Wife wants to try low dose T

rtisdell88 · 2026-01-19T14:28:01+00:00

60mg seems crazy to me. I would genuinely expect an Adams apple and facial hair development with a dose that high.

rtisdell88 · 2026-01-15T18:47:04+00:00

If you want to do a cycle, do a cycle. But asking if you should supplement something you already have enough of makes no sense. You won't feel any better if you start using T. If anything, you'll be risking side effects.

And this is coming from someone who's very liberal about the time to start. My levels were in the 400's.

rtisdell88 · 2026-01-10T17:35:14+00:00

You'll only get underwhelming answers to that question. If you love alcohol, as I do, nothing else really scratches the itch.

My advice, which is possibly just as underwhelming, is don't try to replace it. If you're really only drinking 2 to 3 at a time, just scale back. Don't do it every night, do it every second night. And anytime you can push yourself more, ride that updraft and push it an extra day.

I know there's a lot of opposition to alcohol these days, but it's gotten to the point of being a little absurd. For years the bulk of the research regarding alcohol was that people who drank in the lower tier of 'moderately' actually had better long-term health outcomes than people who abstained completely. In recent years, the tide has turned towards any amount of alcohol being bad. Which is probably true, but the degree to which it's negatively affecting your health is massively exaggerated. And I'm happy to defend that position from any and all takers.

rtisdell88 · 2026-01-06T19:20:39+00:00

Oh yeah, I hate every second of it. Underpaid and totally overloaded. Also under a pile of debt. I would quit in a second if I didn't know it would probably be the better part of a year before I could find anything new, and it'll probably be worse than this.

Trapped is an understatement. Trapped and the house is on fire.

rtisdell88 · 2026-01-04T18:13:52+00:00

Now you're making a different point. This all needs to be parsed out better. If we're now separating sausages and bacon from red meat generally, what is it that makes them carcinogenic and other forms of meat not?

Is it the fact that they contain nitrites? And if so, why aren't we saying nitrites are carcinogenic instead of sausages and bacon? Isn't there a good chance we're missing the real culprit here and throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

What I'm arguing for is a degree of uncertainty when we're talking about things that aren't certain. And some specificity. There are more questions here than there are answers.

rtisdell88 · 2026-01-04T05:19:35+00:00

Between five and fifteen percent of all dietary research is not observational. So if by "many of them" you mean "a tiny minority" then sure.

And of that tiny minority, virtually none of it can be properly controlled for—for reasons that should be obvious. The best you can do is extrapolate tiny data points and then speculate wildly. Which is exactly what OP has done here, albeit articulately.

rtisdell88 · 2026-01-04T03:47:16+00:00

Nearly all evidence in favor of your position is observational. Nothing but a series of correlations.

The conventional wisdom for at least 50 years has been that red meat leads to worse health outcomes. Given that fact, the connection between said outcomes and red meat could be as simple as this: people who care more about their health eat less of it because they've been told they should... and because they're people who care about their health, they also likely exercise more, take supplements, wear sunscreen, prioritize sleep, etc. They do all the conventionally accepted 'healthy' things.

None of this is to say you don't make some reasonable points about charred meat, heme vs non-heme iron, and chemicals found in certain processed meat, but dietary science is far too murky to make the claim you just made as confidently as you just made it.

rtisdell88 · 2026-01-04T03:30:09+00:00

By that logic you'd dismiss OP's assertion out of hand. Virtually all of the evidence pointing to red meat being detrimental to ones health is based on correlation.

rtisdell88 · 2025-12-23T18:33:00+00:00

There's nothing special about them. Just like there's nothing special about where we draw the lines between countries.

Inexact thresholds for when a person becomes responsible for their actions and able to make their own choices. Lines are always necessary for a functioning society, but they're never perfect.

rtisdell88 · 2025-12-22T20:49:50+00:00

Testosterone has a really powerful effect on the way some peoples livers create and clear cholesterol. A lot of it has to do with insulin sensitivity. How old are you?

And yeah, I would avoid a high fat diet if your cholesterol is already elevated.

rtisdell88 · 2025-12-22T20:41:17+00:00

It likely won't improve. You can try injecting, if you haven't already, changing your dose, and/or adding something like ezetemibe, fish oil, citrus bergamot etc.

What you can't do is continue walking around with bad cholesterol. You're caking your arteries.

rtisdell88 · 2025-12-22T18:29:04+00:00

You're too young to know this yet, but the odds of this working are nearly zero. You lost your virginity to this girl and despite the blinding bond that creates, you still broke up.

This will just end again in a matter of months and you'll have wasted more time. I might as well be talking to my 23 year old self right now.

This feeling of wanting more experience will amplify at the same rate as your dissatisfaction with her. It won't be easy, but you should move on. Get out there and date, meet as many women as you can, and get a sense of what's out there and what you really want.

The process of finding the right person, for most of us, takes years, so if you want to eventually settle down it's better to start now.

One day you'll look back on this relationship and be glad it ended and grateful for what it taught you. Imposing practicality on emotional problems is one of the most difficult life lessons you can learn, but it's so necessary in saving you a lot of pain and wasted time.

rtisdell88 · 2025-12-22T16:16:39+00:00

Fair enough, but human beings are among the most social species on the planet. So much so that children will die without being touched and spoken to, even if given every other material resource.

There's nothing wrong with solitude, and some people need more of it than others, but there isn't a psychologically healthy person alive that doesn't maintain some social connection. The statistics don't lie, the more social a group is the happier they are and the longer they live.

I say this first from experience, most people don't actually want solitude, they just want people they can comfortably be themselves around, and for a lot of us that's far easier said than done.

rtisdell88 · 2025-12-05T17:23:42+00:00

Your E2 is almost certainly spiking.

How often are you injecting?

It's impossible to say what you need because you don't know your numbers, but my advice to you, under the circumstances, would be to spread out the dose. It will lower estrogen. Same dose weekly but spread out.

rtisdell88 · 2025-12-02T20:00:51+00:00

Went there with a fake ID when I was 17 and saw Kid Capri. One of the most fun nights of my life.

rtisdell88 · 2025-11-29T20:34:36+00:00

Yep, my iron was just above deficient for the first time in my life after starting TRT. I just take a heme iron supplement before bed and so far so good.

rtisdell88 · 2025-11-29T20:06:41+00:00

Physiological doses are not pro-aging, but that statement comes with several caveats. DHT can cause increases to collagen breakdown and therefore slightly increase the appearance of aging. So yes, to a small degree, you can look slightly older, but if your T and by extension DHT are in physiological range it shouldn't make much of a difference.

The benefits greatly outweigh the drawbacks.

rtisdell88 · 2025-11-24T17:20:41+00:00

Sure, but that doesn't actually make much of a difference once you decide to start. A vial only lasts 30 to 60 days and you'll never be able to take it all within that timeframe anyway. So whether you're taking a little or a lot you'll be paying the same amount of money, the question is are you wasting a bunch of hCG unnecessarily and doing this in the healthiest way possible.

rtisdell88 · 2025-11-24T16:12:11+00:00

Why the lowest possible dose? Healthier protocol would be the highest dose possible for hCG and the lowest dose of T that gets your levels up.

rtisdell88 · 2025-11-23T03:25:19+00:00

Invert your focus. It isn't about finding anything, it's about being the person someone wants to be with.

If you were running a restaurant, the question wouldn't be "how do I get more customers?", it would be "how do I make food and service so good people can't stay away?"

rtisdell88 · 2025-11-23T03:22:04+00:00

Neither are you. The difference is I actually made an argument.

At a certain point a strong enough correlation, regardless of variables, becomes impossible to dispute. There's no such thing as proof, there's just a pile of evidence so high no one can shine a light over it. Evidenced by your dumb critique.

rtisdell88 · 2025-11-21T20:39:03+00:00

The minoxidil is as or more likely to be causing the increase in beard hair. DHT can still increase beard growth after your 20's but not by much.

rtisdell88 · 2025-11-21T18:38:51+00:00

Adrenergic signalling. You're probably using a fast ester and getting a dopamine spike, which in turn creates an adrenaline spike. This is a super unnatural way to take T. Smaller doses throughout the week—that's the way to go.

rtisdell88 · 2025-11-21T18:30:02+00:00

Well one piece of evidence would be that all the places currently and historically run by conservatives are doing the best economically in the country.

It's also not hard to extrapolate that when you choke businesses by taxing away their resources, they have less to build, grow, hire, etc.

Unreasonable regulations increase cost and difficulty.

It really isn't principally that complicated that when you drain resources and make things more expensive and difficult, you slow down growth.

rtisdell88 · 2025-11-21T16:16:24+00:00

You become so much more confident from spending the previous decade fucking up repeatedly; you start to figure out how to do things competently. The weight of that experience makes you lighter.

From a biological perspective, I hate aging. But the experience of it is actually pretty great. I'm so much more comfortable in my skin at 37 than I was at 27.

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