Why Extreme Dieting Tanks Your Testosterone (Natural Bodybuilding)

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Why Extreme Dieting Tanks Your Testosterone

Is there a consideration to be made for somebody who's pursuing a natural bodybuilding career when it comes to testosterone and hormone production? The answer is yes, and this is actually a consideration that you also have to make even if you're an enhanced bodybuilder. Getting very lean in a very short time will drop your testosterone, and that happens by design, not by accident.

One of the things that we understand about hormone production, especially your reproductive hormones like testosterone and estradiol, is those are in most cases the first for your body to stop producing when you put yourself into a situation where you're extremely low body fat.

The chain runs from the brain down. Your hypothalamus releases something called GnRH, which is the signal that tells your pituitary to release LH and FSH, and LH is the message that actually reaches your testes and tells them to make testosterone. When the body decides resources are short, it slows that first signal at the top, and everything downstream slows with it.

So like in order for you to reproduce, especially if you're a woman and you're looking to carry a child, you need to have enough resources on hand to not only support the function of your body, but also support the development of another body, of another person.

And so if you're in a place where you're in this extreme calorie deficit, your body fat is extremely low, we're basically starving ourselves in a controlled way, the very first thing that's gonna shut down is your reproductive function.

That's your body's core job and what drives most of the decisions that are happening internally to make your body function.

Think of it like a house running on a generator during a blackout. The generator keeps the fridge and the furnace going, and the things that can wait get switched off first. Reproduction is the thing that can wait.

And if you have a shortage of resources, micronutrients, healthy stored amount of fat, et cetera, then your body is going to basically pull resources away from the production of those hormones and place them elsewhere.

Leptin is a big part of how your brain reads that shortage. It's a hormone released by fat tissue, and the amount in your blood tracks how much stored fat you're carrying, so when body fat drops hard, leptin drops with it and the hypothalamus takes that as a signal that food is scarce. That's one of the levers that quiets GnRH.

So to circle back around when it comes to natural bodybuilding, especially these guys are not using enhancements, not using drugs to assist with the ability to maintain and build muscle while in a calorie deficit, while still trying to achieve the elite level of conditioning that's required to go onto a stage.

This means that we're manipulating our salt and our water intake, we're manipulating our carbohydrate intake, we're getting ourselves into an extreme deficit and adding an excess of cardio to bring all that fat down.

Each one of those stacks on the same signal. The deficit lowers leptin, the cardio raises the total energy you're burning without raising what's coming in, and low carbohydrate intake keeps insulin and thyroid signaling down, which the brain reads as more scarcity. Hormone production plummets through that process, and that is the expected outcome, not a sign something went wrong with your prep.

Be aware that putting yourself in an extreme deficit can also be a negative thing for you if your goal is long-term health, longevity, hormone optimization, et cetera.

Those are two different goals and they pull in opposite directions. Stage conditioning is a temporary state you hold for a weekend. If you live at that body fat year round, you're living in the suppressed state year round.