Thursday , March 28 2024

Intermittent Fasting And Testosterone Levels: Fasting Benefits For Men



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Intermittent fasting has been a super useful tool in my tool box over the past couple years when both dropping body fat and increasing testosterone levels naturally.

Even in the absence of perfect nutrition and less-than-ideal sleeping conditions and lifestyle stress situations (living in NYC and sleeping on a couch for a year on noisy 14th street, for example, while under extreme stress with a venture-funded mobile tech startup = stress to the max), intermittent fasting became my go-to daily form of hitting the reset button with my physiology.

And over time, I truly believe that IF played a major role in bringing my health from mediocre, to very solid.

In today’s video, we’re going to explore some different types of IF and how you can use them to lose fat and even increase your T levels naturally.

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is quite simply abstinence from caloric consumption for a short period of time.

During this fasting period, an individual can consume non- caloric beverages without negatively impacting the fast, but no foods or caloric liquids should be consumed, or the individual leaves the fasted state.

Fasting has been used for centuries as a medicinal exercise in humans, and is a natural response for many animals during times of sickness or healing.

Arguing for or against the nature of fasting is not within the scope of this program. I will instead assume that you are reading this in order to learn more about how to increase your testosterone naturally, and therefore I’ll lay out the myriad benefits of IF for doing so.

Not only does intermittent fasting provide a means to decreasing body fat, either by easily facilitating a caloric deficit without the negative hormonal side effects of calorie restriction or by facilitating some of its own fat-burning influence in the absence of a calorie deficit, making body recomposition more effortless, but it also boosts testosterone by influencing expression of key pituitary and satiety hormones including GnRH, LH, insulin, and leptin.

The research on intermittent fasting in the scientific literature is either, or both: 1. woefully nascent 2. non- applicable to both humans and/or us, fitness-conscious individuals.

Most short-term fasting studies are conducted in animals like monkeys, rats, or cows, and are carried out with methodological 48 – 72 hour fasts. For our purposes, this is considered a long-term fast, especially because most humans will never undergo a fast over 48 hours. And the results are non-applicable to us.

Almost all of these studies find the suppression of testosterone and an increase in circulating cortisol, as if that was a surprise. Between 24-48 hours of fasting, depending on individual variance, most humans will have an acute stress response to the lack of feeding. Hormones such as cortisol, insulin, growth hormone, and testosterone will likely be affected.

However, for fasts under 24 hours, the benefits are myriad, and this acute stress response is less likely.

For example, in obese men short-term fasting was shown to increase LH production after just an overnight fast. While the LH increase in this case did not directly lead to a noticeable increase in testosterone levels in these men (it was, remember, a mere overnight fast) the increase in LH was promising enough for the same researchers to perform tests in non-obese men.

In the non-obese men, the results of a mere overnight short-term fast were staggering: a 67% increase in LH response and a 180% increase in testosterone. With this in mind, doing a short-term fast daily may have profound, almost immediate effects on your endocrine balance, especially because LH pulsing needs to spike regularly in order to have a noticeable effect on your overall T levels, something that regular daily intermittent fasts can have a positive effect on.

In terms of these results, short-term fasting appears to affect men differently based on their level of body fat, with normal, nonobese men seeing a rapid rise in LH, then testosterone following a short fast.

However, in obese men, the rise in LH does not seem to affect testosterone levels, which may be an indication that IF induces a strong enough stress response in this subgroup of men to effectively negate the LH increase before it triggers testosterone production or because it is not strong enough to overcome the powerful estrogenic influence exerted by the excessive levels of body fat.

Testosterone has been found to be positively correlated with insulin sensitivity, which also reinforces the idea that body fat levels matter in terms of healthy testosterone levels, with normal and fit body fat levels exhibiting improved insulin sensitivity over overweight and obese individuals.

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