Sex, Libido & Hormones Q&A – A Special Podcast Episode For Mature Audiences Only.

Welcome to this special episode of the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. A Q and A on sex, libido and hormones. If you have small children in the audience, please kick them out or put earmuffs on them. Let's rock and roll.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill, cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hey. Hey. We're live. We're live. I can't even see the screen right now because I'm wearing my super duper sexy sunglasses and I promised you that I would wear my, my sexiest pajamas as well. So I'm sporting my suite. I gotta be careful because the fly tends to, tends to drop open on these things. But these are my, these are my Lucky Charms. PJ's ready for tonight's sexy spreecast. Seriously, my wife has a thing for leprechauns. She thinks these are just like the sexiest PJs ever. Not. Well, you could ask her about that. Anyways, I'm gonna take my sunglasses off because I have absolutely no freaking clue what's going on in the screen right now because I can't see. Alright, there we go. That's better. All right, so we are gonna talk about adrenals tonight. We're gonna talk about actually going to talk about libido. By the way, this is my Ben Greenfield fitness hat that I'll be sporting tonight as well. And I've got a lot of your questions pulled up here. So you guys asked some fantastic questions on the blog. And remember, one of the reasons that we're doing this whole darn thing is because this is the week that the Sexy Back Summit is going on. And the whole idea behind the Sexy Back Summit, which you can attend@tinyurl.com SexyBackBen is it's basically like this week long free deal where there's videos every day that teach you how to do things like restore your adrenals, enhance your libido, improve your sex life. I've already seen a bunch of videos and some of the presenters that are in there and it's rock solid stuff, pun intended. So I would highly recommend that you check that out. Honestly, what I do when I do a summit like this is I'll join the summit. I'LL go in, I'll watch the videos that I can for that day. If I get to the end of the summit and I haven't seen all the videos, sometimes I will, you know, because they will try and get you to like buy access to more videos at the end of the summit, FYI, I think that's how they make money off it. But basically you can watch the videos for free all day long the day that the videos come out. So that being said, let's go ahead and jump right in to what you guys want to know about sex, hormones, libido, etc. Now, because this is a live spreecast, you can ask your questions. Why do I have my headphones on? You can ask your questions on the screen and I'll put you on the screen. You can ask your questions via video if you'd like. And I will also start by reading off all the fantastic questions that you guys left on the blog. Now, if you are listening into the post recording or watching the post recording of this, then you can always leave your follow up comments wherever this video or audio winds up. So let's just start right off the bat with a question from Jason. And Jason says, is there any way to know whether your testosterone is low without having to take an expensive blood test? And by the way, before I jump into Jason's question, can you all hear me? Okay, just want to check here because I can. I'll maybe amp up the mic just a little bit. Yeah, let's turn it up just slightly. Just type in yes. Okay, I just turn up the mic a little bit here. All right, so Jason's question, how do you know if your testosterone is low without having to take an expensive blood test? So it was very, very interesting. I want to start off with a story about this. I last year got on an herbal testosterone support formula and there are a variety of them out there and they're usually mixes of Tribulus and Maca and Fenugreek and all these different herbal enhancing compounds that frankly work in some men and women and don't work in others. And usually different herbal mixes work for different people. We might get a chance to talk about that a little bit later on. I don't use an herbal testosterone support formula anymore. Based off of my recent blood work, I probably should get back on something like that because my testosterone has plummeted since I quit using one of those things. But I got on this and immediately I noticed a few changes for me as a male. And what those changes were was first of all it was during a time that I play noon ball three times a week at my local ymca. I play noon basketball. And all of a sudden, within a few days after starting on some herbal testosterone support formulas and working on getting my testosterone up, I noticed a distinct interest in winning. I got very, very upset when my team would lose games. I was far more competitive in terms of pushing guys around and really getting in people's faces. I was literally more aggressive out there. I also tended to be a little bit more aggressive in the weight room as well, wanting to really kind of push things around. It was just an overall feeling of competitiveness and aggressiveness that I didn't have when I wasn't working on getting my testosterone elevated. So that's one way that you can identify low testosterone is have you lost your competitiveness, your competitive drive? Have you lost your aggressiveness? Do you not care if the other guy wins? Okay, Very, very kind of primal testosterone enhanced drive that we have that we lose. If we dip into andropause or our testosterone, specifically our free testosterone, the stuff we can use gets too low. So. And someone just told me that the microphone is loud now. You know what, I'm going to be putting this onto the podcast probably tomorrow, so I want to make sure I get good quality audio. So hopefully it isn't too loud for you anyways, though. Another thing that you'll notice, and we're really not leaving any stone unturned today, another thing that you'll notice when your testosterone is low is you literally experience atrophy of your penile muscles, meaning that you get down regulation of what are called the androgen receptors, specifically in that very important gland of your body. And you'll tend to notice that it actually has a more shrunken and small appearance. And that's another sign that your testosterone is low. You can upregulate and restore those androgen receptors. It doesn't mean that you've kind of screwed yourself for life, and pardon the expression, you're going to have a, you know, kind of a small member for the rest of your life. But that's another thing that you'll notice is you'll get atrophy in that area. Another thing that you tend to notice, kind of hand in hand with that is, and I got to be careful with the analogies that I use here, but hand in hand with that is the fact that you tend to not experience quite as much as that waking up like a 13 year old boy type of phenomenon. And again, when I've gotten on herbal Testosterone support formulas. When I notice my testosterone is elevated, what I'll experience are like waking at 1 2am wishing my wife was awake, waking up in the morning, kind of like the same way that you woke up when you're 12, 13, 14 years old with what we call the morning wood. You tend to notice that as well and that goes away and you just never experience that. You also never experience like sexually oriented dreams, things like, things of that nature when your testosterone is low. Now, there are some other things that testosterone does to you that go above and beyond, like sex and competitive drive, such as your ability to recover and repair from a workout. So you're more sore for a longer period of time and you have a harder time bouncing back after a workout. You tend to sometimes get more brain fog, you tend to get depressed a little bit more easily, showing signs of seasonal affective disorder. Something that really tends to fly under the radar with testosterone. And frankly, it's not something that you would know until you like. A friend of mine who I'm getting on the podcast to have a heart attack is that chronic disease, specifically chronic cardiovascular diseases associated with low testosterone. And of course, you wouldn't know this just from looking at qualitative variables, but it's something that's pretty darn important and something that really scared me. That was the first thing on my mind when I saw my blood work two weeks ago and saw that my testosterone had fallen back down. Those first thing I thought about was my buddy who had a heart attack because his testosterone was low. So those are some of the basic ways that you would be able to recognize and identify low testosterone. If you weren't going to go out and work with Wellness FX to get a blood panel or if you weren't going to use direct labs or something like that for an adrenal stress index or salivary testosterone profile. You know, if you just can't afford that stuff or you don't have time and you just want to kind of keep your finger on the pulse of your testosterone on a day to day basis, those are some of the things that you can use to recognize it. So good question, Jason. Matt says are there supplement or diet choices at mealtime that can act as an aphrodisiac, AKA a modern day Spanish fly Man. If you did a web search for this, you would literally get like thousands of results. Sip my glass of wine. I actually just got out of the river doing my cold thermogenesis and one glass of wine typically gets me a little loopy. So towards the end of this podcast things make it a little crazy. Anyways though, you'll see the downward progression of my iq. So supplements or diet choices at mealtime for libido enhancing. First of all, let me say that above all, more than anything else, nothing beats the high amounts of zinc that you're going to get from something like shellfish, you know, doing the whole oyster, crab, lobster, clam type of thing. All of those type of things certainly are proven libido enhancers. That is not an old wives tale. I guarantee that's the number one thing and that's because of the zinc that you're going to find in those. Now there are also things that are going to enhance nitric oxide formation. Probably the biggest two that you're going to find out there in literature are watermelon and chocolate. And you don't need much of this stuff. We're talking about like a quarter to a half piece of dark chocolate, slice of watermelon. That stuff really enhances nitric oxide formation. Arugula is another compound that really enhances nitric oxide. If you watched my sexy Time Shake video, that was something that I put into there. There are some other things that you can use about two to three hours prior to sex that you, that you would mix for example in like a glass of water and preferably consume with a higher fat meal. A couple of those. One would be like a raw pollen extract, another one would be a pine pollen extract. You can get either of those in like basic supplement form off like Amazon.com for example. Another thing that you would use that you could use would be like red wine. That's a vasodilator we used to use during bodybuilding to again enhance nitric oxide, enhance the veins that stand out. And all of this stuff can also travel to the groin. And both guys and girls enhance orgasm and enhance sexual experience and blood flow. Those are some of the diet choices. You know, pollen is a little bit more of a supplement I guess as well as Chinese adaptogenic herbs. That would be another thing you could use with a high fat meal, specifically like cordyceps or cortagen, rhodiola. Some of the components of like that TNT Chinese adaptogenic herb complex that I recommend. Any of that stuff can work. As far as a lot of those herbal supplements that I talked about, those also can have a pretty darn good effect. The fenugreek, maca root, tribulus. What are some other ones? Mucuna, A couple of supplements out there and I'm going to be talking about these in this coming Friday's blog post where I talk about my personal plan for getting my testosterone levels back up. Renew Male is one blend that's really good, so that'd be one option. Another blend that's really good is called Aggressive Strength by Michael Mailer. That's another good one. Another blend is D aspartic acid, which you can get off Amazon in powdered form. About 3 grams of that or about a teaspoon of that per day is good, too. The drawback to that one is that it can give you man boobs if you use it too much. So generally you want to mix that with what's called an aromatase inhibitor. So you don't get a lot of that testosterone getting converted into estrogens. And an example of an aromatase inhibitor would be like Chrysan is one. So C H R Y S I N Another one is Myomin M Y O M I N. Both of those are pretty potent in their ability to keep testosterone from getting converted into excessive estrogens. Also, another thing that works really well is are any of these supplements that you get to give you a pump at the gym, like nitric oxide or. No, explode. I don't like a lot of the artificial sweeteners in that, but if you can find a nitric oxide precursor that doesn't have those in it, that's good. There's a company called Millennium Sports. Millennium Sports, I believe it's@millurysports.net and they make a supplement called Citraval, which is a citrulline precursor. They make another one called Nitroceps, which is a nitric oxide precursor. And either of those consumed about 30 to 60 minutes prior to sex with a carbohydrate such as watermelon or dark chocolate or wine, or can also work really well. Last thing. And this thing, this is kind of fringe. I will admit that when I travel to Asia, I do buy this stuff and bring some home for the occasional long nightly stint. But that would be basically like any of those generic versions of Viagra that tend to be a little less expensive than Viagra. Carmegra is a perfect example. If you haven't used Viagra before, it actually is a pretty cool thing, especially for men. And that's another one that you can use. Little bit tougher on your liver, so be careful with overusing that one. But every now and again, using something like that, you know, whatever for an anniversary or a special night or something like that, where you just want to. You want to go for a long time, that Stuff's pretty potent and you pretty much can just go until you're, until whenever you feel like stopping, basically, if you, if you pop one of those. So those are, those are pretty interesting as well. So, like Karmagra, I think it's K A, R, M A, G, R A. You know, if you travel to Asia, you can get like, you know, 10 pills of that for like 20, 30 bucks. You can also buy it online from, you know, any of these kind of dubious online pharmaceutical companies like WorldPharma, you know.org or something like that. And you know that that's another way to do it. You're just going to pay a lot of money. And Jordan, who's in the chat room right now, just piped in and gave a very good tip. He said 20 minutes after a very cold shower and some saturated fat and your libido will be a roaring lion. And that's certainly. And you don't even have to do it 20 minutes before. Like when I do cold thermogenesis. Like for example, about 20 minutes ago I went swimming in the river and I Swam for about 40 minutes. It was around 46 degrees Fahrenheit. Part of that was for cold thermogenesis. Part of it is because tomorrow morning I leave for a week and frankly tonight I plan on getting it on. And that will actually help quite a bit with that experience in terms of just like the overall strength of libido. So cold thermogenesis, absolutely. Jordan, that's a good one as well. Let's see. Trevor says, what advice would you give someone that wants to get off monthly testosterone treatments and onto more natural remedies to help with low testosterone testosterone levels and getting the boom back in the bedroom. Trevor, I've already mentioned some of the stuff like for example, renew Mail or the Aggressive Strength by Mike Mailer as well as like Chinese adaptogenic herbs. Those help quite a bit as well. One of the things that you gotta understand is that if you are a man specifically, and I feel like this information is really getting skewed towards guys, girls, if you're listening in or watching, don't worry, we'll address some topics for women as well. But if you're on testosterone and you get off testosterone, it's going to be a good four to six months where you're feeling really crappy. It takes a long time to get your libido back. I have a client who I work with who was literally on something that he called the Pecker Pack. And he was taking, he was doing everything like zinc Boron, you know, testosterone precursors everything. And was still just feeling like crap after weeks and weeks and weeks because it takes a while for you to start to upregulate your own endogenous production of testosterone after you stop taking a testosterone replacement hormone that's replacing the testosterone that you're on. So that's why I'm not a huge fan of like, compounded hormone replacement therapy with testosterone. Unless your quality of life is just super duper low and your testosterone is so suppressed that you're at increased risk of heart disease, that type of thing, you know, that's where that choice will probably do you more benefit than harm. But you got to understand, first of all, that no matter what you do to get your testosterone back up after you quit using something like a hormone or an injection or a patch or a cream, it's gonna be a little bit of a long road. So anyways, as far as some other treatments that could help you if you get off a testosterone patch, in addition to the stuff that I've already mentioned, Boron is one. And there was a guest post that was done by the folks from examine.com, which is a great website for researching supplements and whether or not they're efficacious. They did a guest post on BenGreenfieldFitness.com about natural ways to get your testosterone back up. And the three biggies that they talked about were vitamin D, zinc, boron. So you'll want to test your vitamin D levels, because if you megadose with vitamin D and you get your levels up above 100, which is possible to do with megadosing, what happens is you have increased risk of chronic disease. So you don't want your vitamin D above 100. I like to see vitamin D levels between 40 and 60 in men and women to indicate proper hormone and steroid and cholesterol precursors for getting your sex drive up and your testosterone and your progesterone up. But vitamin D would be one. If your vitamin D is low. About the number that I like to recommend Is to get 35 international units of vitamin D per pound of body weight. Okay, 35 international units per pound of body weight. In many, many folks, that ends up coming out to anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 international units of vitamin D. To put this into perspective for you, the average multivitamin usually has about 200 to 400 units of vitamin D. So you can get that extra vitamin D through like a Carlson's liquid, vitamin D drop through like cod liver oil or fermented cod liver oil and that type of thing. The other really, really good way to get a lot of these fat soluble vitamins. If you're a meat eater and you're okay with eating like offal and organ meats, not awful A W F U L, awful O F F A L. That would be through liver. And you can, you can just google grass fed liver and the name of your city and you can find, find liver. Or if you're a hunter, you can go out and hunt down some liver because it's best fresh. Trust me, if you can take down a deer and get its liver out and cook that up that night, it is very, very tasty. Anyways though, let's move on to Texas lawyers. Question, he says, for those of us who like to have a few drinks on a date, can you suggest a healthy way to counteract the alcohol's negative effect on sexual performance? Perhaps an exercise supplement or just good old fashioned hydration? Well, this is a really good and relevant question because a lot of us have probably dealt with this. You're out drinking, whether with your spouse or significant other, maybe if you're single, this is just what you do and you get back and you've got someone there that you're trying to enjoy a good time with and the alcohol has just, you know, suppressed your ability to really get it on or even depressed some, some nerve function and that type of thing. Well, certainly one thing to do would be to drink less alcohol. And even though that doesn't sound like fun, one of the ways that you can still get a good time with alcohol, perhaps let down some of your natural barriers, but not drink so much alcohol that it messes up your sexual performance is to not eat very much at the same time that you're drinking the alcohol. I know that flies in the face of what a lot of websites will tell you eat a lot so you soak up the alcohol so it doesn't do damage. I'm a bigger fan of not eating very much before you drink. Drinking alcohol that is not very calorie dense, but very alcohol dense. So for example, vodka with soda water because. Or tequila with soda water. Either way, because the bubbles in the water will allow the alcohol to actually transport the alcohol across your membrane and allow it to be absorbed into the bloodstream a little bit more quickly, meaning you have to drink less, you have a lower bar tab, but you also have less effect of excessive alcohol having an effect on your sexual performance and your libido. So that's one thing that you can do and then if you're concerned about the way that you feel the next day because you didn't have enough food to soak up the alcohol. I've got whole posts over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com about mitigating the effects of alcohol. But probably my biggest supplements for something like that would be to do a few sprays of like a liposomal glutathione. I get one off of Dave Asprey's website. That's really good. Doesn't taste very good, but three to four sprays of that before you go out and drink. Dissolved under your tongue. Three to four sprays when you finish. That's a really good one. High dose turmeric is really good both before and after you drink. I'm a fan of phenocaine for that. You could also put a bunch of turmeric on whatever food you are eating when you're drinking, but that can kind of affect your breath. If you're with a significant other who doesn't want to feel like she's kissing a giant pot of curry, then you may want to go with something like phenocaine. So phenocaine is really, really good for that as well. Another thing that can help out quite a bit is like spirulina or chlorella. I like these energy tablets that would be something to eat before you go out and drink. Because if you eat it after and prior to whatever fun times you plan on having in the bedroom after it dyes your mouth green and sticks in your teeth. And that is not sexy. Trust me, I know. I'm wearing green underwear right now and my sexy green trucker hat, and I had my green sunglasses. But green all over your teeth in your mouth is not sexy. So do that. Do spirulina, algae stuff like energy bits, things like that before, not after, if you're drinking for those purposes. Anything else, you know, that, like Carmegra or Viagra that I mentioned, that, you know, definitely that stuff can make you a little bit more bulletproof to the effects of alcohol in terms of enhancing blood flow to your. To your groinal areas. And yeah, those would be the biggies. Those would be the biggies. So. So let's move on to B. Burpee's question. He says, do you know the best time of day for male and female hormones to be supercharged? There's bound to be an apex that both partners have to maximize their satisfaction. This is a tough one, guys. You've probably run into this. You wake up in the mood and she's not. Okay. Now the reason for this is because generally in most men, testosterone is going to peak pretty high to the time that cortisol peaks during the day. And that's going to be between 8 and 10am so for a guy, the time that sex is going to be most pleasurable is between 8 and 10am for women, you tend to see that peak in progesterone and a peak in some of the hormones that are responsible for sexual pleasure occurring between 4 and 6pm so there's obviously kind of an awkward time differential there. And it's one of those things where, you know, you can identify the times that don't work well. Okay, so 5am doesn't work very well, as anyone who's tried to have sex at 5am probably knows. The other time it doesn't work well is when your body starts to churn out melatonin, because melatonin is going to suppress. It's going to put you in rest and digest mode, basically. It's going to suppress some of these natural sexual drives that we have. And generally that's going to start right around 9:30, 10:00pm and you know, go on up through midnight 2:00am so that's not really an ideal time either. I mean, if that's the only time that you can get it on, then that's better than nothing. But ultimately, sometime between 9am and 6pm is ideal. In other words, like quickies during the day are really, in terms of pleasure, the best time to get it on. And that's what I found from personal experience. I've talked to many other people who have discovered the same thing. Waiting until the end of the day or just trying to get it on very first thing in the morning. Generally not the best time for both partners. But if you can manage to sneak away somehow and get it on during the working bank hours, that's the time to do it if you really want to maximize the effect. Here's a good one. Mother Nurturing says, is there any credence to abstaining before a big race, game, event? So research has looked into this and research has clearly proven that there are no detrimental performance effects of having sex the night before or in a few hours preceding a big race or a game or an event, like having sex the night before an Ironman triathlon or something like that. Unless you think that that is going to have an effect on you. And if you have those thoughts, that's where you get the placebo effect, where if you think it's going to hurt performance, it will understand that there's nothing to show that it's going to hurt performance at all. And as a matter of fact, having an orgasm, whether it's a self induced orgasm or whether it's one that you get on with a partner, has been shown to actually improve mental focus in cognitive performance tests. So what this means is that if you need more focus, if you need to be more in the alpha zone when you're competing, it may actually help. Now I think the reason that the idea behind sex not being good prior to an event has come about is because the idea is that when you orgasm you lose some of, some of your, some of your lifeblood, some of your power. Some of that goes out from you and it's better to have that bottled up while you're performing so you can just like lay it all out when you're out there racing or competing or fighting or whatever. Unfortunately, so many studies have looked into this and they haven't found that to be true. Now obviously some of the studies may have been flawed, they may not have been controlled very well. Now I want to shift this also to kind of an N equals one type of thing. I've personally found that I tend to get more complacent, more, more sleepy, more kind of ho hum, that whole oxytocin relaxed type of feel, like damned if I do, damned if I don't type of thing after I have sex. And sometimes that stays with me all through the next day. So I'm happy, clappy and everything. But sometimes it's better to be a little bit pent up aggressive before you go out and do an event. So I'm personally kind of a bigger fan of not before a game or a race or event, but that's me. And again, different strokes, haha for different folks. So there you go. All right. Susan says, oh boy, this is going to be a fun one. Can you explain the connection between your adrenals, your thyroid, your liver and your gut? Wow. Okay, so this stuff is all very interrelated and here's why. Your adrenal glands churn out all these adrenocorticosteroids, cortisol being one of the main ones. And your adrenal glands need a certain amount of precursors in order to be able to do that. They need vitamin D and they need cholesterol and all that kind of stuff. So if you have beat up adrenal glands and you are over training and using too many of these hormonal precursors, you're not able to produce Cortisol and a lot of your adrenal corticosteroids, and you tend to be more adrenally exhausted and more in a state of adrenal fatigue. Now, especially in women and to an extent in men as well, we can also look at the liver. And what happens is when your gonads, when your ovaries, etc. Are pumping out your hormones, a lot of times many of these hormones undergo their conversion in the liver. And the liver is also the place where you're going to detox a lot of estrogen mimickers that you're getting through your diet, through environment, stuff you get from like, plastics and soy milk and stuff like that. So if your liver isn't working very well, if you've beat up your liver from excess pharmaceutical consumption or alcohol consumption, or just living an unhealthy lifestyle, getting exposed to lots of toxins, pollutants, et cetera, even if your glands, like your gonads and your ovaries, are pumping out adequate hormones, a lot of times they're not getting converted into their active form, or a lot of times they're getting out competed by some hormones that are coming in from your environment. So that's where the liver comes into play. Where the thyroid comes into play is that if you have way too much cortisol that's being produced, what happens is the thyroid receptors on your cells aren't as sensitive to to thyroid. So your pituitary gland has to churn out way more TSH, and it's churning out way more TSH to make more T3, which would technically get converted into T4 and uptaken by the cells to increase your metabolism. But that doesn't happen because you got excess cortisol. And in my case, that's something I'm dealing with right now. I just had my blood work tested. I've got very high cortisol. I'm following up with some thyroid tests through Wellness FX to make sure this is the case. But I highly suspect that the issue is due to hypercortisolism causing a downregulation of thyroid. However, there's also another thing that you got to take into consideration here, the fourth component that Susan asked about, and that's your gut. Not only does your gut churn out a lot of the neurotransmitters that are going to allow your brain to send signals to your ovaries, to your testicles, to your kidneys, et cetera. So if you've got an unhealthy gut, you're not going to produce the neurotransmitters that are necessary for hormone formation. But there is a condition called small intestine bacterial overgrowth. Small intestine bacterial overgrowth is an imbalance of bacteria in your digestive tract that's usually due to something like. It can be related to a parasite, infection. It can be related to overconsumption of carbohydrates. Typically, it goes hand in hand with things like irritable bowel syndrome, gas bloating, etc. But a lot of times, hand in hand with this, you tend to see a downregulation of your thyroid. And so that may be, in my case, for example, another issue that I'm dealing with is gut health. And I certainly do have some of the signs and symptoms that that may be an issue in my case, with my thyroid as well. So all this stuff is interrelated. Really, the only way you can go after it is to test, test, test. So, like, I have to do a hydrogen breath test for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. I have to do a test to follow up from the high TSH to see what my T3, what my T4 is at, what's called my reverse T3, my thyroid antibodies. So there's all these. You really don't know unless you go out and you do the tests. But that's kind of the overview of how all this stuff is interrelated. So I hope that helps. Mike is telling me to put on a shirt. Mike, sorry, I promised I was going to wear my Sexy time pajamas, and those do not involve a shirt. You may have come in after the fact that I showed my lucky charms pajamas, but, yeah, anyways, Mike, this is for you. All right, so questions. Let's see what other questions have come in since we started this freecast. Rodolfo, I'm gonna put your question on screen because I can't read the whole thing, but Rodolfo says, what are your thoughts on this? I have low estrogen levels, low fsh, low lh. And for those of you who don't know what FSH and LH are, those are the hormones that get churned out by your. Your pituitary gland to get your ovaries to produce more hormones like estrogen, low igf. No, I'm sorry, I'm totally butchering this. You say low estrogen, high fsh, high lh, high insulin, like growth factor. Okay. What this means, especially when you say that these other hormones like DHEA and testosterone and stuff like that are all low, is typically that for some reason, your Brain is churning out the compounds that are telling you to produce more hormones, but your body isn't responding by producing more hormones. Now, you say that your sex hormone binding globulin is low, and that's a very, very key factor here because usually if your brain is sending a signal to your body to produce more hormones, but you've tested and those hormones are low, it's one of two things. You've got too much binding globulin circulating in your bloodstream that's causing hormones to be in your bloodstream, but be in their bound unactive form. A lot of times when that's happening, it's due to caloric excess. Too much insulin and too much sugar that can upregulate these sex hormone binding globulins. Now, the other thing that can happen is you don't have enough precursors on board to actually produce hormones. You don't have enough vitamin D, you don't have enough fat. Sometimes it can be a magnesium issue, sometimes it can be some other micronutrient like zinc or Boron or B12 or something like that, but it can also be a nutrient deficiency. Now, in your case, because you say you've got low hormones, but you've got high or you've got low hormones but also low binding globulin, in your case, you probably need to look at this from a dietary standpoint. You probably got to eat more or eat more fat or put your body into a state where you're getting more precursors into your diet. And that's usually kind of the case with something like this. Chris says, how does having four to six Brazil nuts a day help similarly for high dose fish oil? Chris, this is something I should have mentioned earlier in my response about dietary factors because I keep frozen in the shell Brazil nuts in my freezer. You got to get them in the shell so that you're guaranteed they're not going to be moldy and rancid. Because Brazil nuts can be really bad for you. If they are, the other thing that you got to do is keep them in the freezer again so they don't get moldy and rancid. Because Brazil nuts can be really bad for you, but they can also be really good for you because they're a potent source of the selenium and zinc, which are helpful for your thyroid and helpful for your testosterone. They also got a lot of these healthy fats in them which are, like I just mentioned, hormone precursors. So that's where Brazil nuts come in handy. I actually just do three Right now I toss them in my morning green shake with some coconut oil, a little bit of almond butter and that type of thing. So that's the deal with the Brazil nuts. For fish oil, it really does come down partially to a lot of these fat soluble vitamins that I've talked about a little bit today as well as omega 3 fatty acids. Not only do omega 3 fatty acids help you from a cardiovascular standpoint, they've got a little bit of a blood thinning property. They help with blood flow, so they can assist with sexual function and sexual performance. But they also have a lot of anti inflammatory omega 3 fatty acids in them. Again, just like Brazil nuts and any fat really. If you get the wrong kind of fish oil, it's bad for you because it's rancid and it's high in omega 6 fatty acids and it tends to cause a lot of oxidation in your bloodstream. But if you get a good high quality fish oil that's cold processed, that is packaged with antioxidants like astaxanthin and vitamin D and stuff like that, I take the brand Super Essentials, by the way. I take four grams of that a day when I'm traveling and I'm not eating fish like I usually do at home. That can be really, really good way, really good way to basically keep your healthy fat levels high. So I'm a big fan of fish oil. I know fish oil has taken a beating in the news recently. If you have seen the beating that fish oil has taken in the news, I would recommend you go to the Life Extension foundation website and do a search for fish oil. Life Extension foundation just kind of recently published a kind of a rebuttal to some of these studies that have shown fish oil to be harmful. So I recommend you check that out on the Life Extension foundation website. All right. We are getting close to time. Let me tell you right now. I would highly, highly recommend that if you dig this kind of information, I only scratch the surface of the type of stuff that you're going to learn when you go to tinyurl.com sexybackben and you check out the Sexy Back Summit. A lot of what I've taught you in this brief 45 minutes or so is stuff that I've picked up from a lot of the doctors that are presenting at this Sexy Back Summit. People like Chris Kresser and Dr. Sarah Gottfried and who else is there? Dave Asprey. He's not a doctor, but he's talking there a lot of really, really good talk. So totally worth going to again. It's at tinyurl, sexybackben. It's totally free. You can't go wrong checking some of this stuff out. So I'd highly recommend that if you have more questions, you can leave them right underneath this video. I will be posting this video@BenGreenfieldFitness.com as well as publishing it on a podcast. This will be the special podcast for this week. If I've offended you in any way, I apologize. I know that some of this stuff can be a sensitive topic for people, and I always go out on a limb when I talk about sex in a frank and candid manner. But it really is something that we all do or that we all should be doing. Now, let me end with this as well. If you can dial in your fertility, you can dial in your fertility. Meaning enhance your hormones, balance your hormones, get your libido up, get your sex drive up. I guarantee that you will, in the process of doing that, vastly improve your health, your longevity, and your performance. Okay? Fertility is intimately intertwined, pun intended, with health performance. If you can't get it up, guys, women, if you're never in the mood or you're a menorrheic, guys, if you have no competitive drive and you're sluggish or you've noticed that you've experienced penile atrophy and hopefully you know what that means and basically stuff just isn't working for you in the sexual department, I guarantee you're shortening your life and you're really cutting yourself short in terms of your sports performance and your ability to enhance whatever your performance in a triathlon or a CrossFit workout or whatever. If you can get your fertility lined up and your hormones balanced, the downstream effects are freaking awesome. All right, you guys, thank you so much for watching. Thank you for attending. I'm going to go ahead and end this precast and Again, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com to leave your questions. And don't forget to go to tiny URL.com SexyBackBen all right, over and out. Thanks for watching.

Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice. Sam.