Hey guys, I’m new here and I’ve been posting a few responses but they are yet to be approved by mods. Hopefully this gets through because since quitting fin in 2011 I’ve taken my total t from 450ng/dL to 932 ng/dL (peaked at around 1006 ng/dL actually) by making dietary changes, taking a few supplements and performing a couple of temperature control routines. I was going to post this in “recoveries” but it says I can’t post there.
I’ve made this mainly about the science of what I did because I know that forum science enthusiasts love seeing a good explanation for everything. If you go to my website it has a lot more science and a lot of practical advise about how I implemented all this. If you’re suffering from low total T, I genuinely believe you can kickstart your HPTA (androgen cycle) and get everything working again.
This is long. I’ll make an info graphic soon.
Fist my history:
Took 1.25mg fin daily from august 2009 to october 2011.
Quit Cold Turkey
Crashed for 6 months: severe erectile dysfunction and loss of libido. No brain fog or other symptoms. I was depressed obviously - am not anymore.
Pathology (not posting with reference ranges because I don’t have them)
Total T: 450 ng/dL
SHBG: 96 nmol/dL
Oestradiol: 138 pmol/L
Experienced a 3 month “Revival” in mid 2012 (no hormone tests just symptom free). Crashed again in late 2012.
Spent 2013 doing a tonne of research and overhauling my diet an an effort to stimulate the HPTA to create more testosterone and less oestradiol.
After 6 months on an intensely different diet my hormone results in april 2013:
Total T: over 900 ng/dL
SHBG: 49 nmol/dL
Oestradiol: 62 pmol/L
My results today (august 2014) are almost exactly the same and I’m symptom free.
Just thinking about that that is actually a crazy change I feel pretty proud of.
How I did it:
I did a lot of research for this protocol and I have al the studies I analysed referenced and saved so if you have questions, ask. I also have an entire website explaining it step by step which I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post here. If a mod needs me to remove it I will, but here it is: www.mrfreet.com
Diet to increase androgen levels and stimulate all parts of the HPTA including the production of LH, FSH, and T:
The most effective things I did were to
Completely cut out refined carbohydrates.
Insulin response and chronically high blood glucose levels hurt the androgen cycle.
One study concluded that men who drank a glucose solution saw as much as a 25% reduction in their free testosterone levels over the next few hours. The same study recommended, based on the sum of available research that the effect was likely long-term and cumulative. That means chronically high blood glucose levels means chronically low free testosterone.
That’s just the direct causal connection between blood sugar levels and testosterone. There’s also the fact that high GI diets cause insulin resistance which has been consistently shown to inhibit the testosterone cycle. What this means is that in scientific studies lower GI diets are associated with higher testosterone in a long term sense. In an anecdotal sense, you can scour the internet and you will hear the same story over and over: eating too many refined carbs kills your testosterone levels.
Dramatically increase saturated fat and cholesterol consumption.
The cholesterol found in fats is one of the essential building blocks of testosterone. It is used in the testes to create testosterone. It’s not known entirely whether this is the mechanism that actually leads to increased testosterone on high saturated fat diets (and lowered testosterone on low fat diets) but many studies suggest the same thing: high fat diets are are a major factor in high testosterone levels. Personally I can tell you that a high fat diet felt like someone pulling the curtain from in front of my eyes. I am always more energetic, productive and interested in sex when consuming lots of high quality natural fats.
The fats you want to eat a lot of are high quality saturated fats from animals, eggs, dairy and coconut oil. ‘High quality’ means picking the organic and grass fed options for two reasons.
Non organic methods of production often involve hormones which have been shown to make their way into the human body.
Animals fed with grains or pellets instead of grass/vegetables produce fat with significantly different nutrient profile.
Here’s how I was doing this:
Morning: “Bulletproof” coffee with 4 tbsp organic grass fed butter and 1 tbsp coconut oil.
Throughout the day: a grass fed steak (fatty cut)
Before bed: 3 raw egg yolks in a smoothie with raw milk and some fruit for taste (be careful of salmonella especially in The States, don’t do this unless you get good quality produce)
The supplements that helped me along the way:
Fermented cod liver oil + vitamin rich butter fat capsules
This supplement contains high concentrations of vitamin D, vitamin A and vitamin K(2), but to view it as just a natural multivitamin would be to misunderstand the complex synergy of its ingredients. D, A and K(2) work together to encourage androgen production in a way that is not possible without high quality lacto-fermented food and natural animal fats, like the ones in these capsules. Here’s why:
Vitamin A: Known as ‘retinol’ crosses the blood testes barrier where it is converted into it’s bioactive form ‘retinoic acid’. It has been shown in many studies on rats that the presence of retinoic acid in the testes increases testosterone production and decreases estrogen production because it upregulates GnRH in the hypothalamus.1 Moving the discussion to humans, a 2004 study showed that vitamin A and iron supplementation was as effective as hormone therapy (though slower) at inducing puberty in young boys with delayed development.
Here’s where it gets really interesting: retinoic acid from vitamin A has been shown to increase the expression of “steroidogenic acute regulatory protein” or StAR. StAR is the protein responsible for transporting cholesterol into the inner membrane of the enzymes in your testes that turn cholesterol into steroid hormones. This is how the cholesterol goes from simply being deposited inertly around your body, to actually making its way to the site of testosterone creation. I would guess this is why consuming extra cholesterol and fermented cod liver oil and butter fat capsules together before bed is such a potent combination.
Vitamin D: Early studies showed vitamin D in rats was critical to the creation of androgens in the testes. In 2010, a study suggested a similar phenomenon in humans: there is a strong association between having more vitamin D and having higher levels of serum testosterone.5 In 2011, a placebo controlled study confirmed this phenomenon, a year of vitamin D supplementation significantly increased, testosterone and bioavailable testosterone over the control.
Vitamin K(2) also know as ‘Activator X’: Vitamin K(2) amplifies the effects of vitamin D and A together. Vitamin K(2) earned its good reputation because of the work of Dr. Weston A. Price - a notable anthropologist and dentist who spent the 1930s meticulously documenting the dietary habits and health indices of populations isolated from factory farming and westernised diets, then comparing these outcomes to the outcomes from members of the same population who subsequently moved to bigger cities and adopted a western diet.
What he found was that populations with an intake of fat soluble vitamins D and A from animal fat 10x higher than US levels along with high levels of vitamin K(2) had the best markers of overall health and lowest rates of disease. Vitamin K(2) is found in great quantities in lacto or fermented foods like fish eggs, cod liver oil, grass-fed butter and kim chi.
More recent science illustrates how vitamin K(2) is essential to gaining most of the expected benefits of vitamins D and A because it activates vitamin D- and A- dependent proteins that transport calcium and perform a few other key functions. It hasn’t been explicitly proven that k2 is required to get the increased androgen production benefits from vitamin A and D, but based on related studies in Turkeys, anecdotal accounts I’ve read, and the fact that my total testosterone levels are currently sitting at around 930ng/dL, I’d would suggest that you probably want to ignore K(2) at your own peril.
Raw almonds
They’re a good source of vitamin E. Vitamin E is believed to stimulate the release of GnRH in the hypothalamus, the hormone that signals the release of luteinizing hormone. I wouldn’t say I’m certain that vitamin E is the only factor in the almonds that is at play here so listen to your libido and your androgen levels in your blood tests to see what works.
Why not just eat vitamin E supplements? Because almonds are cheaper, they taste better. Also, most vitamin E supplements only contain one form of vitamin E: alpha tocopherol. The result seems to be that supplementing alpha tocopherol without other important forms of vitamin E such as gamma tocopherol can actually be linked to decreased androgen levels. Not what you want.
Brazil nuts
These should only be consumed by those who are selenium deficient. Too much selenium and too many brazil nuts is dangerous. As few as 10 brazil nuts has had me cramping for hours. However, if you’re deficient, adequate selenium intake could make a difference to libido and erection quality. Moreover, a 1998 double blind study DID find that supplementation with selenium and vitamin E greatly improved sperm and reproductive health indicators compared to a placebo.9 It is unclear what effect this has on libido but it another study in support of the almond/brazil nut combination.
The final thing I did:
Cold showers:
These took my free T from 539 pmol/L to 700 pmol/L in one week, tested at the beginning and end of the week.
The evidence behind cold showers is intuitive, but unfortunately mostly anecdotal at this point. It is well established that frequent cold showers increase your basal metabolic rate (BMR) - that’s the rate at which you burn energy when resting. They are a fantastic tool for people looking to lose fat, fast. People can burn thousands of extra calories equivalent worth of fat per day just by adding cold showers. But what if your BMR not only affected fat loss, but also your testosterone levels?
Research generally paints a one way causal picture where more testosterone leads to a higher BMR. This makes sense:
more testosterone = more muscle mass for your body to fuel = higher BMR.
However, like many processes in the body - the causal loop runs both ways. Factors that increase in BMR - things like low temperatures, increased thyroid function and a low-fat body composition, tend to increase testosterone.
Hope this helps anyone with the stamina to read it all.