I did a search and came across this thead. I felt I could help this young fella given my experience and similarities. This is my first post. Take it as a grain of salt if you’d like.
I used to be very active in sports, weightlifting, social life etc. I was 23 at the time. I began working a full time job and immediately noticed something was off. My cognition and memory were terrible. I had cold intolerance, primarily cold hands and feet, often turning blue under extremely cold temps. I had NO sex drive, despite being with some HOT women.
I was basically FUBAR. That lead me on a journey of discovery. After 6 months of playing the doctor game, I self diagnosed low testosterone. I was referred to an endo where she put me on andro gel which “sucks” and a small dose of levoxyl b/c my thyroid was subpar. I later had her switch me to test enanthate since the gel was terrible.
Still felt terrible and still slept 14 hours a day without feeling any better. Well, now, I’m probably 75% well and can attribute my feeling better to a few things.
Number 1, if you have low testosterone or low thyroid for a prolonged period of time, your body will be able to sustain itself. However, when your reserves (your adrenals) runout, you’ll start to notice “something” is wrong. Usually its too late. So, what can you do? Well, let me ask you this. Would you like to recover your adrenals, only to crash again because your genetically low T levels, or hypothyoid? or would you like to be on testosterone, feel better and recover your adrenals “faster” and feel better overall?
I asked myself the same thing and chose option #2. Like you, I resisted testosterone therapy for 1 year. I felt horrible during that time. After 1 year of testosterone therapy, I felt better. Much better than the year before. And 3 years later, I’m 75% back. I’m not 100%, however I am almost certain I know now enough to guide myself to victory.
If I was you and knowing what I know now, this is what I’d do:
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Get on bioidentical testosterone cream or weekly testosterone injections. This will be standard for awhile until you have enough energy to possibly consider coming off and you’ve completed steps 2,3, and 4.
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Recover your adrenals. Take it from me. You can play with sythroid T4 or naturthroid and armour T4+T3 or Cytomel T3 only or sustained release, but until you are able to produce “Enough” cortisol to sustain your lifestyle, you’ll need support. I’ve done the natural route and when I didn’t know what I was doing, did 1 week of hydrocortisone cream to no avail. I’d recommend supplementing with hydrocortisone over the course of the day to suppress your adrenal activity. 20-30mg.
Why not less? Well, your adrenals need to recover, by supplementing with less, your adrenals will need to work during the day. Good? No, not if they’re exhausted.
Give them time to sleep and recover. Also, isocort and herbs of sorts were NOT helpful. Only the real thing works, hydrocortisone (i.e. Cortef)
- If you’re still feeling crappy, I’d say T3 only therapy. You could go with T4+T3, however, when your body is under extreme stress, as it has been for sometime, it’ll start converting t4 to reverse T3, which will bind to your thyroid receptors making them inactive to stimulation, slowing your metabolism and basically making your thyroid inactive, despite “good” thyroid labs. T3 only, titrated up, will slow your thyroid hormone production.
This will allow less T4 conversion and allow your body to discharge reverse T3. Basically resets your metabolism. Some see results after a few weeks, others take 12 to 15 weeks. You’ll need cortisol utilize your T3, so if your body isn’t producing enough, you’ll want to stay on hydrocortisone until leveling your body out. The best way to tell if you’re at the right dose is symptoms and objective temperature reading. If your temperature is steady, which yours is not, you have hypothyroidism. But if its all over the place, like mine and yours, you have adrenal problems.
When your temperature stabalizes, that means you have enough cortisol to stabalize your metabolism and its onging temperature. Think of cortisol as a shuttle to your cells which hold temperature constant. If there are not enough shuttles, there will not be enough thyroid, which will create a rise and fall in temperature. Make sense? Fine tune your T3 dose until this happens. Leave for a week or two, and then start coming off.
Stay on your cortisol during this time. If your temp starts to fall, unable to reach 98.6. Stay on the dose until it stabalizes. Keep lowering the dose until one of two things. Either your completely off thyroid, and your temp stays at 98.6 or you cannot go any lower on your thyroid dose. If you cannot get off thyroid without temperature dropping, you most likely are hypothyroid.
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Start weaning off cortisol if and when you can. You adrenals take time to recover so go based on how you feel. If you start to feel crumbing or your cold hands and feet, you’re not ready. Stay on until you can successfully get off without any residual symptoms.
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Start recovering testosterone or remain on longterm test therapy. Personally, I like the latter. Why? Your body will start lowering T production in your 30’s which isn’t good. So if you can keep your levels steady in the optimal youthful ranges forever, you’ll be WAYYYYYY ahead of the game. And, you’ll be running circles around your buddies and feeling very good, when you have a six pack and they have a beer gut. Test helps everything as long as your safe and monitor it correctly.
Okay, I’m done now.