What Causes Low Testosterone Levels In Men & How To Fix It

Kevin Anthony 0:11
Welcome to the love lab podcast a safe place to get real about sex. Whether you’re a man or woman, single or couple, this is the show for you.

Céline Remy 0:20
We are your hosts, Kevin Anthony and Celine Remy. And we are here to guide you to go from good to amazing in the bedroom and beyond.

Kevin Anthony 0:27
All right, welcome back to the love lab podcast. This is Episode 118. And it’s titled what causes low testosterone levels in men and how to fix it. Okay, we have a jam packed show for you. We’re going to try to stay on time, but we’ve got so much good information to share with you. Now, why is this topic important to talk about? Because one, across the board, we’re seeing massive decreases in testosterone in men.

Kevin Anthony 0:59
And we’ll get into all that and why that is. But also because it’s a common thing that we see with clients. And it’s a common complaint about men that they feel like they either have been tested and have low testosterone, or they feel like they’re suffering from low testosterone. So this is huge for men today, I mean, really is big. And I know that I say that I don’t know what took us so long to get to this episode.

Kevin Anthony 1:25
But there’s gonna be tons of amazing stuff in here. And if you’re a woman, please don’t tune out because this is a men’s issue, because you’re gonna want to know how to support your man through this.

Céline Remy 1:37
And I want to make sure that you know that we are not doctors, this is not medical advice. We are simply sharing our opinions and studies and things that we found online and what has worked, working with thousands of clients. And as always do your due diligence and research and listen to your own body, you and your own self.

Céline Remy 1:58
So before we dive into our testosterone, let’s give a big shout-out to our sponsor’s power and mastery. So if you are want to join the secret club of men who are great in bed, then check out power and mastery at power and mastery.com it is the most complete sexual mastery training for men.

Céline Remy 2:18
Whether you want to have harder stronger erections yet because you have good testosterone, you want to last longer in the bedroom or increase your sexual skill. So there is something for you I power and mastery calm.

Kevin Anthony 2:32
Alright, so there’s, there’s a lot that we need to get to in here and some of it we’re gonna go through kind of quickly, and then some of it we’re going to slow down and talk a little bit more about. So let’s start with what is testosterone?

Céline Remy 2:46
Great question. So testosterone is a hormone produced primarily in the testicles. Testosterone helps maintain men’s bone density, fat distribution, muscle strength, and mass facial and body hair, red blood cell production, sex drive sperm production. So as you can see, it is there for a lot of good reasons. Now, our show today is focused on testosterone levels in men.

Céline Remy 3:16
And while it is the main sex hormone, women do also have small levels of testosterone. However, it is so much lower. It’s different, but it is also an important hormone in women. But in today’s show, we are focusing on the men and their testosterone.

Kevin Anthony 3:38
Yes, so let’s talk about so we know what testosterone is. Now, let’s talk about what some of the more recent studies have taught us about testosterone levels in men really, in today’s modern age, because, well, that’s where we are. But two, it’s gonna show a big contrast between the way things used to be and the way things are now.

Céline Remy 4:00
So I was doing some research in putting together this show, and I was in charge of finding the studies. And I noticed that it was a little bit difficult to find really recent studies, most people a quote, a study that was done in 2007. And I’m going to be reading parts of it because there’s a lot of great information. I also found a more recent study that was in 2012, which has, like it’s mind-blowing stuff that they found, but let’s start with our first study.

Céline Remy 4:31
That one was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2007. And what that study indicated is that men’s testosterone levels plummeted 17 and one 7%, from 1987 to 2004. So the study found that not only individual men, men were losing testosterone as they age, which is fairly normal, however, Listen to fairly normal, right? But that same age man from a later era’s had substantially lower T’s than their predecessors.

Céline Remy 5:10
So what that means is that a man who turned 65, and let’s say in 2002, had much lower t than a man who turned 65 in 1987. And this is something that we do talk about a lot when we work with clients that you are not the man that your grandfather used to be. For so many reasons, and testosterone is one of them.

Kevin Anthony 5:36
Yeah. And so this only goes to 2002, which is fairly old. Now. I can tell you, for sure. This trend has continued. It has gotten worse. And I don’t know what the numbers are. But if it was 17%, drop from 87 to 2004, right, I think this was it. Yeah, sorry. 2004.

Kevin Anthony 5:56
Yeah, you can bet that that’s probably, well, I don’t want to say, a specific number, because I don’t know. But I guarantee you, it’s higher, as deployed, I guarantee you that percentage is higher. Mm-hmm.

Céline Remy 6:08
So then there’s the other study that I’m really excited about talking about here. And that was a study that was published in the endocrine society in 2012. And here’s what they found, they found that a drop in testosterone levels over time is more likely to result from a man’s behavioral and have changed and by aging,

Kevin Anthony 6:29
okay, hold up. Before we go any further on this one, I had to bold that in the notes. Please remember that. Because when we get down to the causes and what to do to fix this, this study is going to be huge, because if we didn’t, if we didn’t give you that information, and we get down to some of the things that we personally recommend, you might have gotten, maybe I don’t know, sounds like a lot of work, blah, blah, blah.

Kevin Anthony 6:57
When you understand what the science is telling you about the main reasons for this, you’ll understand why what we tell you, later on, is so important.

Céline Remy 7:08
This is why earlier in that when I was reading that it’s fairly normal for testosterone to drop as you age. And I’ve put the fairly normal because again, it has more to do with your behaviors, and you have than with the numbers on your aging scale. So let’s talk a little bit more about a couple of things they found in their studies.

Céline Remy 7:31
In this study, supported by the National Health and Medical Research councils of Australia, the authors analyzed testosterone measurements in more than if 101,500 men who had measurements taken to clinic visits five years apart. So that’s a fairly big number of men. And they ranged in age from 35 to 80. And the average age was 54.

Céline Remy 8:00
The men who had declines in testosterone were more likely to be those who became obese, had stopped smoking, very interesting. We’ll talk more about that later, or were depressed at either clinic visits. And there was one more point that I thought was fascinating, which I put in there is that unmarried men in the study had greater testosterone reductions than did married men.

Céline Remy 8:26
That’s right. And so one of the authors of this study attributed this finding to past research showing that married men tend to be healthier and happier than unmarried men. Also, regular sexual activity tends to increase testosterone.

Kevin Anthony 8:45
Let’s see what’s interesting about that is it’s counterintuitive, right? In other words, most people would think that unmarried men, they’d be out doing more stuff, they’d be, you know, living the bachelor life, maybe dating a bunch, you know, out doing their stuff with their man friends, and that they would probably tend to have higher testosterone levels.

Kevin Anthony 9:06
And that is not at all what the study shows. And I think it’s very interesting, what the authors attributed that too, which was being healthier, and being happier. So we’re gonna, we’re going to get to that. I wanted to

Céline Remy 9:20
give you some of the studies just to have a little bit of background and more of this science right to be backed up by science. And we also want to talk quickly about ranges of testosterone because that’s always a question that comes in when people work with us.

Kevin Anthony 9:39
What is low testosterone?

Céline Remy 9:40
Yes, how do you know exactly, and so it is widely accepted that total testosterone reading from blood tests that fall between 300 nanograms per one file per deciliter and one that falls between one point Thousand 50 nanograms per deciliter is are to be considered normal

Kevin Anthony 10:03
300 to 1050. Correct. That’s a huge, huge, big range. Yes.

Céline Remy 10:11
That’s one of the biggest things that we do talk about when my clients come to us and like, well, I got tested. And I’m like 450. And my doctor said, it’s normal, and all is good. Yet, they still have some issues, which we’ll talk about what happens when you have low testosterone in just a few minutes. And what I’ve realized is that most men don’t get tested when they feel really good at their prime. So you don’t have a baseline to know, where do I stand.

Céline Remy 10:37
And so let’s say if you had a certain baseline, and then you drop in, you still in the range, you’re still between that 300 to 1050. So you’re still normal, yet, you’re half of what you were when you were in your 20s, you have the man there, even though you still normal.

Céline Remy 10:53
So it’s important to be able to have a baseline. And it’s also important to understand that testosterone levels fluctuate and change. And I think it’s more important to go by how you feel, and what are the symptoms and what’s happening in your body than just a number on paper?

Kevin Anthony 11:11
Yeah, of course. There’s a couple of points to be made that first of all, we actually have in the notes here, there’s a, there’s a whole chart of like, from birth to pre-puberty during puberty, ages 15 to 18. What age range you are the range for what the normal level is, will vary a little bit. So if you’re younger listening to this, or you’re older listening to this, you know, just know, if you really want to know, just go look up the chart and see where you should be for your age range.

Kevin Anthony 11:41
But the other point that you made that’s really great, is that if you’ve never had it tested, then you don’t know what’s normal for you. And that’s always a big problem when clients come to us. And they’re like, Well, I think I’m gonna have low testosterone. But my doctor said I met, you know, 400.

Kevin Anthony 11:56
And we’re like, well, we don’t know if that’s low for you, all we can say is that it’s within the acceptable range. But yeah, you could have been much higher previously. And that’s why you’re feeling different than before.

Céline Remy 12:09
And remember what we shared earlier, too, that the levels now they’ve also adjusted levels. And even though you still fall in normal, you most likely having fewer assets or testosterone than what a man that was the same as I knew, like let’s say two or three decades ago.

Céline Remy 12:27
So it’s important to remember that even though they give you a range and a normal, they kind of adjust it with what’s going on in the world. And it is proven facts that there is a decline in testosterone, that’s just how it is

Kevin Anthony 12:41
no, I really despise the fact that they’re constantly adjusting these things. So what they do, and they do this with everything, they’ve done this with average body weight, right. And they’ve done this with a whole bunch of different things, which is that as society changes and literally becomes more unhealthy, they look at the average. And then they use that average to create their levels, right.

Kevin Anthony 13:05
So when they give you the average weight for somebody of a particular age, that’s not the same as it used to be, when they give you the average testosterone for somebody of your age, that’s not the same as it used to be either. And the problem with that is, if we keep adjusting it, we lose perspective of what we’re supposed to be at.

Kevin Anthony 13:23
All we know is we’re in the average range for this time period, but this time period could be completely totally out of whack. And it is

Céline Remy 13:32
Mm-hmm. With the intention of being politically correct, not hurting people, and including everyone, we are promoting this idea that being unhealthy is normal. And it’s not. It’s really important to understand that that the messages you are getting from the outside world from the medical view, they have kind of settled for average, or mediocre. And that’s not where you want to settle.

Kevin Anthony 14:00
Correct. Okay, so let’s keep going on because right now, basically, we’re laying all the foundation so that you understand what testosterone is what’s normal, you know, all that kind of stuff. And there’s one more piece that we need to talk about because this is something that gets confused a lot. And that is the free testosterone

Céline Remy 14:19
Versus the total testosterone. So basically approximatively 98% of the testosterone that the body produces is bound to either sex hormone-binding globulin which is s h BG or albumin, okay? And this is referred to as bound testosterone because it binds to something else. The 2% that is left is known as free testosterone. So why is this important to understand because the unbound or free testosterone is what connects with testosterone receptors within the body cells.

Céline Remy 14:55
So when a cell absorbs free testosterone, it enables its function now. Such as cell replication in the bones and muscles. So free testosterone is also responsible for the creation of what are known as second secondary sexual characteristics. And man, which includes facial hair, deeper voice, mean sex drive so many different things right.

Céline Remy 15:17
And so as the name suggests, total testosterone is the grand total of all the hormones available in the bloodstream. While the total testosterone levels may appear healthy if you have low levels of free testosterone that could lead to improper diagnosis and treatment plans. So for example, a patient he like may not need more testosterone, they may simply need like less of the substances that tend to convert testosterone into other substances such as estrogen, which are the female sex hormone.

Céline Remy 15:51
And this is why it’s critically important to test for free testosterone levels and not just a total testosterone levels alone. So you mean all this manliness right here is only being generated by 2%. I’m sure it all works together, Kevin

Kevin Anthony 16:09
magnify up that by 1%. You couldn’t handle it? As I wear my lavender shirt today. Okay, so all joking aside, this is important, right? Because if you’re trying to understand numbers, when you get numbers about testosterone, it’s important to understand free testosterone is really the important thing when it comes to all of these things that we’re talking about as far as like how you feel, and your sex drive, and all that stuff that is not being utilized by your normal bodily processes.

Céline Remy 16:46
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Anthony 16:47
So you just want to understand that because yeah, you could get that number of total testosterone and think I’m in the clear, I’m in the range. And then but you still have a problem. Right?

Céline Remy 16:56
Exactly. So make sure that if you when you get tested, you get both so you can have a full picture and ask for both because sometimes they don’t do that. So how about talking about some of the symptoms after low testosterone in adults? Like how do you know, now that you have low testosterone?

Kevin Anthony 17:14
Yeah. And so I wrote in there specifically adult because the article that I sourced some of these from broke it down, again, by age groups, and there were different things for different age groups. So you know, this show is primarily geared towards adults. So we hope so. Yeah, so we’re really only going to speak about signs and symptoms that you know, an adult male would really see. So just to make that clear,

Céline Remy 17:42
Okay, number one, and it’s not on the list here, but I’m going to share it is G you wake up with a morning would Is that something that happens every morning? If it doesn’t. I know Kevin, you do every morning, every morning was like on the clock, right? There’s my word. If you’re not waking up every day with that there’s a sign that your body is not having enough testosterone.

Céline Remy 18:05
This is really when you see it because once you’ve been sleeping, your body has been regenerated, you should have higher levels in the morning. And it should lead to an erection if you don’t have that consistently that society.

Kevin Anthony 18:19
Yeah, it can be a sign of other health conditions as well. But yeah, for sure. Okay, so I’m kind of, I’m gonna read through these somewhat fast, because really, what I want to get to is the causes and how to fix it. But this will help you get a feel for whether or not you might have low testosterone.

Kevin Anthony 18:35
So low energy levels, you just don’t have a lot of energy, low muscle mass or trouble putting on muscle mass if you started working out and you’re just like, I just can’t seem to build any muscle.

Céline Remy 18:47
And especially if it’s hard with your pegs, you know when you see men that are concave, that did not like there they go in the pectoral area that’s assigned to offload testosterone,

Kevin Anthony 18:58
infertility, erectile dysfunction, as we were just talking about decreased sex drive. And this is actually this is really one of the ones that clients come to us with is the D decreased sex drive or the mental dysfunction. So that’s why this comes up a lot in our work because we work with a lot of people who deal directly with those two issues. And this is definitely something that we need to address when working with those people. Slow hair growth or hair loss.

Kevin Anthony 19:29
So so that’s why you like all this hair here. shows that I’m manly and have testosterone. A loss of bone mass, we have gynecomastia, which is the development of breasts in men. So when you see men that have kind of like, like, wow, he’s got boobs, that is actually a sign of low testosterone, fatigue, and mental fogginess.

Kevin Anthony 19:55
This was an interesting one because it didn’t show up on a lot of the like Medical website lists per se, but they’re ones that showed up when they were asking people like asking actual men, what kind of symptoms they were experiencing, and they tended to report a lot of like, like mental fatigue and fogginess, and just not being clear in their headspace.

Céline Remy 20:22
Absolutely. A lot of men also say they have depression. That’s another thing too, where they like, which one comes first? Is it a cause? Is it a symptom? You know, but having that sense of like, just not being mentally at your best is a sign?

Kevin Anthony 20:37
Yeah, well, it’s tricky with that, because the low testosterone levels can potentially lead to feeling like you’re depressed, which could then potentially lead you to seek treatment. And some of those treatments then could actually lower the testosterone. So you can get in one of those downward spiral things. But well, we’ll talk about that as we’re getting into causes now.

Céline Remy 21:00
But before we get into our causes, we want to invite you to our program. So if you are a committed couple who is stuck in a rut, and just going through the daily motions, instead of connecting the way you used to, and you’re tired of stale, mechanical sex that lacks spontaneity and fun, and you don’t want to live a life of average, then Kevin and I would like to invite you to join our highly sexed power couple Platinum program.

Céline Remy 21:25
So if you give us 90 days, we will help you bring the passion back between the sheets, and be synched up sexually so that you can thrive with more purpose and passion in life. So good to Celine remi.com, forward slash passion to find all about our highly sexed power couple Platinum program.

Kevin Anthony 21:46
You know, for some reason, when I woke up this morning, I was thinking about that ad in our program for that. And what was going through my mind is like, if your relationship isn’t where you want it to be, whether it’s you’re not connecting as well, or you’re not having the sex life you want like if there’s something where your relationship just isn’t where it should be, you need to work with us as this program will help you.

Céline Remy 22:12
Absolutely. So go check it out at kevinanthonycoaching.com/passion.

Kevin Anthony 22:16
I don’t know why I wake up thinking about these things. Sometimes I do this there was going through my head, I’m like, Look if I could just boil it down. If your relationship isn’t where you want it, please come work with us. We can help you.

Céline Remy 22:28
We want to help you to have what we have. Yeah. So let’s go into the causes. What causes low testosterone? And there’s a lot of things. See, that’s one of the things that a lot of people disagree on when you go and research online or to talk to experts. Some people say that’s what the cause is, is this one thing?

Céline Remy 22:49
And then somebody’s like, no, it’s this other thing. And they are both right. There’s not just one thing, and oftentimes, it’s an accumulation of several causes that creates a problem.

Kevin Anthony 23:01
Yeah, so So not only are there a whole bunch of different things that can cause the problem, you might have two or three of them concurrently that are causing your problem. Yeah, so that can make it kind of difficult to diagnose. But so let’s dive into the causes. The first thing I have on the top is medical issues. And I put that first because, you know, like anything like erectile dysfunction, there are often medical issues, right.

Kevin Anthony 23:29
But that’s only a certain percentage of the people that suffer from that. Then honestly, the majority of people have other issues, the types of things that we can help them with. Mm-hmm. There’s a similar thing here, there are some real medical conditions that you need to seek medical help for. After that, we can help you with pretty much everything else. I kind of wanted to start with those and say, boom, if you’ve got these medical things, go see your doctor, have them help you with that.

If you have any of the other things on the list, come see us we’ll help you with that. So, so medical issues, they break it down into two categories, primary hypogonadism, and secondary hypogonadism and gonads just a medical term for your sex organs.

Kevin Anthony 24:13
You know your testicles, your ovaries, gonads, so hypo meaning low, right, so low going at ism. So in the primary, they’re things like undescended testicles with some male children are born and their testicles drop like they’re supposed to and Kleinfelder syndrome, which is a boy, you don’t really need to go into it hemochromatosis, which is too much iron in the blood, then there’s physical injury.

Kevin Anthony 24:45
So you’ve had some sort of physical injury to your testicles, and actually, cancer treatment, which we’ll talk about a little bit more later. So if you have any of those things, you’re going to need your doctor to help you with that. Secondary hypogonadism is things like pituitary disorders and inflammatory diseases, obesity, aging medications, concurrent illnesses.

Kevin Anthony 25:04
So what you can see there is that the primary stuff is stuff you tend to be born with. The secondary stuff tends to be more lifestyle stuff right with. So I don’t want to spend a lot of time going there, because we’re going to break down each one of those, we’re going to talk about obesity, aging, medic medications, concurrent illnesses, all of that it more in them as we go down in the list.

Céline Remy 25:27
And this is why that new study where they really found that it is more likely due to immense behavioral and health changes than by aging, the decline in testosterone, this is really where you can tie it together.

Kevin Anthony 25:40
Exactly. And I would add in with that the people that fall into the primary category is a pretty small number, right? So if you take out the people in the primary category, and you take out the people in the aging, you’re actually still left with the majority of people that suffer from low testosterone, right?

Kevin Anthony 26:00
So that big group of people, those are the people that we can really help adjust their lifestyle habits so that they can increase their testosterone.

Céline Remy 26:09
So another cause is to not exercise. And that’s unfortunate, something that’s happening a lot because of our sedentary lifestyle, how we work, we’re always on our assets. I mean, now they say that sitting is the new smoking. And even I want to say with exercising, over-exercising could also create a drop in testosterone.

Céline Remy 26:31
So you got to exercise smart, and things that work really well. Well, maybe we’ll talk about how to fix it afterward. So exercise smart will live there that will leave it at that,

Kevin Anthony 26:42
Oh, no, I’m not leaving exercises that I didn’t talk about this a little bit more. Okay, first of all, yes, over-exercising could be a problem. But I’m telling you 99.9% of the people listening to this will never have a problem over-exercising their way on the other side of the scale. When we say over-exercising, we’re talking about things like marathon runners, triathlon people who are just intensely exercising to the point of actually being detrimental to their bodies.

Kevin Anthony 27:11
So totally teeny tiny percentage of people who exercise for everybody else, you need to get off your ass and do something. And here’s the part that I really wanted to add to that, which is I have personally found so I was a certified personal trainer, I worked in a high-end club like wealthy famous people would come and get trained there. And, and, you know, I trained under the US Olympic bobsled coach. He’s the one that I trained under for my strength and conditioning certification. So I have a pretty good background in this and I know what I’m talking about. I was weight training heavily when I was younger.

Kevin Anthony 27:48
And as I got a little bit older, I got a lot more into you know, mountain biking, and rock climbing and martial arts and the more like extreme sports kind of stuff. Because I was doing so much of that I really tapered back my weight training. And I really, and then I even got to the point where I was like, I don’t really need to weight train anymore. I’m like out exercising literally every day, you know. And so I got away from the weight training.

Kevin Anthony 28:11
But as I started to age, and I started doing less of the extreme sports stuff, and I started working in a more sedentary type job, I started noticing that things were changing. And then eventually, I decided that I needed to get back to weight training again. And I saw a huge difference. A huge difference just by picking up the weights. Now I’ve always been active, I was still hiking, still doing martial arts, still doing all this kind of stuff.

Kevin Anthony 28:43
But I noticed that after 40 weight training suddenly became way more important again. And so the point is, is you need to exercise and anything is better than nothing. But I highly recommend that men, I would say 40 and over if you’re not doing some sort of weight-bearing strength training you really need to be

Céline Remy 29:02
Mm-hmm. And we’ll talk a little bit more about this on how to fix it. Number three, our causes here is previous anabolic steroid abuse, and I’m gonna let you kind of love that one, Kevin.

Kevin Anthony 29:15
Okay. So when I group these causes, I tried to group similar ones together, so we have not exercised and then we have previous anabolic steroid abuse. So this kind of this falls into that small category of people who are over-exercise. The problem with taking a lot of steroids, his steroids help boost testosterone production in your body.

Kevin Anthony 29:35
That’s how they work right? So what happens is, if you are putting an outside source of testosterone in your body all the time, your body goes well, I got tons of testosterone I don’t need to make anymore so your testicles actually will sometimes stop producing testosterone. Then when you stop taking the steroids, your body’s not, doesn’t always automatically kick back in and start producing again.

Kevin Anthony 29:59
So When you’re done with your bodybuilding competition days, all of a sudden, you find that you went from having all this testosterone to being way low. So that’s another potential issue. And honestly, that you see that mostly with people who are really into like competitive bodybuilding.

Kevin Anthony 30:17
But, you know, I knew a fair number of people when I was in my 20s, like young guys, who were using steroids, I had a whole bunch of friends who were using steroids making massive gains. And what they didn’t realize is, is that a few years later, when they stop the problem.

Céline Remy 30:30
Mm-hmm, not another one here that I want to talk about is diet, what you put in your body affects how your body responds. Food is energy, you want to think about things like when you eat something that’s overly processed, highly sugared. And it has a vibration of it, that’s fairly dead, really not supportive of the body’s production of like health, versus something that’s full of life. When it comes to what you eat, I mean, I’m sure most people have a good idea of what junk food is versus like healthy food.

Céline Remy 31:08
And, yes, that you can make choices, it’s important to make the right choices. And just because you’re eating healthy, doesn’t mean you have to forego, like having dessert or having nice sweet things, sometimes we just have to look at the quality of what you eat. Because unfortunately, a lot of people eat overly processed food. This processed food also contains things that will put your hormones out of balance.

Céline Remy 31:35
Some people have will consume a lot of soy, drink a lot of beer, processed, like cornflakes, all of these things, which are also having a lot of Phytoestrogens, so plant estrogens. And what those do is that they go in the body and they mimic the estrogens and when you go, you don’t want to have so much estrogen in the body. Because then it will if you have more estrogen, you’ll have less testosterone, so you’ll become more feminized, right in the body.

Céline Remy 32:07
So understanding that what you eat can either support your testosterone or rub off the testosterone from your body. And that’s where a lot of people don’t give enough credit to what they eat.

Kevin Anthony 32:19
Yeah, so there’s a couple of things here. One is that if you don’t eat a healthy diet, you’re gonna end up obese, right? If you’re not exercising, you don’t need a healthy diet. Obesity is one of the sorts of causes or risk factors for low testosterone. But the other thing is, is that some of the things that you eat, actually, as you accurately said, contain Phytoestrogens and then actually create more estrogen in the body, which of course then counterbalances or sort of robs you of the testosterone.

Kevin Anthony 32:50
So there are two different things there with diet. One is your overall health. The other is the estrogen causing stuff and there’s tons of it out there. In my opinion, it’s one of the big reasons why we see a shift now. It’s actually the food. So like what I put on the list here.

Kevin Anthony 33:05
The next one after diet was estrogen excess, usually, from an external or environmental source that comes from the, I think that was one of the causes from the Cleveland Clinic, which is a big clinic where they have a lot of medical information online as well. So what they say is usually from an external or environmental source, but they don’t say is those external environmental sources are what you eat?

Céline Remy 33:29
Absolutely. And what you eat. So there’s something that happens to the body. There’s something called aromatase, it’s an enzyme that’s responsible for the conversion of male sex hormones, such as testosterone into estrogen, and if you have a higher level of aromatase, it will increase increased in your blood, it will, it will make that most of the testosterone that you have will be converted into estrogen.

Céline Remy 33:53
And so sometimes it’s not that you have not enough testosterone is that you have this enzyme the aromatase, the process in the body that’s converting it into estrogen. So actually bringing in more testosterone is not going to solve the problem. You have to fix what creates the trends, the transformation from the testosterone into estrogen and we could do an entire show on that.

Céline Remy 34:17
Remember what you eat is important but what you put on your body is just as important things like your deodorant could affect your sex drive because it has all these chemicals in them.

Céline Remy 34:28
So those environmental sources that how excess estrogens and things like stylets and things that you find in plastic, these are sending extra estrogen and estrogens and they will like to mimic the estrogen response in the body and create overload things like drinking from the plastic bottle your water you know you don’t think about these things are eating your food into a plastic container. All of these are

Kevin Anthony 34:54
huge and all these plastic things. This is what the big craze that happened a few years ago with getting rid of BPA And of everything by phenol a well, what people don’t realize is there’s an A, B, C, D, E, F, G, there’s literally a whole group of them, all they ever did was removed the A, but the others are still there too. So when you’re drinking none of your plastic will BPA free water bottle, don’t think you are BP free, you’re only BPA free.

Céline Remy 35:22
So let’s talk about a few more causes here. Just Rob I want to go a little quicker over that because I want to spend more time on how to fix it as we’re getting closer to the end of the show. But if you drink too much alcohol, that definitely causes low testosterone.

Céline Remy 35:35
Now if we look at have problems like the best obesity, depression, and unfortunately, a lot of the meds anti-depression, meds will like to create problems and decline in your testosterone, I had a partner who was on different drugs for his heart, and some of them totally changed his personality. And then he was no longer feeling like any sex drive, and we saw the difference.

Céline Remy 35:59
And then he shifted to a different medication, and everything disappeared. So it’s important to understand that those medications can create big changes and problems in your body. And earlier, we talked about cancer treatments and opioids. I mean, opioids are huge.

Kevin Anthony 36:16
Yeah, I had to put that on the list when I, when I was researching that, because, you know, we’ve talked about the anti-depression meds, have been the anti-cancer stuff that was kind of new to me, but that that we’ve already talked about that. But you’ve probably heard, of course, about the opioid crisis that’s going on, especially in America.

Kevin Anthony 36:34
And when you think about the opioid crisis later, I mean, there’s been whole documentaries done on it, you’ll see it all across the news, the opioid crisis isn’t something that we’ve you know, made up or exaggerated, it’s a real thing. And when you realize that one of the many effects of the opioid crisis is actually a decrease in testosterone levels in men you go, man, like this stuff is all connected,

Céline Remy 36:56
it really is. You want to think too, about toxins, you know, the air we breathe, there are so many things like from like things we put like the roundup in your backyard to keep the weeds out. I mean, this is really bad. This is even proven that it’s going to affect your body and affect your fertility and so many different things.

Céline Remy 37:17
But then there’s things that people don’t always think about, like stress, stress will lower your testosterone a lot because most of the time you’ll ever produce your sex hormones or your stress hormones. And so if you’re overly stressed, you’re not going to be producing as much sex hormones,

Kevin Anthony 37:34
that’s when we talk about a lot is to the relationship between stress and cortisol and testosterone when we talk a lot on this show about

Céline Remy 37:42
and there are causes that people don’t really think about. But we do need to bring in here because things are shifting in terms of like, feminine and masculine dynamic and relationship. And so men that don’t do so much manly activity, the things that make them men that feel fuel their testosterone, and now they’re turning into, like, let’s get into a circle and cry and talk.

Céline Remy 38:05
And all that happens is that these activities will produce oxytocin, which is what women need and to be more sexual and feel connected. But when it happens in a guy, these oxytocin producing activities will lower your testosterone. So we’re not saying that you can bond with your children, your wife, or your friends and have like tender moments or have empathy.

Céline Remy 38:29
But it’s important to balance it out with still remaining masculine and not just delve into becoming this overly sensitive man, that’s not in touch with his primal nature.

Kevin Anthony 38:44
Yeah, exactly. And so there’s value in doing that work. there’s value in getting in touch with your inner feminine doing all that kind of stuff, for sure. And you need to make sure that you’re also doing stuff to get you in touch with your inner manliness. Right now, in our culture, there’s so much pressure on men to not be men, that somehow being a man is toxic, right.

Kevin Anthony 39:05
That’s the word you hear all the time. That’s just nonsense. Men just need to be healthy, masculine men, but they still need to be masculine men. And that’s the important part. So activities that stimulate that things get you in touch with that, that gets you feeling like a man get that energy moving through your body, tons of all kinds of different things you could do.

Céline Remy 39:26
And by the way, your man cave you time when you get home just to be by yourself for a few minutes to half-hour to decompress and not being asked to do a task will work really well for you to rebuild your testosterone that’s been depleted for working all day and being stressed out so that then you feel higher with your testosterone and can deal with your family life way better.

Kevin Anthony 39:47
Absolutely

Céline Remy 39:48
we need to do a whole other show on that. But let’s talk about how to fix it. So if that’s you and you have low testosterone levels, don’t jump right away into doing like hormone therapy and biotech. denticle hormones or anything like that, because as soon as you start to supplement your testosterone, you basically will never be able to get off of it, right potentially.

Kevin Anthony 40:09
And there are side effects, I actually put, there’s eight, eight things on the list of how to fix it. And that’s the very last one because I really want you to try everything else first.

Kevin Anthony 40:19
So number one, treat the underlying medical conditions, if you have one of those medical conditions, whether it’s primary or secondary, go see your doctor get that taken care of, if you’ve still got problems after that, you may have one of the other causes that we talked about. So what do you do then? Well, number two on the list of exercise, including weight training, you got to move your ass

Céline Remy 40:42
and you explained it quite well earlier. So I don’t feel like we need to go very much in detail into well, weight training, but also think high-intensity training and just things that I burst of energy and then relaxing. This is really more beneficial to your testosterone that doing cardio?

Kevin Anthony 41:00
Yeah, absolutely. Clean up your diet is the next one, get rid of all those Phytoestrogens, and Xenoestrogens, all those things that we talked about, get rid of the things that deplete testosterone, and reduce your alcohol consumption, which is so funny, right?

Kevin Anthony 41:13
Because alcohol, like a guy drinking a beer, you know, it’s like such a manly activity. But you know, we’ve done videos, we have blog articles on stuff about how beer actually reduces your testosterone. So all you guys who think that drinking a beer is manly, every beer you drink makes you a little bit less of a man. I know the advertising campaigns won’t tell you that. But science does.

Céline Remy 41:35
You want to look at what you’re doing. If you are on prescription meds, like ask for them to be switched, change things, and see if that you know can make a difference. You don’t have to stay to the one that you were prescribed, you know, there are multiple things available there.

Kevin Anthony 41:50
Yeah, they can often shift your prescription or maybe help you wean you off that there are ways that you can manage it. And one of the problems is, you know, guys will come in and say, Well, I got to take this medication, there’s nothing I can do. Yet there is still

Céline Remy 42:04
get off your ass eat better and make some changes. But a lot of people prefer to just pop a pill and say, Well, I just have like hypertension or I have diabetes. Well, it’s actually all connected to how you eat. And if you were to change that and exercise more and eat better, you wouldn’t need those things. But of course, it requires you to have more willpower.

Céline Remy 42:23
It requires you to do things that are not always very comfortable. But it’s worthwhile in the long term. You want to look at reducing your stress level. And I mean, I don’t think we’ll talk about this enough. And even if you’re thinking you’re not really stressed, I think just living on earth is really stressful. Just like trying to go to the grocery store, getting in your car is stressful.

Céline Remy 42:48
I mean, go on the internet, there’s like this crazy news. I mean, so many things are constantly bombarding us, it’s impossible to not be stressed unless you live out of like in the jungle and you have no access to electricity and like the Internet and this kind of thing that we have. Otherwise, you most likely have a low-grade stress level in your body.

Kevin Anthony 43:10
or in 2020 a high-grade stress level. Okay, last two things real quick here because we are really over time. Seven do man the activities we kind of talked about that are so do things that inspire you to be a man. And then the last one, if all else fails, you can seek testosterone replacement therapy,

Céline Remy 43:33
and go with bioidentical hormones like a fine thing of people that work more naturally because it’s a little bit more gentle in the body. But try the other things first and keep that as the last resort. Remember that yes, a lot of things you can do and change find your purpose in life like find your drive again, seek that become the man you know you are deep within and make the changes because these are going to make a difference.

Kevin Anthony 44:01
Absolutely. Okay. Well, that was a lot of information. We’ve been speaking really fast and some of it I know. We hope that you got value out of this and we will see you next week. We hope you like this episode of the love lab podcast. If you enjoy this show, subscribe. leave us a review and share it with your friends.

Céline Remy 44:25
And for more free exclusive content. Join us in the passion vault at kevinanthonycoaching.com/vault

Kevin Anthony 44:39
Thanks for listening.

Céline Remy 44:40
And remember, you’re amazing