A few day ago I was looking through the blog on Sexology Institute and came across a post on Testosterone and the Connection of It to Sexuality. The post describes four ways to deal with some of the sexual effects of declining testosterone. The bullet about medication to help with erectile disfunction (ED) deals specifically with an effect of lower testosterone and not how to raise or maintain levels. Two of the other bullets, one about losing weight and exercise along with the bullet about sleep have always perplexed me when I've seen them in other locations.
Some say because of lower testosterone (T) there is weight gain and disrupted sleep while sometimes the same source will say steps to improve sleep, exercise and diet will help maintain T levels. I feel like I'm presented with a chicken or the egg and I'm not sure which comes first. I finally decided for me to watch my diet, get more exercise, and do my best to sleep well. The diet and exercise are things I've been steadily improving on. The sleep comes and goes.
I didn't have my T levels checked until I had been working at it for a while so my results are suspect at best. I was seeing some weight loss but also seemed to be loosing muscle mass. My chest was starting to look like an 80 year old's chest. I had read about fenugreek being an ingredient of many herbal testosterone boosters. I was finally able to travel to Sexology Institute for some counseling on my ED with my wife. Melissa Jones, the Sexologist there seemed to agree with me it was probably something other than low T. After the counseling session we were looking at some of the products and I saw one with fenugreek in it. It also had saw palmetto in it. I had read that saw palmetto helps with prostate problems and had tried some before. It not only didn't seem to help but symptoms often increased when I used it. I hoped it was small enough of an amount that it wouldn't hurt and the fenugreek would come through to help.
My chest and biceps have added mass in the two and half years I've used fenugreek regularly. I kept with the product with the saw palmetto in for a while but then switched to fenugreek capsules from the supplements section and my grocery store. Some of the products sold online and in health food stores to increase testosterone always promoted they had the most, or the best form of fenugreek which was shown to increase T in clinical studies. I decided to look for those studies. I found two. One was behind a password protected wall of an online journal so I have no way to know what it says. The other took a few tries but I found a copy online. I didn't read the whole study as the abstract said it was conducted on 18 athletes for about six weeks. I decided that was too small of a sample of too restrictive of a population to do me any good in trying to find proof it was the fenugreek helping me. It may have been I was too impatient with how my older body responded to the exercise. I may have started adding mass finally at the time I started the supplement. It could be a placebo effect. All I know is I'll keep using the inexpensive form I get at the store until it seems it isn't working or I see some research to say it doesn't work or is harmful to me.
At another grocery store I came across a number of products that claim to enhance male response. I did a little research on some of the ingredients and will report on what I learned in a future post.
Comments