Transcription
All right, gentlemen. In this video, we're going to be talking about testosterone replacement therapy, commonly known as TRT, and some of the drawbacks and downsides. Cuz it's not all rainbows and butterflies. This is stuff I wish I knew years ago when I was searching the internet. None of this really came up, and in hindsight, well, it's always 20/20. I thought I would share this with you because a lot of the times I get guys asking questions about it, often younger guys. There's a chapter in my book where I talk about managing your hormones as you age and the like. So let's get into it. But before we do, I got to grab a coffee before we hit the road. Thank you, Timmy. It's a staple in Canada, and I've become a fan of americanos lately.
All right, let me give you a little bit of a background as to why I got on TRT. I was in my early 40s. I knew about it. I had friends that I had talked to that I'd seen at events and conferences. They would tell me, you know, "things are awesome, they're great." I would say to them, "Well, why?" You know, "you look good, you've you've got some decent size on you, some, you know, some muscle even." And they would say, "Well, it's TRT," and they would explain it, kind of the protocols and how they do it. Most of these guys were from the states, Americans, so I wasn't quite sure if it's available in Canada. But I remember going to the gym, you know, again in my early 40s, thinking to myself, "I'm feeling weaker, sort of tired, I'm not as motivated, I don't want to go and get at life anymore." You're not waking up with morning wood all the time. Those are all the typical symptoms of, you know, what they call suboptimal testosterone. Yeah, than you all right.
So suboptimal testosterone sucks. You know, like I said, it's not fun. And I took a look around at a few of the guys at the gym, and a lot of them look really good, you know, guys my age were even older. They were they were fit, they were reasonably jacked. I wouldn't say, you know, bodybuilder style, but I'll give some pictures to my editor, but I'll have them put up some before shots of me in my 30s when I was in real good shape and everything was optimal, and I'll show you some afters when I got on TRT, so you can get a little bit of a visual on the difference. And it and it does have an impact, like it is a strong, improved, noticeable difference. Like before I got on TRT, I think I was around 194 lb. I'm about 218 as of the time of recording this video. Most of it's muscle, some of it is bone density increase, cuz that's one of the benefits of testosterone, some of it's water retention, of course. There's also some fat, you know, as well that, you know, sometimes comes along with that, depending on how you manage your diet. If I'm being honest, I've been a little bit lazy lately. It's wintertime here in Canada. We've got a bombie, minus 14 out today, Celsius.
But let me get you into some of the stuff that I wish I knew that I couldn't find or wasn't available to me when I was doing research, cuz I was reading blogs, watching YouTube videos. It looked very straightforward. Found a clinic here in Canada that did it and got signed up. Not all clinics are the same, by the way. They're not all equal. Some of them really suck, and I didn't have the best experience with the first place that I went to. It starts with, okay, you go in, they test your blood labs, then he's like, "Well, let's see if we can optimize you naturally," cuz I think the doctor kind of wants to cover his ass. And he's like, "Take some more of this and a little bit of that, and let me give you a little script of uh DHEA," which is not available over the counter like it is in America. In Canada, you need a prescription from a doctor, and come back and, you know, "we'll take a look at it in 3 or 4 months and see how things look." And they didn't look much better, right? So I just push for it. I'm like, "Yeah, you know, not motivated, you know, can just give me the script, you know, I just I just wanted the gear." Now I always knew when I got on it, I was like, "I kind of am a little bit on the edge about having my hormones and my optimal health under the control or the the supply chain of big Pharma and doctor's offices and the government," cuz at any time the government could say, "Yeah, you know what, masculinity is toxic, there's too many strong masculine males out there, we need to cut them off testosterone, TRT, now legal, Pharma companies, supply chain issues," you know, we've actually seen that over the years here in Canada. It's a good thing that I always keep about a 90-day supply, but they do pop up from time to time. That being said, there are a lot of homebrew guys that just buy the raw ingredients and make it themselves that I could source from. I'd rather get it from lab-tested Pharma stuff because it should be the highest quality possible, but black market still exists for testosterone.
What ends up happening though, once you start getting fully optimized, and I'll tell you what the bad part is in a little bit, is they start looking at everything. So I went to a really good clinic after a few years of treatment with kind of like the basic Bob sort of treatment, and I found a guy that really knew his stuff, was really into it, was older, was fit, masculine. He's about 65 or so, really good shape. The guy that I was dealing with before was kind of a nerdy wimp, about the same age, maybe a little bit younger, but just a geek. So I found a guy that I was introduced to, you know, just recommendations, "Hey, who should I talk to? Talk to this guy." He was awesome. He went right down the rabbit hole, ticked off all the boxes on the blood labs. "All right, let's see where your zinc at, let's see where your poppers at, let's take a look at your inflammatory markers, LP little a, let's take a look at homocystine, CRP," all these important things that my original clinic didn't want to run labs on or didn't know to run labs on, they didn't think about it. So that's the first thing you got to understand is when you with your hormones, you want somebody that really knows what they're doing. And I'll be honest with you, the vast majority of these places that are like franchise-based, cookie-cutter, very simplified sort of thing, a lot of them are just family doctors that were like, "Oh, I see an opportunity to make money specializing in hormone management." The first place I went to, I think was charging 12,400 bucks a year plus any extras that you kind of needed on the way. He would sell you supplements and stuff like that and a few other things. The other guy was about 275 a visit, so you go four times a year, so you know, it costs money, you know, it's a way for them to make some money obviously, which is fine. I don't mind paying for good healthcare. A lot of people think healthcare is free in Canada. No, it isn't. It's not the best healthcare. I can get into that in a separate video.
One of the things I noticed, by the way, was when I go in to get my blood labs for them to measure estrogen, which is mostly a dominant female hormone, it's free. You want to measure free testosterone, it's not free. You got to pay to measure free testosterone, total testosterone, all these things, you know, the Canadian government does not cover that because it's testosterone, isn't that surprising, anyway. So found a really good clinic, got fully dialed in, felt great for years, okay? He was looking at things, he's like, "Oh, you know, your mercury level is too high, let's, you know, let's see what's going on with that." Then we introduced a remedy to fix that problem. Ended up being too much tuna in my diet, you know, don't eat large fish that are old fish from the ocean, they do have heavy metals or more heavy metals than normal. There was a copper deficiency. That's one of the reasons why my beard was going gray. If you don't have high enough copper levels, your hair will tend to gray sooner or prematurely. That, you know, that's why, you know, my beard, you know, some people said, "You know, your beard looks like it's getting darker." So copper levels were fixed, zinc levels were fixed. He was keeping an eye on inflammatory markers, and it's not just testosterone, then you have testosterone, DHEA, you have an aromatized inhibitor, I think I use AI, if I'm not mistaken, then you have a pregnanolone at nighttime to make sure you balance out the rest of your hormone panel. It's a full suite of stuff, and now my entire optimal health is reliant on Pharma, a clinic, you know, prescribing it, supplying it, the government saying it's okay that I can have it, sort of thing. Those are really big ifs.
Here's the stuff that they don't tell you. Over time, my doctor started to notice, "Well, you know, your hemoglobin and your hematocrits are changing, you know, it's going up," which is generally something that happens to people when they go on testosterone. So one is a measure, I think, of percentage of red blood cells, and the other one's a measure of I think oxygen carry. I'm I'm butchering it. Somebody that's a medical professional will correct me in the comments, but either way, your blood starts to thicken, which is fine as long as it doesn't get too thick because you don't want to stress your heart too much, pumping blood, thicker blood, more viscous blood. Think in cold weather when you start your car up and you've got thicker oil in it, it's harder to move it through the engine and lubricate everything. It's it's it's much harder, the engine works harder, same thing for your heart. You don't want your blood to get too thick. So now, okay, well, well, as a consequence of having testosterone, higher levels, optimal levels like I had when I was younger, now my blood's starting to get thicker. Okay, so how do you fix that? Well, you can donate. Donations suck because they take out 500 mL, which is two cups. My normal phlebotomy, when I would go into my clinic because he had it all dialed in again, you know, you go in, he had an IV bag, you take your vitamins, take the bag off the hook, drop it on the floor, you drain out maybe 100 milliliters of blood, and you keep yourself at a nice stable level. Everything's fine, everything's fine until it's not. So my clinic isn't available anymore. Now I lost my provider, okay, different story, but my provider no longer is an option to me. So now I'm scrambling to find another provider. I've got a supply that'll last probably 60 more days, 30 days on some other supplements, there's some others that I'm going to run out in 14 days. I had to call a friend of mine that's down in Arizona right now and say, "Hey, you know, can you grab me a bottle of DHEA cuz I'm almost out," and I got to, you know, find another clinic. That's what's going on. So blood's getting thicker, don't have access to the prescriptions that I need to operate at an optimal level, and trying to find another clinic cuz obviously very, very hard. You can't get a phlebotomy. I I just can't walk into the uh blood draw clinic and say, "Hey, can you take some blood out?" I have to go to my family doctor, then I have to explain to my family doctor what's going on, and then I have to convince her to write me a script to go into the blood lab place to get a phlebotomy. I even started looking up online, "Can you do it yourself?" Actually, yes, you can. It doesn't look like it's that hard. Do I want to mess with it? Not really. So I went and donated blood yesterday. They took out, you know, 500 mL. You're feeling all laded afterwards. It sucks. I've also been told that they don't generally use all the blood that they take out for saving lives in hospitals and accident victims and all this sort of stuff. A lot of it goes to research facilities, some in places you don't want your blood going to. Save that for another video. You're going to tinfoil hat me, but you see where I'm going. It's not all rainbows and butterflies.
It's much better, in my opinion, if you can optimize your body naturally and do all the work to make it work to pump out the natural levels. I don't see any reason why guys in their 20s or even 30s should really, for the most part, be on testosterone replacement therapy or dealing with a hormone clinic. It's probably a shortcut that you don't need to take. I'm not saying always, but probably. Like I said earlier, I gave some photographs to my editor, you know, you saw before I was on TRT versus after, kind of similar results. In fact, after TRT, you kind of look a little bit bigger, right, which is great. You feel great, you look great, people notice it when you enter a room. It's pretty obvious, "This guy looks after himself." It's a good feeling, but your entire well-being is at the whim of Pharma companies, the government, and a provider. And then you've also got the other things you got to manage like your blood thickness and stuff like that. How do you deal with that? Your phlebotomy, are you going to go to a doctor to get a script for that? Are you going to donate blood? Are you going to do it yourself? I just ordered this morning a kit off Amazon that lets me track my hemoglobin via fingerprint, so I can probably manage that a little bit better and hopefully avoid any need to go in and dump blood unnecessarily or too much of it if it's not like quite thick enough that I need to take some off. Because I'm telling you, man, I don't like it. In hindsight, I wish that I had done more to manage my hormones a little bit better before I got on testosterone. I don't fully regret it. When everything's optimal, it's great, it's amazing. It's probably better than what my body would be naturally, if I'm being honest. But as I just explained, you know, with every benefit that you derive out of life, there's always some cost to pay somewhere. Nothing, as they say, there is no free lunch. And this video is really the explainer of there is no free lunch when it comes to TRT.
So you know, I talked to a lot of guys that are young, you know, I met a guy last week when I was on a business mastermind. He was like 28, and he's like telling me he's on TRT, and I'm, "I'm why? Like, why did you do that?" Sort of thing. And that's coming from me, a guy that's been doing it for a long time now. So give it some thought, guys, you know, there's there's ways to optimize it. There's actually an entire chapter in my book, and I put a lot of thought into it. I'm going to try to recap some of it in this video for you, but you should get my book, unplugged, outfits pinned below. The main things are optimizing vitamin D, and when you optimize vitamin D, you're going to end up with higher levels of vitamin D, which which will deposit calcium in your arteries, which is not where you want it. So you want a vitamin DK variant, a vitamin DK variant. The K moves the calcium out of your arteries and into your bones where you want it. So it's incredibly important to optimize vitamin D. That's really that's a strong contributor to optimal levels of your hormone. So vitamin DK blend, zinc, incredibly important, and a high-quality zinc bisglycinate is the best one, a boron supplement as well, a low amount of boron supplement helps as well too. There's other things like Tongkat Ali, ashwagandha, there's there's a few other things like DIM and cryon which help lower your estrogen levels, which seem to get out of whack as you get older. I have to take an AI to make sure that not too much of my testosterone converts to estrogen. You don't want too high estrogen because if it goes too high, you're going to have tits. If it goes too low, you're going to have no libido, right? So there's like all these sort of things that you're starting to manage now, right, that a good provider can be very, very good at, as long as you're doing your blood labs regularly. What happens if the blood lab place is shut down, right? This is why I'm saying, guys, try to optimize it as naturally as possible. If you're waking up with morning wood, if you've got muscle mass on you, low fat, you're motivated, you know, Andrew Huberman famously said in a Joe Rogan podcast, "Testosterone makes effort feel good," like really, that's what the benefit is, right? It's a driver, it's a go-getter sort of hormone for you, and it makes you want to go out and do things in life and pick up heavy and put it down, down, and you know, have intimate relationships with women, and that's why you wake up with morning wood. So if all of that's working naturally, why do you want to mess with that by introducing exogenous hormones to your body that your body makes naturally? They do this big sales pitch, okay, they'll say they're bioidentical hormones, maybe they are, maybe they aren't, I don't know. I don't produce them. That's what the Pharma companies say, but it's my opinion, having been natty for 40 plus years of my life versus having been on a therapeutic dose of testosterone, which is just optimizing me, to put it this way, you know, people go, "What are your levels at?" Well, if 10 is top of the range, I'm like, "Usually coming in on my blood labs at 9 to like 11," so around the top, slightly higher, feels good, awesome. If you're still feeling good, everything's working, just don't do it, don't do it. Now if you're not feeling good, if you're missing things out like high libido, strong morning wood, strong sex drive, a go-getter attitude in life, do all those things that I said first. I've actually got a good supplement line, it's not even good, it's great. I've got one of the best supp lines out there, it's very, very high quality, pinned below in the top description, there's a category which I'll leave there for you on testosterone optimization. I've had a lot of my membership that's used it and got good results. Try it for 3 to 6 months and see if it improves your levels. You got to check your labs before and then check your labs after, okay? The vitamin DK one, the zinc product, and the Alpha T product are all the ones that you want to introduce. The Alpha T product is more of an AI sort of blend with a testosterone-boosting of compounds of herbs and natural components that have have been proven to improve testosterone. This is all stuff again I wish that I knew years ago when I got involved in this. I hope that helps. A bunch of you probably have some experiences that you want to share, leave a comment below. Hope you guys enjoyed the video, subscribe and all the other good stuff. Peace out. I don't I don't take I got for the F if you want to play and want to hate this I show up.