What are general opinions of restricting dietary fat while on a cut if on Trt? The most common reason for maintaining a minimum of .3g/lb of bw seems to be for maintaining hormone profile, but doesn’t the floor get a bit lower if you’re on T?
I understand you wouldn’t want to go down to nothing because of joint health, serotonin production etc but are there other considerations I’m missing? Is a certain threshold of dietary fat necessary for thyroid? DHT? Anything else?
I can easily get through a day without exceeding 40 or 50g and then find myself looking for dietary fat sources in the evening just to get that number up a bit. Is that even really necessary?
Dietary fats do all sorts of cool things. Rather than looking at just hitting a certain amount of fat in the diet, it’d be worthwhile to get certain TYPES of fats in the diet
Thanks this is helpful. Seems like as it relates to hormone levels, certain fats are needed to keep shbg from getting too high regardless of whether test is endogenous or exogenous….in addition to the other benefits like maintaining cholesterol ratios for heart health
Ok but not really relevant to my question. I guess I’m wondering if those of you that blast/cruise during the year are still concerned with DF during a cut, and what the specific biology is.
There are a ton of articles and threads that say keep 50g or 70g as a minimum but then the reasoning is to “maintain optimal hormone levels” or that fat is correlated with cholesterol and cholesterol is necessary for T production- those are pretty vague and total T production becomes moot for someone on Trt.
I’m not looking for an excuse to cutout fat, I’m trying to understand the underlying mechanism and pathways that fat impacts specifically as it relates to BB. Does it aid or inhibit conversion to DHT or estrogen? Does it promote T3? Does it aid in cellular repair?
if anyone can help clarify it would be much appreciated.
As @T3hPwnisher posted, you need to focus on the types of fats. You are not going to be able to fine tune your hormones based on the fats you eat. I’m not saying there will be ‘no difference’ just not really a discernible difference as it pertains to body building assuming you are eating healthy fats in a proper macro ratio. Keep in mind that macro ratios need to be dialed in to your body and genetics. That takes some experimentation.
Endongenous sex hormones are derived from cholesterol. Low fat diets can reduce androgens in men, but you are on TRT. Regardless of sex hormones, having healthy levels of fats are beneficial to heart health and cholesterol (outside of hormone production) and other things. Since you are on TRT you won’t see a dive in test levels on a low fat diet but there is virtually nothing advantageous about it.
Ok thanks. That’s the point - most studies come to a conclusion about dropping fat leads to lower test level, but I have never seen anything that puts an approximation on the amount of fats needed for heart health, and that’s much harder to pinpoint based on feel.
The only benefit of cutting fat rather than carbs is the gram-for-gram caloric trade off. IMO It’s a lot easier to cutout 100 calories from fat than carbs.
I get that the high level takeaway is that certain fats are good for overall health, but I was hoping someone could either point to a study about DF in a trained but unnatural sample, or just simply explain how fat impacts exogenous test in the body.
Exactly….Do you feel like there was an added benefit to body comp over the 8 weeks? I seem to notice that fat specifically in the midsection drops more quickly on low fat diet, independent of labs. That could just be placebo or potentially the added glycogen on higher carb helping the illusion of a smaller waist…regardless I agree that this is a topic that has not been given the same type of love that other aspects of nutrition have gotten.
essential fatty acids that must be provided by foods because these cannot be synthesized in the body yet are necessary for health, is supplementing with fish oil enough to satisfy the requirements.