline stable hormone levels every day.
So what this does is it basically gives men a similar
hormone rhythm to women on their periods.
This is not good for anyone. So when it comes to using
injectables, the problem that we have is that if someone is
insulin resistant or they're overweight or they have issues
with their liver or they have all three of these problems,
they will typically produce less 5A reductase, which is what
makes DHT and they'll produce more aromatase, which is what
creates estrogen. Now this is not necessarily a
problem because the body is trying to protect itself.
Estrogen's anti-inflammatory. But then when you come in and
Jack the levels up, the body is not in an environment in which
it would ever be making these hormone levels.
So you've just taken a Ferrari engine and you put it into a
beat up Suzuki Swift and you're wondering why it's not working
properly and you're saying, well, if I take the Ferrari
engine, it's going to turn my Suzuki Swift into a Ferrari?
No, it's not. Doesn't work like that.
But what we can do for people who are metabolically unhealthy
is give them testosterone in the form of a cream.
Now, the typical creams and gels that people are usually familiar
with, which have a bad rap are garbage.
Test the gel androforte. These are the brands that people
get from the pharmacy. These creams are so weak and
have no bioavailability. You'd basically have to take a
bath in it for it to work. But when you work with a
provider who's skilled in this kind of application, you can
have a 20% cream made-up in what's called a HRT base, which
is made of olive oil and macadamia oil.
So it's a really natural healthy cream.
It's like a moisturizer. And you get about the amount of
cream that you'd put toothpaste on a toothbrush.
So it's a relatively small amount of like a moisturizer.
And you apply it to the underside of the ball sack
because the skin on the scrotum is very thin and it has a large
presence of the enzyme 5A reductants, which is reduced
when the individual is chronically inflamed.
So when they take testosterone by rubbing it on their shaved
bowl SAC twice a day instead of injecting it, what we're able to
do is more so mimic the way that the testosterone would be
metabolized by a healthy mat, which allows them to feel that
motivation, that uplift, that energy effect, that kind of
androgenic masculinizing effect. And they don't get any of the
side effects that we typically see from injections.
So it allows them to tolerate the testosterone without the
side effects that would be caused by the contraindication
of being overweight, obese, insulin resistant, or having
fatty liver. So it's not so much that these
individuals can't or shouldn't do TRT, it's that it needs to be
done in a way that's catered towards them being metabolically
unhealthy. And then augmenting that
treatment with something like metformin to improve insulin
sensitivity or, you know, improving the diet would be
better. But you know, compliance is the
science. So things like metformin can be
very helpful, Melatonin to help with sleep as well.
Things like glutathione as well to help with antioxidant
production. All of these things can be very
helpful to augment it to allow people to benefit from the
treatment without having the potential side effects.
But if you take someone who's unhealthy and overweight and
give them a big dose of injectable testosterone, you
could be creating more problems than you're solving.
And I haven't heard many people with that application modality.
I'm out. I hear like the horror stories
of people walking to a clinic, getting prescribed testosterone,
not getting follow up lab panels for like 6 months or ever and
then having that, you know, injectable dose and then doing
that every two weeks or something.
I've heard a lot more people having a reduced dose, but
scattered throughout the week, like a, you know, Tuesday,
Friday split or something like that.
I'm sure that's better. But I haven't heard many people
with the the cream on the scrotum, so that makes that
makes more sense. Yeah, so for me personally, so
I've, I've been blessed that I've had some really amazing
mentors and, and colleagues since I got into the space,
which I'm, I'm very humbled by, is not being a medical doctor.
So friends of mine, doctor Keith Nichols has been a big advocate
of the cream. My friend Jay Campbell, who you
should definitely have on the, the podcast, He, he's super into
all the dieting and he's gotten into the sugar diet stuff as
well. Fantastic guy to talk to about
this, but what they really have been teaching for longer than
I've been teaching it is that inflammation is what's driving
the side effects that guys are getting on TRT.
And when we look at the cream option, the cream option
metabolizes very different in the body to injections.
And when we can find a pathway that complements people who
would usually be getting the side effects, this is a real
game changer. Now a lot of people refer just
being on the cream to injections because they find that they get
more of that DHT based effect and they feel the benefit of the
treatment more. So with the clinics that I work
with, we actually offer both so that people can choose between
the two. But when it comes to doing
injections twice a week, shots is the minimum that anyone
should be doing. But the more often you split
that up, the better. So if people are doing
injectable testosterone and they're going, what's the best,
most optimal way that I can do this?
It's injected every day. If people want to find the sweet
spot between how can I do the least amount of injections
possible but still get like a Goldilocks zone, it's three days
a week or every other day. The minimal amount is twice a
week. The problem that people have
when they're looking at what's called pharmacodynamics, which
is basically how drugs metabolize in the body, is they
look at what's called the half life.
So testosterone injections and Anthony Incipienate, depending
on the study report to have a half life of seven to 10 days.
So we'll say about a week. Now if we use caffeine as an
example, caffeine got 1/2 flight of eight hours.
It doesn't gradually build up and peak its four and then drop
off for the rest of the 8. You get a pronounced peak in 30
to 90 minutes depending on the individual and then you get a
drop off. But the main effect of the
caffeine that you can subjectively feel is not evenly
distributed over 8 hours. Everyone knows that the side
effect of keeping you awake is distributed evenly, but not the
effect that we're looking for. So when we look at a
testosterone injection, even though it's got a one week half
life, it peaks between 24 and 36 hours.
In some people it peaks out for 12 hours.
So if you're not injecting daily, you're going to be
getting some degree of fluctuating levels and the
amount of fluctuation that someone will tolerate seems to
be individual. But from an objective
standpoint, when we're looking at dosing medications like
pharmaceuticals, the idea is typically to keep a therapeutic
amount of the drug in your system.
So if you take something that's got like a, if you take like a
blood pressure medication, for example, if you take that once a
day, it will still have a peak and a through, but the level
when you redose it will be above what's called the therapeutic
floor. So it won't be completely out of
your system. If you apply that same logic to
hormone levels, you're basically saying, well, we can have a big
excursion of these hormone levels and that's still fine
because it's not going to 0. That doesn't make sense from an
optimizing hormone standpoint. It makes sense from a
pharmaceutical standpoint, not from an optimizing hormone
standpoint. So if we want to have stability,
just like, you know, if you wanted to keep your peak
caffeinated dose, you'd sip on coffee all day, you'd redose it
at the peak to maintain a stable level.
So if we want to maintain stable androgen levels, we should
redose it at the peak, not at the half line.
So every day is best if people are willing to do it.
A really small insulin syringe you can just inject into the
delt. And if people want to find an
acceptable Goldilocks zone to still get an optimal result,
three days a week or month or every other day works well.
But twice a week is the minimum that anyone could do.
But when people are obese and have these health problems, even
doing 3 * a week injections, they're still going to get the
side effects. Yeah, makes sense.
What what can one expect? Like if they decide to go the
route of TRT, what can they expect to happen to their
endogenous production, whether it be from the injectables or
the cream? It will vanish.
So the way that unfortunately, if it didn't work like that, I'd
just be saying everyone should try testosterone.
I mean, that'd be everyone should give it a shot, but
because of the down regulation of natural production, that's
why it's a commitment. Otherwise it would be a very
different industry. So when you take exogenous
testosterone, whether it's a cream or a shot or a small dose
or a massive steroid dose, your body will have what's called a
negative feedback reaction. So when testosterone circulates
and activates receptors in the hypothalamus, which is a part of
the brain, and when those receptors get saturated, the
body goes, OK, there's plenty of testosterone here, we don't need
to make any more. Whereas if the body is naturally
producing it and the levels dip down, then you get a signal to
make more and the body maintains its balance.
But when you're taking externally, the body goes up,
job's done, I don't need to do this anymore.
So the signal from the hypothalamus to the testicles,
which is called luteinizing hormone, this basically goes to
0. So as a result, the testicles
basically go offline. So they basically deflate like
balloons and they kind of shrink down to the size of about
olives. They revert to a similar child
that they were when similar size to when you were a child.
And the testicles go offline because the main function of
secreting hormones is already taken care of.
So this is the big catch 22 of TLT.
And when you start the treatment, the the question is,
well, can you trial it for like 12 weeks or 16 weeks and then
have your natural production come back?
And this is a tricky question to answer because there's not a
100% guarantee to something that people are looking for a
guaranteed reassurance on. So if someone like myself stops
taking testosterone after almost a decade, my natural production
is going to be virtually non existent.
But the reason that I did TRT was that my natural production
was inadequate in the 1st place. So basically, if I haven't a
company and my company is only performing as well as the
weakest link and I fire the weakest link to do their job
myself, I can now do that job at a fantastic capacity, but I've
taken on the responsibility to do that job for the rest of the
life of the company. That is a decision that I made
because I was like, I can't train this guy up to perform at
the level that he needs to perform at.
And that's why when someone goes on TRT, it should only be done
in a situation where you're saying my natural production is
so garbage that even if I like, there's no reason why this would
serve me any more. And I'm OK with getting rid of
it and taking on the responsibility of replacing that
production. So it's like a great power,
great responsibility, spider man kind of scenario.
It's not ideal. It's absolutely not ideal.
It's one of the reasons why TRT is a flawed intervention.
It has way more benefits than downsides.
But the big downside is that once you start the treatment,
you are dependent. And if people do come off within
the first few months, all the literature shows that they will
recover their natural production, and in my experience
they do. But there would always be a
potential theoretical risk, especially if people are using
anabolic steroids, that that testosterone production may come
back lower than it was before they started.
So people should only do it if they're comfortable with that
shit potentially sailing. OK, that makes sense.
So it's pretty much a commitment all in.
No, no pussyfooting around it. Like if you're gonna get on it,
you can just plan on staying on it until death do you part,
basically. You will have to pry it out of
my cold, dead hands. Absolutely.
Yeah. What about like going the other
extreme, like with the bodybuilders, for example, that
are using performance Henson drugs, anabolics like they're
doing like blasting and cruising.
You know, 20 years ago there was talk of like them cycling off to
let their natural production come back into place.
You don't really hear about that anymore.
People are just always on some dosage and blasting and cruising
is more so just continual blasting.
That's not my of expertise at all, but what's typically
happening in those scenarios? Yeah, so the the way that
bodybuilders do stuff is ridiculous.
People will blast so much gear for such a short space of time
that they will completely burden and destroy the health of their
organs. And you can't accrue that much
muscle tissue in that window of time.
It's just not physiologically possible.
You'll inflate with glycogen and you'll have a more drive full
appearance because your muscles will be more swollen.
But taking grams of gear for 16 weeks and then cycling back to
low levels to think you're repairing that damage, that is
not how it works. Like that is naivety.
That is wishful thinking. That is playing with fire.
It it would be like me punching someone in the face Monday
through Friday and then not punching them in the face
Saturday and Sunday and expecting it to be healed by
Monday. It's like, no, it's not going to
work. So it's people shouldn't be
doing that for a number of reasons, but the stopping and
starting of the natural production is one of the reasons
why guys end up coming to clinics like mine needing
hormone replacement much younger than they typically would.
Because and especially when they do it under the age of 25,
because the endocrine system hasn't finished developing, when
we stop and start the system, especially using high drugs of
these, sorry, high doses of these non bioidentical anabolic
steroid drugs, it seems to permanently damage some degree
of the natural production. So if you do one cycle, like a
big cycle and you do the post cycle therapy, you take the HCG
and the tamoxifen that everyone recommends that you do, even
though that stuff is terrible for your health.
You will recover your natural production, but you might only
recover it to here. And then if you do it again, you
might only recover it to here. And then the problem is if
you're blasting it, you know, a gram or two of gear for 12 to 16
weeks, but then you're spending 12 to 16 weeks with crashed out
hypogonadal testosterone levels. This is why people lose the
muscle that they gain on cycle. It's not because the steroids
went away. It's because the baseline level
they went back down to was so low that they entered A
catabolic state and they feel like garbage.
And then they just want to get back on cycle again because they
feel better. So the way that people should be
looking at it, if they want to do this, like my approach is,
and I I interviewed a, a guy named Doctor Todd Lee the other
day in a relation who's big IFBB pro guy, medical Doctor Who
talks about steroid use in pharmacology.
And he has the same recommendation as me, which is
that unless you are a professional bodybuilder who
requires steroids to compete in your sport, you shouldn't be
using anabolic steroids. But for the people who do choose
to go down that route, you want to be really careful with this
idea of like perma blasting gear because when you go, basically
testosterone is good for you up until the point that it's not.
And when you pass that physiological ceiling into this
super physiological territory and beyond, you are causing a
burden and damage to your organs, more or less.
So depending on the compounds you're using, how good your
cardiovascular fitness is, how good your, how good your
nutrition is, how good your supplemental support is, whether
you're managing your blood pressure, all this kind of
stuff. And people have this idea and
they go, oh, I'm just going to blast steroids until I get a
problem in my blood work. And then I'm going to stop
taking the steroids until the problem in the blood work goes
away and then I'm going to do it again.
This is a terrible idea because you're not getting things like
organ imaging done. You're not really seeing the
full picture and the individual bodybuilder or the bodybuilding
coach is not really able to look at the right blood markers and
determine if damage has actually been done.
But if people are going to be cycling and using anabolic
steroids, they are much better off staying on TRT in between
the steroid cycle use. And if people do want to use
steroids, the first thing they should do is find what that
optimized TRT dose is, because if this is an optimal level of
testosterone for you, like this is an optimized TRT dose.
What I see people doing is they blast up here and they cruise
down here and they think that if they cruise lower, they'll
offset the damage that they did from running higher.
This is just nonsense. So if people want to actually
use steroids, they should find their optimal TRT dose and then
add steroids on top of that in a minimal effective dose for
whatever time frame they're going to do it.
And then when they stop using steroids, they should come back
to their TRT dose and just accept that if this is the
lifestyle and what they want to do with their body because
people can do what they like, they should make the commitment
to at least stay on hormone replacement therapy rather than
doing this stop stop. See Salt garbage.
Totally agree, and just out of curiosity, say you would define
the difference or you would differentiate steroids and TRT
being that TRT is optimal, you know physiological compatible
levels whereas steroids are just super physiological beyond what
would be capable in any natural realm.
Yeah. So there's two factors to it.
The way that I would describe TRT, and I would kind of borrow
Jay Campbell's term in terms of testosterone optimization
therapy, which is we're not just replacing the testosterone
level, we're taking it to the optimal level that it should be
at. So TRTTOT, whatever people want
to call it, but it's using bioidentical test testosterone
at the physiological level that promotes health.
And the problem that people have is that the physiological
healthy level is often above the reference range.
So people often conflate physiological with the reference
range. This is wrong.
There is a level above the reference range which is still
physiological and health promoting.
But when you go beyond that and you're in super physiological
territory, this would be a steroid cycle.
Now you can do a testosterone only steroid cycle.
It will typically produce side effects because of the
aromatization to estrogen when you go into a super
physiological level. But you can do a bioidentical
steroid cycle if you want to. But typically when we're looking
at a steroid cycle, we're looking at using non
bioidentical analogs of these hormones.
So compounds like Primobolan, masteron, Anavar, nandrolone,
trampolone, there's a variety of them, but we're typically
looking at increasing the antigen load beyond the physical
range with hormones that are not bioidentical, that have been
specifically designed to have more anabolic activity in the
body. Makes total sense.
I can talk to you for hours, man.
It's super interesting. I got one more question.
We're already way past the hour mark here.
It's kind of selfish question. So I'm natural bodybuilding,
never taken anything. I'm a bit of a purist in nature.
Like, I'm super rich with my nutrition, my lifestyle factors,
optimizing everything that's within my grasp.
I recognize with the technology and science that we have that I
could perform more optimally with exogenous testosterone,
especially since I've got naturally lower levels.
But at the same time, like I've got this, you know, purest
traditional sense to me of like, hey, look, humans have been
around for a long time. We've never had this until
recently. You know, we can't live forever
despite all the longevity experts promoting otherwise.
Like, you know, death and decay is just a part of life as much
as being born is. And I want to be at peace and
embrace that reality, in fact, too.
And I'm going to fight Father Time as best I can naturally for
as long as I can because I'd still like to compete in the
natural bodybuilding realms for as long as I can.
But and we don't have a crystal ball, but out of curiosity, as I
get older and older, how much knowing what you've seen in your
clients, would you think I'd be leaving on the table and
suffering and seeing a decline in health if I were to stay
natural versus going the route of TOT?
Yeah, I have a very similar paradigm to yourself.
I don't like pharmaceuticals. I don't like.
I mean I will recommend them when they are advantageous, when
the risk to reward ratio is in favor of reward.
And the reason why I like hormone replacement therapy is
that I think it is correcting a natural imbalance.
So I can't argue that TRT is more natural than not taking it,
but I do make the argument that optimal testosterone levels is
the correct state for the male biology to thrive in.
And that's, you know, based on my experience personally and
with clients. But with that said, I also don't
push people down the route of TRTA lot of the time I told
people out of it and I often choke with my clients.
I say, look, it's more work for me if you actually do the TRT.
So I don't have a stake in the game.
When people are aware of TRT, it becomes a matter of when, not
if. If it's on your radar by 60
years old, you would absolutely be trading benefits for not
doing absolutely. And by 70 years old, absolutely,
it would be almost stupid not to do it.
And it's, it's kind of similar with women who are menopausal
with when menopausal women are suffering severely from a
complete lack of hormones in their body.
And they're aware of the benefits of hormone replacement
therapy. And they trial using a bit of
progesterone or a bit of thyroid or whatever they need as part of
their their requirements. Because it's part of your body's
natural operating system. It doesn't feel like you've
taken a drug, you just feel more like yourself.
So if we're looking at that kind of linear decline in levels, the
problem with the male situation is because we don't have like a
menopause event where you kind of drop off a Cliff.
Basically you have this slow, insidious decline over the
course of years where you kind of have to reach a point and go,
at what point in this equation is it worth intervening with to
fix this? And then you basically look at
going, OK, well, what's the opportunity cost of delaying
this by five years or 10 years in terms of the quality of life
that you can, you can get. And This is why I, I work with a
lot of guys similar to yourself, younger than you, older than
you, who are natural and they're wanting to basically get
guidance on this decision. And my best recommendation is
that you get a comprehensive blood panel done every year.
And then that way over a three or four or five year period, you
can look to see not just the decline of your testosterone
levels, if that's occurring, because they'll kind of
fluctuate a little bit, but you can actually see all the other
metabolic markers that testosterone impacts.
So over time, if you're looking after yourself well, which you
know, it sounds like based on, on who you are, that will be
something that will remain constant if you see all those
things staying in place. But then on your blood work, you
see all my insulin sensitivities getting worse every year and my,
my cortisol's going up and my prolactin's going up and my
triglycerides are going up and my sleep quality's going down
and my sex drives going down. And, you know, even though I'm
tracking, you know, my, my lifts and my nutrition, I'm plateauing
in the gym and I'm not waking up properly recovered.
And you can notice things starting to move in the wrong
direction, then you can make the call to make that intervention.
But whether that occurs for you in five years, 10 years or 20
years, I mean, I've met some guys in their 60s who have
thriving testosterone levels. There are absolutely exceptions
to every rule. So it's really good to be able
to get data every year. Like I love it when clients come
and see me and they've got a blood test from every year for
the last 10 years and we can go, OK, this is really easy now.
So start monitoring your blood work comprehensive panel every
year. That way you can kind of see
around the corner for stuff. And then if you you do notice
these comprehensive metabolic markers going in the wrong
direction, you can intervene before it becomes a problem.
It's kind of like if you're driving your car and the check
engine light comes on, you're better off taking it to the
mechanic van before it starts billowing smoke and making a
bunch of noises. So it's much better to intervene
when things start to drop off before the diseases of aging
start to accelerate. And that way you can start to,
you can basically find that sweet spot of saying, I'm going
to push this back to the point that it's needed, but then when
it is needed, I'm not going to delay pulling the trigger and
end up with consequences from that.
So I think it's people, if they don't need TLT, they shouldn't
do TLT. But if if it's on your radar, it
will be a when decision, not an if decision.
Now it makes sense in regards to women.
Like I got a lot of question around menopausal years too,
like when everything does drop off the Cliff throughout those
menopausal, you know, window, once they get through that, like
what's happening big picture there?
Like are they are they still going to benefit from getting on
HRT post menopausal years or after that point?
Is it pretty well leveled off and stabilized and they could
just expect day-to-day things to be about same same as normal?
So I often joke that I don't know anything about women at all
at all. Ask my wife.
But the, the way that the way that menopause works when women
are describing menopause is they talk about, they go through
menopause and then they come out of menopause.
The process of going through menopause is the adjustment and
adaptation and subjective response to the ovaries
basically cocking it. So the, the testicles really
gradually die as a man gets older.
This is called primary hypogonadism with women.
They completely cock it and you know, completely flatline when
they hit menopause. So what they end up with is
basically a zeroed out progesterone level and a lot of
the time a very low testosterone level.
And then the estrogen level will vary based on the woman because
estrogen is produced outside the ovaries.
But the progesterone being crashed down to nothing is
really detrimental to a lot of aspects of their health.
So a lot of the time people think testosterone is the man
hormone and estrogen is the women hormone.
It's more so that progesterone is the women hormone.
If we talk about what hormone peaks when they're ovulating,
when we talk about what gives women the feminizing effects
that we would relate with femininity, it's progesterone.
And in the brain progesterone works a lot like Valium.
It's very calming, it's very relaxing, it's very anti stress.
So when that hormone crashes out to 0 along with all the other
hormones as well, I mean, thyroid tends to drop off too.
Melatonin production drops off too.
When they say they've come through menopause, it's more so
they've gotten used to it, but the hormone levels are still
crashed out. It's just the acute adjustment
phase is over. But once a woman goes through
menopause, her risks of developing the diseases of
aging, which is diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and
dementia, all go through the roof because the sex hormones
are protective against all of those systems being problematic.
So once a woman has gone through the horrors of menopause, she
would still benefit from correcting the hormone
deficiencies. But if they want to be proactive
with it, they don't have to go through the horrible suffering
of menopause. But I've also spoken to some
women who say this is the way that my body is supposed to age,
and I want to age the way that, you know, nature or God
intended. And I'm like, that's cool.
That's 100% your decision to do. But for women who don't want to
suffer and go through that, and even when perimenopause is
occurring, like early stages of menopause, hormone replacement
therapy can absolutely be super beneficial.
One of the best people if you want to have them on your
podcast to talk about that is Doctor Fitz.
Lauren, Lauren Fitzgerald. She's fantastic for speaking
about those topics. Awesome, awesome.
Well, I'm going to fight by the time kick his ass as long as I
can naturally, for sure, man. But if I go this route, man,
you're going to be the first to one that I called because you
used to walk the knowledge on this.
And I appreciate everything you're saying, man.
Absolutely, absolutely I will. I will look forward to hearing
from you and having that chat. And for anyone who wants to
learn more about the nitty gritty of TRT in terms of like
protocols and injectables and how everything works, jump on
YouTube and search Dave Lee TRT Master class.
I've got like a 90 minute lecture that is for beginners or
for people who are first starting TRT and it goes through
everything I know about how the actual execution of the process
works. And all that information is on
YouTube for free. Awesome.
Well I will definitely link out. Make it easy people to find you,
Dave. If there's anything you need
from me man, just hit me up. Happy to keep the conversation
going brother. Absolutely.
Thank you so much for having me.