You’re sitting on the couch, eating chips, drinking beer and watching sports. The commercial comes on that suggests that your gut is one of the symptoms of low T.
That HAS to be the reason.
So you run to your doctor. He or she, thinking they are doing the right thing (because he or she read it somewhere…), checks your testosterone levels and finds that they are low, confirming your theory (and the advertising commercial).
The answer now seems easy. Testosterone therapy. Take your pick: injections, creams, pellets or pills. The choice of delivery of the low T treatments are plenty and the answer is easy. No need to change your lifestyle, just rub some cream on every day and life will be great and you’ll be feeling 18 again in no time.
About 2 months later, as you notice that your testicles have shrunk, reality sets in. No miraculous improvements in energy or your waistline. Personally, I always ask patients who are on testosterone if they feel better. Most often I get a fuzzy answer and very little definite improvements.
Big surprise.
Let’s get something straight here. Your low testosterone is NOT the problem. It is merely a symptom. If your doctor thinks they are practicing “preventative” medicine, finds low testosterone in your blood work and puts you on some form of testosterone, he or she clearly does not understand the human body.
Here’s how it works. In males (and females for that matter, but I’ve covered this in a previous blog article that can be read by clicking here) the adrenals glands produce a hormone called DHEA. DHEA can then be converted to testosterone and actually supplies a large chunk of a man’s circulating testosterone.
Stress and poor lifestyle changes are going to affect your testosterone levels. These same lifestyles are going to make you fat. Period. It’s not like low T comes from uncontrollable gamma radiation from deep past Pluto and the only answer comes in a cream.
Just in case you don’t believe me and think that the doctor who put you on testosterone injections is correct, let me direct you to this particular article.
Researchers tracked hormone levels (estradiol and testosterone) in a large group of men over the course of almost 5 years. What they found was that, in the men that put on more fat, there was no change in the hormone levels that preceded the fat gain.
However, as participants gained fat weight, the testosterone levels dropped.
The bottom line? Get off the couch, fire the doctor that put you on testosterone pellets (and neglected to inform you that this will drastically increase your risk of prostate cancer) and make some positive changes to your lifestyle (you can read all about the changes I recommend in my free eBook by clicking here). There is no easy answer in a cream.