The Importance of Testosterone

Attention Men – This is a “Must Read” Article because it contains some very important information about Testosterone, Sex Drive, and How To Preserve Both!

Hey there, it’s your muscle building coach Lee Hayward here and I’ve got a very important article that you should read.

It’s about The Importance of Testosterone, Sex Drive, and How To Preserve Both.

This is a guest article written by John Romaniello who is the author of the brand new book:

Man 2.0: Engineering The Alpha <<--Click Here to check it out

This is an amazing book that was forwarded and endorsed by the governator himself, the great Arnold Schwarzenegger himself!

How I Lost My Mojo (and Got it Back)
By John Romaniello

There’s a problem that men facing across the world —
a problem that few people are talking about, but a great
many are experiencing. This problem needs a solution, but
more than anything, it requires awareness. The problem,
very simply, is that men are dying; at least, metaphorically.
Their manhood is dying.

Men are less manly. That’s not an opinion; it’s a fact.
If you want to be a little more scientific and a little
less dramatic about it, testosterone levels are dropping
rapidly. And not just in older men; whereas decades ago,
this was thought only to affect men in their late 30’s
and beyond, it’s now beginning to affect men as young
as 22. It’s so bad that researchers from Massachusetts
found that the average man’s testosterone (not just older men)
has dropped 22% in the last 20 years, and that one out of
every four men has below average testosterone. If those
facts don’t scare you, if the fact that it’s very possible
that you’re suffering from low T doesn’t scare you,
then you may not know all of the devastating effects
this condition can have.

To help explain why this issue is so important, and help
illustrate just how impactful it can be, I’d like to tell
you a story—and a very personal story at that. It’s the story
of how I lost an important part of myself, and eventually got
it back. It’s a story about how I had work around a common
medical condition, and take matters into my own hands to
solve it. It’s story about how I lost one of the defining
characteristics of my masculinity, and about my journey to
reclaim it. And this is the first time I’m sharing it publicly.

Despite all the content I’ve written and all of the articles
I’ve published, one of the things I’ve never really discussed
is how, at 25 years old, in the prime of my youth,
I personally struggled with low testosterone — and the way
it manifested itself was with low sex drive. Today, I’d like
to share the story of how I fixed it; and how in my journey
to do so, discovered how epidemic this problem truly was
— how my passion for this issue led me to write a book about it.

During the course of this story, you’ll learn how this
devastating issue might be affecting you; how it’s potentially
responsible for lack of energy, or depression, or the nagging
feeling that you’re aging faster a bit too quickly.
And, of course, you’ll learn what you can do about it.

Let’s Begin at the Beginning…

I was 25 years old and had spent the majority of my
adolescent and young adult life as a very sexual being.
Like most young guys, to an extent, I defined myself by
my aspects of sexuality — my virility, desirability, and
performance all factored into my assessment of who I was
as a man. Before you judge me too harshly, I blame evolution
for this. Feeling actualized as a sexual being is a factor
in self-esteem; this is just one of the idiosyncrasies of
being human. While it certainly applies to women, for men,
the relationship between self-esteem and sexuality is
especially strong. It’s been shown that this is just one
of the (many) complications that comes of being born with
a penis. Put another way, from the perspective of
evolutionary psychology, your manhood and your,
um, manhood are indelibly tied together.

Evolution and psychology notwithstanding, speaking purely
personally, my sexual identity was part of my overall
identity. And then one day it was gone. It may have been
a gradual decline that I didn’t notice, but it felt like
stepping off a cliff. I simply woke up one morning and didn’t
want to have sex. And, I don’t just mean with my girlfriend
(which I could have written off as relationship boredom),
but with anyone.

Sex was no longer interesting to me. Not just uninteresting,
but also unappealing to the point of revulsion. The thought
of a woman touching me made my skin crawl. If you’ve
experienced low sex drive, you can relate; all of the
people I’ve spoken to in my interviews for the book
reported a similar feeling. (If you’ve never experienced it,
the best way I can describe to you is the feeling of being
really full to the point of nauseous, and then someone you
care about trying to feed a home cooked meal… and then
getting really upset when you didn’t want to eat it.)
These subjects also discussed the feelings of shame and guilt
associated with low sex drive—shame for not wanting sex,
guilt for the way it made their partners feel.

At first, I was bothered by the void—the hole left by not
wanting sex, and all the extra time on my hands from not
having it. For a time, I wanted to want sex. Eventually,
it stopped bothering me. Then, in moments of reflection,
in the early hours of the night when I was pretending to be
asleep in an effort to avoid another conversation about it,
I was bothered about not being bothered about it. And then
that stopped too. From that point on, I watched with a
strange sort of detached bemusement as the ramifications
of my condition tainted piece after piece of my life.

Needless to say, my relationship was one of the casualties.
After nearly eight months of incredibly infrequent and
probably lackluster sex, my lady and I called it quits.
A dearth of sex is dangerous in any relationship, as it leads
to lack of intimacy and a widening fissure between partners.
Some relationships can survive that; mine couldn’t. She’d had
enough of feeling unwanted and unattractive, and I’d had
enough of feeling guilty about making her feel that way.

This happens more than you can imagine, and as covered in a
2009 piece in a New York Times blog, psychologists see over
and over that when stops in a relationship, the couple begins
to struggle with lessening intimacy—and the longer that
relationship goes without sex, the harder it is to reclaim
intimacy. For many couples, that starts with testosterone.
For this reason and a host others, low T can cause depression,
lack of ambition, and even thoughts of suicide. It didn’t go
quite that far for me, thankfully, but it certainly wasn’t fun.

Here’s the truly scary part: I didn’t actually know I had
low testosterone. I had no idea what was causing the issue;
all I knew is that I wasn’t who I had been. I had lost not
just one part of myself, but several—because the fact is,
sex drive is strongly tied to all drive. When it drops,
so too does your ambition, and your motivation to achieve
that ambition. For me, it felt like I’d become a different
person, a lesser man. Without exaggeration, ever part of my
life was negatively affected: my relationships, my sleep
patterns, and my physique—even my productivity and business
were all hampered.

Eventually, I spoke to a friend of mine who suggested I get
my testosterone levels checked. They were low, in a relative
since—certainly lower than they should have been at my age.
I measured less than 400ng/dl. This is right about the point
where research suggests many men begin to experience symptoms
of low T. Unfortunately, that still fell within the range
of “normal”, because that range of is so vast. Depending on
which lab you get tested at, “average” can be from as low as
260ng/dl (nanograms per decaliter) to as high as 1080ng/dl).
Meaning, that if you’re at around 800ng/dl and your
testosterone falls by 50%, you’re still within the
“reference range”, and therefore, not be considered low.
(As a related aside, this is something I humbly suggest
needs to addressed by the medical community.)

The problem for me personally became that I was in a strange
grey area — I was low enough to be experiencing a ton of
symptoms, but too high to qualify for treatment of any kind.
My doctor advised me that while my levels were low for my age,
they were still technically normal, and I just had to deal
with it. Very rarely has stupider medical advice been given.
I had to take matters into my own hands, and had two choices:
I could either simply procure illegal testosterone and
start injecting it, or figure out a way to increase T levels
naturally. Although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t briefly
consider the former, in the end I’m happy to report I went
with the latter.

Over the course of the next several months, I dove into all
the literature I could find and started making a lifestyle
overhaul. My sex drive returned—rather rapidly. In 6 weeks
I felt different. After 12, I got tested again, and my
testosterone levels had literally doubled—doubled!
I was productive again. I started dating. I reclaimed
my physique and liked the way I looked again.
I felt ALIVE again.

As you might imagine, I was struck by how well it worked,
and how simple it had been, once I knew what to do. And I
decided that eventually, I would write a book about it —
because I felt that men truly needed it. In the process of
my research, for both my personal use and the book, I came
to realize just how much men need it, how epidemic this
problem really is.

The goal of Man 2.0 has been, from the outset, to not only
provide a solution to a huge problem, but also to create
awareness of it. This article will certainly create some
awareness, but I’d like to use this platform to provide a
solution. While I can’t be as starkly informative as I am in
the book, below you’ll find three high-yield tips to naturally
increase your testosterone and improve your sex drive.

How to Increase Testosterone Naturally

– Reduce Carbohydrate Intake

More and more, it’s becoming obvious that high carbohydrate
diets are a pretty bad idea for the majority of people.
In this specific case, as usual, the reason is insulin;
although insulin is produced when you eat any food, the
insulin response to carbohydrates is significantly greater
than the response to fat or protein. Insulin affects your
testosterone and sex drive in a number of ways.

Firstly, production of insulin halts secretion of growth
hormone, which potentiates testosterone production. Secondly,
chronically elevated insulin levels have been show to
increase the likelihood of erectile dysfunction.

Limiting carbohydrate in helps to reduce the production
of insulin, and help avoid the sexual issue that can arise.

Reduce Your Body Fat

As if your really needed another reason to bring your bodyfat
down—because, you know, diabetes and heart disease just aren’t
scary enough—men with lower levels of body fat are consistently
tested with higher testosterone. Conversely, men with higher
bodyfat have greater levels of estrogen. This piece mentions
the relationship between testosterone and bodyfat, but suffice
it to say that getting leaner will improve your T levels and
sex drive. But, since you’re going to follow the first tip
and lower carbs, losing body fat won’t be an issue,
so you’re set.

Increase Dietary Fat Intake—Especially Saturated Fat

For years, people have been afraid of fat and cholesterol,
despite the fact that avoiding them seems not to be slowing
the growth of the obesity epidemic at all. Gripes aside, fat
isn’t just “not that bad” for you – it’s far healthier than
you’ve been led to believe.

Further is study is needed to confirm this, but seems likely
that the “health issues” that are sometimes thought to be
correlated with high dietary fat and cholesterol intake are
probably more do to other lifestyle factors. For example,
despite the fact that high fat intake has been linked to
heart disease, the recent popularity of the Paleo diet has
produced a tremendous amount of anecdotal evidence that
people on higher fat, lower carbohydrate diets do not seem
to experience a radical increase in cholesterol — particularly
when this diet is combined with exercise.

In fact, often times cholesterol levels go down.
Most importantly, the ratio of HDL:LDL tends to improve,
as do other markers of health, like total triglyceride count,
which decreases.

More importantly, concern about “high cholesterol” is
generally overblown, because cholesterol is largely
misunderstood. Something to consider is that cholesterol
is actually a pre-cursor to all sex hormones—including
testosterone. And so, for men looking to increase
testosterone and sex drive, avoiding dietary fat
and cholesterol is a bad idea. In fact, it’s been suggested
that increasing cholesterol increases testosterone.

Wanna safeguard your sex drive? Bring on the bacon!

Final Thoughts…

As I mentioned above, low sex drive is a harrowingly trying
problem to deal with, and it’s more common than you think,
because low Testosterone is truly epidemic. And while
deceased libido is, for most men, an unavoidable
consequence of low testosterone, what’s not inevitable
is the drop in T.

The first thing you need to do: get tested. Even if you’re
not currently experiencing any of the symptoms, you should
at least know your T levels so that you have a baseline
of comparison for the future. From there, follow the above
tips to start taking control of your body and creating a
hormonal environment that will facilitate a healthy,
well-balanced life—one that includes sex.

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If you would like to get a copy of John’s new book;

Just watch the intro video below and you’ll see what it’s all about as well as get several extra freebie bonuses that will help you jack your natural T levels and live your life to the fullest.