Shocking Ways You TANK Your Testosterone

More and more people are concerned about their testosterone levels. But what if there are things that you're doing every day that actually destroys your testosterone? Hello, all champions! Today, we're going to talk about 10 surprising ways that people may be lowering their testosterone without even realizing it. And first of all, we have to realize just how important testosterone is. It's not just about muscles and sexuality, the way most people think about it. It plays a major role in your health for both men and women. It is involved with your energy and your mood. It's involved with your metabolism. It's involved with mental clarity. And it even plays a role in your motivation and your drive as well as in your overall health. And again, this is for both men and women. And in no particular order, the first way that you destroy your testosterone is by eating too much sugar and carbs. Because when you do that, then you drive up your insulin. Insulin is a hormone that takes blood sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cells. And the more sugar and the more carbs you eat, the more you're going to spike your blood sugar. And the more you're going to drive up your levels of insulin. And as a result, you're going to lower your levels of SHBG, which stands for sex hormone binding globulin. And if you have less of that, then you're going to have more free estrogen and less free testosterone as a result. And if you eat carbs and sugar on a regular basis, now you're going to chronically drive up your insulin levels. You're going to become insulin resistance and also that's associated with type 2 diabetes. Now what's also going to happen is that you're going to drive down your long term levels of LH, or luteinizing hormone. And that's a hormone that speaks to the testicles and tell them to make testosterone. So with less luteinizing hormones, you're going to have less testosterone production as a result. The second way you destroy testosterone is with chronic stress. And what's happening here is you're driving up your levels of cortisol chronically, which leads to less testosterone. And the way this works is that cortisol competes with the testosterone for precursors, for raw materials. And some other compounds involved with making testosterone are cholesterol and pregnant alone and something called DHA, which stands for dehydroephyndrostrom. And these names are not important, but what we want to understand is all of these things are involved in building things up. And when we are chronically stressed, now the body is not in a state of build up. And it's in a state of catabolism, of breaking things down. It's just trying to survive for the moment and make some energy. And that's what chronic stress does. And it's not just that we're competing for raw materials, but the overall state of stress is breaking things down. And that's not when the body prioritizes making testosterone. The third way we destroy testosterone is with poor sleep. And testosterone is made during REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. So if you have poor sleep or insufficient sleep, then that's going to cost you in terms of testosterone. In fact, one week of poor sleep can reduce your testosterone levels by 50% and poor sleep is also reducing the amount of luteinizing hormone that we just talked about and when LH goes down, then the testosterone production goes down as well. The fourth way you destroy testosterone is through endocrine disruptors and what are they? Well, they're chemicals, they're compounds that work through a lock and key mechanism. So if you have a cell and that cell tries to communicate with various different chemical messengers, then it's going to have a receptor. And then when that compound comes in and it fits into that receptor, then it's going to create a signal. And now that cell is either stimulated or it is slowed down. So this is how chemical messengers communicate with the cells and tell them what to do through receptors. But with an endocrine disruptor, now it can displace, it can disrupt this communication by mimicking the body's own chemical messenger. And some of the most common compounds that can do this are fat-soluble compounds like plastics and pesticides, but also metals and other chemicals as well. And if these chemicals end up fitting into this receptor that was intended for something else like testosterone or something needed for testosterone production, now these chemicals, these endocrine disruptors are going to bind and block that signaling site. And now we have disrupted the bodies signaling and production. And if we disrupt that regulation, one of the things that can happen is of course that we reduce our testosterone production. We interfere with it. And this way we can interfere with testosterone production as if we eat a very low fat and/or a vegan diet. And one of the reasons is that cholesterol, like we mentioned, is the raw material for testosterone. It is the building block for all the steroid hormones in the body. And even though the body makes most of the cholesterol, as much as 75 to 80% of all the cholesterol used in the body is actually manufactured in the body, diets still plays a big role. And when we have things like saturated fat, it acts in conjunction with cholesterol. And we also need things like zinc, the mineral zinc, we need vitamin D and vitamin B12. We also need something called creatine and carnitine, which we have in animal products. And if we don't get these, even though we can still make a lot of the cholesterol, what they have found is that dietary cholesterol still is very, very important. And if you have a very low fat or a vegan diet, you could reduce your testosterone by as much as 10 to 15%. And this was reported in the journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism. And the sixth way that we can hurt our testosterone levels is with a lack of strength training. So the type of strength training that we need is the type that pushes large muscle groups. And we don't just need to use them, we need to push them, we need to challenge them. And of course one of the hormones that help build muscles is testosterone. So when we challenge large muscle groups and we break them down and we need to rebuild them, that's a stimulus for the body to make more testosterone. And the best muscles that we can use for this are the leg muscles and the gluteus muscles, because they have the largest mass. So if we really push and challenge them, that's where we get the biggest bang for the buck. But there are other ways we can challenge the body as well. We can do it with a large muscle group, but we can also do it by pushing our heart rate up to very near max level. So high intensity interval training will do it as well. So if you get your heart rate up over 90% of your maximum, then that is a very strong challenge for the body as well to make growth hormone and to make it. And another popular way that has been talked about a lot in recent years is ice bath. If you plunge yourself into cold water, that's a huge short term stress and a huge challenge to the body. And I'm not someone who enjoys ice baths a whole lot, unless I can first be in a sauna. So you could do the ice bath if you enjoy that sort of thing or you can go in the sauna first and then you jump in the ice bath. And then you can go back and forth a few times as well. And this is going to provide a wonderful challenge for the body that's going to drive up all kinds of hormones. And the seventh way that you can damage your testosterone is by having too much body fat. And here we're talking specifically about this roll fat. So this is fat that is associated with stress, with excess fructose. And again, that's half of sugar is fructose. And also associated with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So fructose will drive the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease as well as alcohol. And once you have a fatty liver or the beginnings of a fatty liver, that's going to create a lot of visceral fat typically. And the problem here is that you're going to unbalance something called aromatase in the body. And there's a pathway called the aromatase pathway. and the reason we're interested in that is that it converts testosterone into estrogen. And here's where we really need to understand that this is a real thing, because if you have low testosterone, if you go get a lab test and you find out your testosterone is low and you figure that it's as simple as just supplementing some testosterone. You could either take it as a pill or you could rub it on your body as a cream. But what happens now with testosterone supplementation if you have an unbalanced aromatase pathway because you have a lot of visceral fat and fatty liver and insulin resistance, now you're going to convert that supplemented testosterone into estrogen. So you could actually start rubbing on testosterone cream and all that really happens is you're driving up your estrogen. So it works for some people but just be aware that it's not as simple as just taking some testosterone. And the eighth way that we can hurt our testosterone is with over training. Even though we just talked about how important training is to produce testosterone, we don't want to over train, especially not without sufficient recovery. And there's a huge misconception here that training builds muscles and this is not so. Exercise equals breakdown. When you exercise, you tear muscle fibers. You break them down and the body has to recycle them. And then if and when you get enough recovery, now you can repair, you can restore and you can even increase your muscle mass as a result of breaking them down first. But if you don't get enough recovery, then you're also not giving the body a chance to rebuild it. And this is why a lot of body builders and people who work on very hard, heavy weights, they will alternate days to focus on a specific body group. So they do legs on one day and then upper body on another and then on the third day, they might rest. And by doing that, you want to get 48 to 72 hours of rest after you do a heavy workout on a body part. And one way that you can tell how widespread this misconception is is by watching movies. And I can't tell you the number of times that I've reacted to the fact that they have the hero do a really hard workout the day before the important event. And all you're going to do there is you're going to break down the body. You're going to increase cortisol, you're going to increase inflammation and you're going to reduce testosterone. Now, when I was an athlete and getting ready for the Olympic to cathlon, we would do less and less work the closer we got to the competition. For even a couple of weeks before, we would decrease the amount of working out. You would still work out, but you increase the quality and the intensity and you reduce the quantity. That way, you're not breaking down muscle fibers. You're not creating inflammation. You're just tweaking the body. You're tweaking the timing. You're increasing the muscle tone so that you're just teasing the body to get ready and hungry for that meat. But if you were to do what they do in the movies, like I said, all you're doing is you're shown up for the meat and you're really tired and pain and sluggish. The ninth way you can interfere with testosterone is with excess alcohol. We just mentioned how excess alcohol can contribute to a fatty liver and visceral fat and how that can alter that aromatase pathway where we turn to testosterone into estrogen. But one more way is that if we stress the liver with a lot of alcohol, then we are reducing the liver's ability to metabolize and break down estrogen. And breaking down hormones is one of the most important functions of the liver. They're supposed to be produced and then they're supposed to have a certain half-life. They're supposed to be active for only a limited time and then we're supposed to break them down. That is the normal way and that's how we can balance hormones. But if we're interfering with the liver's metabolism of estrogen, now we're going to end up with more estrogen and less testosterone as a result. Also, a stressed liver is not going to be able to absorb zinc as well. And as a result, we're going to have less testosterone production. And the tenth way we interfere with testosterone is with vitamin D deficiencies because vitamin D acts as a hormone. It is a hormone and it is directly involved in the production of testosterone. It also affects gene expression directly. So with less vitamin D, we're going to end up with less testosterone production. As you can tell, there is more to this than simply measuring a level and taking some testosterone if it's low. You want to understand all the different aspects of how your body is working and which different factors can contribute to bringing the balance back. And if you find that this is a little complicated, then don't despair because it is. And we have a telehealth department that can sit down with you and that can come up with some recommendations and help you understand your situation and how to bring back that natural balance. I'll put a link down below if you want to check that out. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. 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