|
Testosterone is Your Friend
Download This Book
|
Chapter 15: Obesity and BMI______________________________________________________
America is the most overweight country in the world. We not only eat more calories than anyone else, but more empty, nutritionless calories, 160 pounds of various sugars annually, and 42% of our caloric intake as fat - especially saturated animal fats. Overfed and undernourished. We also get less exercise than anyone else on earth. We don’t need to wonder why we’re so overweight. There are no shortcuts or “magic answers” to weight loss. Will power is an illusion as you can’t deny the hunger instinct. Diet and lifestyle is the key to staying slim all your life. You can literally eat all you want if you eat whole, healthy natural foods. Please read my book, Zen Macrobiotics for Americans.
Yes, hormones do play an important part in this in addition to diet and exercise. Androgen deficiency as well as low thyroid (T3 and T4) and high estrogens (estradiol and estrone) are especially important to metabolic rate. As you would expect, there was quite a lot of research done on obesity regarding men, but almost none on women. As always, women should have a normal, youthful range of androgens avoiding both hyper- and hypo- levels. Youthful testosterone levels are vital to maintaining slimness and a low body mass index (BMI), but this is only one part of a total program of diet, exercise and lifestyle. Expect some changes in your BMI and body fat per cent from maintaining a youthful testosterone (and DHEA) level, but not any dramatic ones. Your best results will come from realizing all your hormones work together as a team. You must balance your other basic hormones to get the most effect. Definitely you should test your free T3 and free T4 (not your TSH or T3 uptake) thyroid hormones since these affect your metabolic rate so strongly. Do not accept low normal levels here, but keep them at least at mid-range. DHEA is your other major androgen and also important in maintaining slimness. Keep a youthful level of DHEA. Men can test for excessive estradiol and estrone and women can test for these as well as for estriol (estriol is rarely out of balance in men). Be sure to balance your pregnenolone and melatonin as well. Growth hormone is important, but simply too expensive at $1,200 a year minimum (for Chinese Jintropin®). You can expect to gain some lean muscle mass, but controlling percentage of body fat is a more difficult matter. Some studies find loss of body fat, while others find no changes when supplemental testosterone is given.
A very informative study was done at the University of Munster in 2002 (European Journal of Endocrinology, v. 146, pp. 505-11) which was previously discussed in Chapter 4. Here they used oral, injected, and transdermal (patches) forms on hypogonadal men. There was very insightful information here about BMI and testosterone levels as men age. They concluded, “…testosterone appears to be an important factor contributing to these changes. Thus aging men should benefit from testosterone substitution as far as body composition is concerned.” The fall in testosterone as men age was paralleled by a rise in BMI and body fat mass. This was reduced significantly by raising testosterone levels, even when using the wrong types in the wrong ways. Leptin was also found to increase with age and BMI, but this could be due to leptin resistance. With all the research on leptin there still has not been any practical means found to raise or lower it to change the composition of the body. Normal men gained BMI, body fat, and leptin as they aged, but lost testosterone. Men given supplemental testosterone did not gain BMI, body fat, or leptin and kept youthful testosterone levels. The authors, unfortunately, somehow felt only “20-30%” of aging men had subnormal testosterone levels, when the well proven facts show over 90% of them do. All this should equally apply to women basically.
Rising leptin levels as related to age were studied at the University of Koln in Germany in 1997 (Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, v. 82, p. 2510-3) correlating it with falling testosterone and rising BMI. Low leptin levels correlated with slimness, and high leptin levels correlated with obesity. (Men have lower leptin levels than women.) The hypogonadal men in this study had three times the leptin levels of the normal subjects. Therefore an inverse relationship exists where low testosterone and high leptin help cause obesity. There is every reason to think the same situation would occur in women. “We conclude that hypogonadal men exhibit elevated leptin levels that are normalized by substitution with testosterone.”
At the National School of Public Health in Athens (Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism, v. 43, 1999, pp. 23-9) healthy elderly men were studied for their body mass and their hormone levels. Not surprisingly they found that low testosterone was equated with obesity and high testosterone equated with slimness. They also found higher estradiol levels equated with obesity and low estradiol with slimness. They also studied leptin. High leptin was associated with obesity and low leptin with slimness. Of course they found the higher the leptin levels the lower the testosterone levels. They also found the more dietary fat the men ate the higher their leptin levels - and the lower their testosterone.
At the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, v. 84, 1999, pp. 2647-53) elderly men were given real transdermal testosterone. Of course all of these men were low in testosterone since they were all over the age of 65. This was a true double blind study where half the men were given placebo patches. This study lasted a full three years. The men lost an average of almost seven pounds of ugly fat while making no changes at all in their diet or lifestyle. They gained almost five pounds of real muscle. When you lose fat and gain muscle your total body mass is exponentially improved. This was all done by simply raising their testosterone naturally to youthful levels and not asking them to do anything else at all. Imagine what they could have done with more hormone balance, a better diet and some reasonable exercise!
At the University of Vermont (Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, v. 81, 1996, pp. 3469-75) hypogonadal men aged 33 to 57 were given injections of 300 mg of testosterone cyprionate every two weeks. Even though they were given the wrong kind of testosterone in the wrong way they still got dramatic effects. Just think of how much better they would have fared if given natural testosterone in a natural way. Their free testosterone level went up strongly, but only temporarily, and fell back down to deficient levels before the next injection. The good doctors refused to measure estradiol and estrone levels, which went up just as strongly after the injections. Their actual gain of real muscle was an amazing 15%. The loss of ugly fat was a stunning 11%. When you add the muscle gain to the fat loss this is really impressive especially since they made no dietary or exercise changes. The men actually gained a small amount of weight in that they were now more muscular. “We conclude that testosterone replacement in hypogonadal men enhanced the skeletal muscle mass by stimulating the muscle protein synthesis rate.”
In a rare study of women at the University of Alabama (Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, v. 85, 2000, pp. 4476-80) they found the same results in postmenopausal women. “Total lean mass and leg lean mass were significantly correlated with free testosterone.” Remember that we are talking about the normal ranges for postmenopausal women for free testo-sterone and the women in the higher normal ranges were slimmer and had more lean muscle mass and less fat mass. Women who have hyper levels of testosterone and DHEA outside of the normal range have a condition called “androgenicity” and need to lower those levels.
At the Universtiy of Umea in Sweden (International Journal of Obesity, v. 25, 2001, pp. 98-105) both men and women were finally studied together. In fact, both pre- and postmenopausal women were studied for even more reliable results. They found that in non-obese men and women that the higher the testosterone level the lower the leptin level. Remember that lower leptin levels are desirable and correlated with slimness. “The authors conclude that low leptin levels are associated with androgenicity in non-obese men and women and that the direction of this association is dependent on gender and body fat distribution.”
To further prove that higher testosterone levels equate with lower leptin levels and more muscle mass and less body fat we look to the University of Essen in Germany (Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, v. 82, 1997, pp. 407-13) “Testosterone Substitution Normalizes Elevated Serum Leptin Levels in Hypogonadal Men”. Unfortunately, they used both injections of 250 mg of toxic enanthate every three weeks or a subcutaneous implantation of 1,200 mg of natural crystalline testosterone. At least the implant is natural testosterone and not some artificial salt ester. This relationship was verified at the University of Munster (Clinical Endocrinology v. 47, 1997, pp.237-40). “However, hypogonadal patients who were selected for low testosterone serum levels had significantly higher leptin serum levels and significantly higher BMI. MLR analysis revealed a significant independent association of leptin with testosterone serum levels and with BMI.”
Obviously we need more research with regard to women. The same advice on diet and lifestyle applies for maintaining slimness as in every other chapter in this book. Men need to keep the youthful levels they enjoyed at about the age of 30. Women need to keep the youthful levels while avoiding excessive ones. You must balance your other basic hormone levels (see Chapter 17 for more about this) for optimum benefits. You can see by the above charts how body fat rises in both American men and women until about the age of 60. After the age of 60 it falls due to failing health and the inability of the body to maintain itself.
Ironically we have low body fat in our eighties, but it certainly isn’t due to good diet and exercise! Women average about 34% body fat while men average about 23%. Women therefore maintain about 50% more adipose tissue. Americans are literally the fattest people on earth as you can see by the above charts. You’ll find that people in Third World countries will have about one third less fat on their bodies due to less food available, less animal foods available and harder physical work to survive.
|
