TESTOSTERONE IN PERSPECTIVE — CRITICAL CONTEXT

The Big Picture

• Testosterone is a widely misunderstood and consequently a wrongly feared, even vilified hormone that actually drives most of the basic components of men’s health and fitness. It’s critical for building and maintaining muscle, strong bones, dropping fat, more energy and drive, cognition and mental health, reproductive health, and much more. As such, it has far-reaching health benefit.

• The hardly acknowledged inverse of this, then, is that a lack of testosterone drives widespread health detriment. It tends to decline with age, but this decline is neither inevitable nor irreversible as I’ve seen firsthand and will lay out for you in this ebook.

• Throughout my research and experience, as you’re about to see, it became clear that virtually everything men are commonly encouraged to do for health and fitness, and life in general, combines and compounds with unprecedented levels of chronic stress and very popular men’s lifestyle choices to systemically erode our testosterone.

• It’s not just declining with age, it’s also declining across the population independent of age. Men today have literally half as much testosterone as men the same age had just 50 years ago, and this population-wide decline continues worsening by about 1% a year.

• And, in 2017 the CDC actually lowered the reference range for “normal” testosterone, per this population-wide decline. So, many men with “normal” testosterone actually have low testosterone. Rather than sounding the alarm, the CDC just lowered the bar.

• Low Testosterone IS THE men’s health crisis, as it paves the way and sets the stage for developing most risk factors of chronic diseases, infertility, and mental illness, all of which have exploded amidst this population-wide testosterone decline. Reversing this vastly destructive ebb would drive a rising tide of significant men’s health improvement.

• Barring any certain health conditions, reversing low and waning testosterone is actually not that hard, but I’ve found it requires a core understanding that since testosterone is influenced by a combination of factors across stress and diet and exercise, and lifestyle, at all times, for better or worse, it requires addressing ALL these areas. You eat and exercise and live to create a favorable environment for your testosterone to flourish.

  • Imagine the limited success of a business that only has strength in marketing, OR product, OR operations, OR sales, OR finance & accounting, etc. Now, imagine the thriving success of a business with strength in ALL these areas. You can’t only eat or supplement to boost testosterone, or just do the stress stuff, or just lifestyle adjustments, just the workouts, etc. and expect much. Each may help, but it’s the combination of all of these working together and compounding one another’s benefit such that their collective power far outweighs the sum of the individual parts.

• This low testosterone epidemic has sent men, in droves, to Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) clinics, and to buy grey market bioidentical hormones online. Google searches for TRT have nearly quadrupled just since early 2020. Synthetic hormones do help some guys, but can have terrible side effects and can create a lifelong dependency on the drugs as the body shuts down its own testosterone production. And like all pharmaceutical interventions they generally don't address root cause of the problem. I’m not on any synthetic hormones, but even if I was, I’d still do everything in this protocol to maximize efficacy at minimal dosage. Just putting more testosterone into the body is not enough on its own, and can often just convert to estrogen, leading to a host of other problems.

• For me, it is and isn’t about the number. It’s a way of life. I had my testosterone checked only once, a little over a year into this journey. At 41 my testosterone was 733 ng/dl (almost double “normal” for a 41 year old). I don’t care to keep checking it, as I now understand how to keep it elevated to thrive, as all of my symptoms of low and waning testosterone remain completely reversed ~8 years in. But, I’ve become more concerned by the population-wide decline and what it means for ourselves, our sons and grandsons. This is why I’m sharing my entire protocol and trying to make this information more accessible and understandable to more guys.

• Do not obsess. I generally follow an 80/20 rule, sometimes 90/10, on how strictly I follow everything in this ebook, as I saw most of my results when I only even knew of maybe two thirds of it. You’ll see that testosterone is constantly undermined by so many things in life. So I created this as a comprehensive toolkit to help guys understand the basics to better weather the daily storm and forge ahead.

• Lastly, I found it hard to navigate all the debate among health and fitness experts that tends to hinge on the ever changing landscape of science, and the cherrypicking of studies of varying levels of quality and degrees of rigor that prove or disprove various things at various levels of certainty and so on. As a normal guy trying to understand all of this, I had to draw a line somewhere when it came to science and all of the well-intended, but quite confusing, jargon-laden bickering. I simply resolved to try things out for myself if they at least had some decent scientific support (and/or centuries of anecdotal evidence!), whereas many health and fitness experts tend to prefer only things that have passed many levels of scientific rigor and proof, and shrug off the rest as false. So, there are varying levels and degrees of scientific rigor behind everything in my protocol. It was only when I started looking at things this way, though, with a focus specifically on testosterone, that I began seeing and understanding the big picture of how it all works and how it is that we’ve ended up with a low (and waning) testosterone epidemic on our hands. I elaborate on this in Part 4, the Lifestyle section of this ebook.