AOM: 30 Days... Day 4 – Increase Your Testesterone

Are you kidding me with this stuff???

So, today's assignment from The Art of Manliness is "Increase Your Testosterone." Like I need any help with that.

(A year and a half ago, I screwed up and accidentally began taking the same T dose twice as frequently as I should have been – hence my joke that testosterone made me more stoopid. I almost instantly started losing the hair on the crown of my scalp, and sprouted an insane amount of pesky chest hairs. Ya, about that... Since then, I slowly reduced the amount of T that I injected, and let more time elapse in between shots, but without much help. Years later, and lower T levels in my body, and the male pattern baldness is still running rampant. Awesome! Fuck it – I'm back to my original prescribed T levels, at the suggested intervals, and saving up for the soon to be needed hair transplant, while contemplating corporate sponsorship on my newly revealed scalp if it means a discount on the procedure. But anywho~)

Here is an excerpt from AOM:

http://artofmanliness.com/2009/06/03/30-days-to-a-better-man-day-4-increase-your-testosterone/

“Researchers in the US are finding testosterone levels to be substantially lower — by about 15 to 20% — than they were fifteen years ago. Scandinavian studies show similar declines, and in younger men too; a man born in 1970, for example, had about 20 percent less testosterone at 35 than a man of his father’s generation at the same age.”³

So what’s sapping our T? Here’s a few of the factors at play:

Stress. Stress increases our level of cortisol and decreases our testosterone.

Lack of sleep. Testosterone rises while you sleep, particularly during the REM phases. Today, men are often skimping on their shut eye, which in turn is sapping their testosterone.⁴

Soy intake. Soy is supposed to be so good for you, right? Wrong! Soy increases your estrogen and decreases your T.⁵ It will also lower your sperm count.⁶

Eating a low fat diet. Low fat diets have been widely debunked these days.⁷ But in case you needed yet another reason to put down the Snackwell’s, it has also been proven to decease your T.⁸

Smoking. The nicotine and cotinine in cigarettes inhibits and reduces T production.⁹

The Day 4 Challenge: Increase Your Testosterone!

So your task for today is to do three things from the following list that will help increase your testosterone. Obviously, doing more than 3 is great, and I would encourage you to commit to them for the whole 30 days and beyond.

1. Get at least 8 hours of sleep tonight.

2. Do not smoke at all today. (If you don’t smoke right now, you can’t count this one as one of your 3)

3. Do no eat anything with soy in it. You’re going to have to read labels. It will blow your mind how many things contain soy these days.

4. Meditate for at least 10 minutes. This will help you de-stress.

5. Do resistance training. Lift some weights and do compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, dips, rows, and pull-ups. They’ll boost your T more than bicep curls. You also need to use heavy weights and short sets. If you’re looking to maximize your T, I highly recommend the Strong Lifts 5X5 program.

6. Eat a serving of good fat. As you fat intake goes up, so do your T levels. Aim to get at least 30% of your calories from fat today and spread your consumption of it throughout the day. Monosaturated fats-the kind found in nuts, fish, olives, olive oil, seeds, and avocados-are particularly beneficial to your testosterone level (and your health).¹⁰ Also, don’t be afraid of saturated fat; that whole business about it raising your cholesterol and causing heart disease is a bunch of rubbish.¹¹

7. Eat a serving of animal protein. Vegetarian diets have been proven to lower your T levels.¹² So go ahead and have that steak. (This might be the easiest day of the challenge yet!) There’s no need to overdo it though; a diet with a carb to protein ratio of 2:1 is ideal for testosterone production.

8. Eat a serving of cruciferous vegetables. Veggies like broccoli, cauliflower, radishes, turnips, cabbage and brussel sprouts contain Diindolylmethane which helps balance your estrogen and testosterone levels and increases the amount of free circulating T in your body.

9. Have morning sex (if you partner is willing, of course). Just having an erection increases your testosterone. And you already get a surge of T when you wake up, so this will bump it up even further.

Well, this was the easiest one yet! Coincidentally, my T levels are at their apex from my last injection. So eating a tuna steak instead of a soy boy veggie burger ain't gonna make that much difference for me today. Whatev's. Here we go with this list from here on out! Watch out folks, I might just rip through my shirt by day 26!