TRT in Russia, Advice Needed

Pharma TRT
22

Oh, really?.. Then I need to rethink the info I excavated during learning about TRT, finding new footholds.
I guess I can use these as a base:

  1. Testosterone level below 290 is low, as it doesn’t allow physical excercises.
  2. T at 350 already allows excercising
  3. T = 400 is the level my doc recommends as minimal
  4. Pumping up T too high isn’t good, as it will simply downregulate receptors, not allowing them to work at full potential, make neurotransmission buggy, cause need to increase dose time to time, heavy dependence. And last but not least - make me not quite me.
  5. Estradiol level 20 is too low too - it causes frequent peeing, eye strain, joints pain.
  6. Estradiol more than 30 isn’t healthy: Men: How to Keep Estrogen in Check - Diet and Nutrition - COMMUNITY - T NATION
  7. And 54 is plainly BS.
  8. I need to reduce TSH more to 1.0, than having almost 4.0.

Unfortunately, cypionate and enanthate are not available in drugstores. They can be ordered from shady online stores, but @badtimes92 discouraged me from buying these - looks like there are much of bogus production. So the most reliable options left for me are Sustanon and Omnadren.

Drugs are:

  1. Duloxetine 53 mg/day (tried to wean off a year ago, but stuck at this dose and can’t go neither up or down).
  2. Caffeine, by means of 2-3 cups of tea everyday, or diet cola.
  3. Androgel 50 mg/day. Robust source of estradiol, adding nothing to testosterone.
  4. Anastrozole 0.25 mg/day. Scary shit I want to get rid of.
  5. B12 2500 ug 2x/week (last year’s blood test showed I’m deificient of it, being 150 pg/ml of 187-883 range).
  6. D3 5000 IU EOD (somewhat low from the same test - 36.3 ug of 30-100 range).
  7. Iodine 150 mcg + selenium 75 mcg daily - started yesterday.

“pls stabilize” is my second name. Until 2014 I was relatively stable. Good, bad, or OK - but more or less stable. Then antidepressants pooping out, switching, tolerance, cross-tolerance, dependence of antidepressants, treatment resistance, oversensitivity to everything but kitchen sink, etc, etc, etc. Since then there is always a rollercoaster.

I have eaten almost every popular antidepressant on earth, a few antipsychotics, but cannot get stable.

Tried Lamictal. They say mood stabilizing properties start from 100 mg, but I can’t get past 50 mg dose - it instantly drops me into dangerous depressive state. There are many other “mood stabilizers”, but they are mostly intended for mania/hypomania, and are famous for making people tired, sleepy, stooopid, and mentally slow - all of them act by reducing neurons activity in some way. And I’m already tired, sleepy, stooopid, and mentally slow - not a maniac even nearly.

Also I afraid to became dependent on a mood stabibilizer, and have no idea what to do if it poop out (but sounds like deadlock).

Regarding my current TRT, I was really on rollercoaster; I think it was expected for me to have crude swings for a while with the start of new drugs. Ultimately I stabilized, but this stability now is “I firmly am a sleepy potato”.

Weight training is “irregular” to say the least.

  • At 2012 (31 years old) excercise intolerance kicked in, I started to become very tired and sleepy even after simple walk
  • Up to 2015, when I wasn’t that depressed, fatigued, and lethargic, I used to walk, riding bicycle, rollerblades, skating. It did nothing regarding to my mood, concentration, cognitive abilities, etc, but was fun to do.
  • Switched to duloxetine (Cymbalta) in 2016 and canceled most physical activities from that time. At first because Cymbalta turned every activity into dizziness, headache, nausea, profuse sweating, and irritability. Bicycle, rollerblades, and skates was abandoned, but regular walking was still intact - until 2017, when Cymbalta apathetic abilites started to flourish.
  • Then “training” became not very fun. Too much apathy from Cymbalta (and probably from the lack of testosterone). “Sleeping spells”, when I just was sleeping entire day, that could happen 2-3 times a week. Excercise intolerance, very low performance, endurance, barely getting any results from the excercises (probably the same lack of T). That had been very discouraging to do excercises. But prior to starting TRT I had been using pullup bar and walking from time to time.
  • After starting TRT I began using pullup more, added a little of squats, restarted bicycle and rollerblades. Thinking about adding push-ups. With the influx of testosterone this all became easier and make sense now.

Diet is simply eating something I see.

  • Lot of ice-cream, cookies, sweets - my favorites for entire life (glucose levels are OK)
  • Spaghetti, instant noodles, etc
  • Meat in forms of sausages, fried chickens, eggs, stockfish
  • Nuts
  • I rarely use any porridge. Fruits and vegetables are not very often too.

Body fat now is 18.4%.

Thank you, I wrote down the list, I’m going to see what I can learn from these guys.

1 Like
23

Lifting dermatologisf YouTube channel start there and the trt round table.

24

What about you folate and iron levels? Are you taking folate? Methyl folate? Folic Acid (synthetic folate)? If not, why not? You should absolutely never do regular B12 injections without supplementing folate, and you should know your ferritin and iron levels if B12 is a problem for you.

25

I found " The Lifting Dermatologist" channel.
But what is “the trt round table”?

B12 is tasty sweet chewable tablets of methylcobalamin. Cherry taste! Work good - next test showed increase from 150 to 405.

I don’t supplement with folic acid, the time I did D3/B12 tests, I also did some others - I have plenty of folic acid:

Folic acid (B9)   21    (3.1  - 20.5)
Ca+               2.23  (2.25 - 2.75) mmol/l
Mg+               0.79  (0.78 - 1.00) mmol/l
P (phosphorus)    1.83  (0.68 - 1.8)  mmol/l
Zinc              15.38 (7.0  - 23.0) umol/l
Fe+               15.38 (6.6  - 26.0) umol/l

Notices:

  1. I see now that calcium level is low. I also see that my bone mass was 2.9 in 2017, 2.8 in 2018, 2.7 in 2019. I guess I have to add calcium sources and have regular trainings.
  2. Magnesium is low, but whenever I add magnesium supplement, I get insomnia and some kind of multi-layered tinnitus, when there are several squeaks at once, and all of them have pulsating volume and pitch.
  3. Phosphorus is probably from phosphoric acid of cola, that I was chugging a lot those times.
  4. Zinc and iron are both 15.38 in the results, I didn’t mistype.
26

I should point out that Folic Acid and Folate (B9) are not the same thing. Folic Acid is the synthetic (Or “Bio-identical” as some would say) version and Folat is naturally occurring. I f you were drinking enough cola to raise your phosphorous level, you were taking in a lot of Folic Acid as well. 46% of Caucasians and 49% of Hispanics do either do not process the synthetic version well or do not process it at all, and thus have a false blood level. Blood test only check Folate, there is no specific test for Folic Acid it just shows up as Folate even though it isn’t. In a nutshell, that test does not mean that you are not deficient. You should investigate the hypocalcemia.

27

Until you get your habits under control brother, and start treating your body with more respect, you’re not going to see a whole lot of improvement.

TRT isn’t a magic pill man. It’s a single piece of a very complex puzzle. You need to get everything else in line diet, exercise, etc…) and get serious about it, and then your body will have the tools it needs to stabilize and heal.

Estradiol above 30 can be, and usually is VERY healthy, if it falls within a decent ratio to your Testosterone levels.

You need to let go of this thought process that estrogen is bad. Estrogen is just as necessary as testosterone and , just like testosterone, too little is just as bad and too much excess. Don’t look for a specific number, look for a ratio of E2 to Testosterone that brings you to homeostasis and let the healing begin.

1 Like
28

Stop calling estrogen the enemy.

Your body creates estrogen for a reason.

  1. Give your body 3-4 months to adapt
  2. Your receptors are not fully absorbing the test and estrogen
    3 due to this it will Give you some minor sides like itchy nipples and some water retention
  3. Eventually the body starts utilizing the hormones properly
  4. If you are going to continue talking about ranges you are going to be stuck on an ai the rest of your life, and fuck your body for it.

Right now we have guys who are ignorant as F to estrogen.

“When my estrogen goes over 32 to 34 my cock stops working , I get tearyyy eyed and fat. I’ve got it down to a science . I jsut pop a small pill and I’m ok by 6pm”…

FFS sakes do you want to spend your life dealing with this shit?

If the above person would grow a set of balls, some logic, and pull his head out of his ass he would realize it is because he never let his body get used to the estrogen. Or not enough trt

Now these folks are 100% sure high e2 is a symptom.

This is what my doc and many experts and others have been telling me.

There is a balance. If estrogen numbers are up there without a supporting free t and DHT level they will experience sides and symptoms.

So what do you do? Increase free t to support your hormone balance.

Stop talking estrogen . Talk about eating right, how happy you are to of found a solution. inject yourself for the next 3-4 months without wasting time reading and asking “why isn’t it working. Is it estrogen”.

Stop analyzing all of this. Stick a needle in your ass or delt and get on with it. Find a doctor and stop doing it yourself.

Did we analyze and discuss free t to estrogen balance with our doctors when we hit puberty? Did they give us an ai at 20 becuse our estrogen was so high…

Natural. Don’t listen to those folks who cannot support the ai with science, logic or common sense.

I realized how stupid I was to of even taken anyone seriously that did not use common sense in their methods. Now I don’t even waste my time arguing with them.

I mean come on. Why are you controlling a natural mechanism of your body.

29

Yes our body doesn’t know what it’s doing. God, Mother Nature messes up and we mustn’t keep estrogen

30

You really really really need to get off the gels. No wonder you do not feel good. For one you cannot optimize free t, the balance to e2 is not optimal. So take my suggestions above when you switch to injections or scrotal cream.

31

Good point. Being a russian speaker I followed the exchange and I can testify, many of us can benefit from the knowledge of badtimes92

32

Of course. That’s what endocrinologists a for. If a teen appears to be ill, he will be analyzed and discussed.
Looks like our estrogen is not so high:
https://www.nature.com/articles/pr1973112.pdf?origin=ppub
It happily fits under 30 pg/ml. Not 54-64 even nearly.

It’s good we started analyzing and discussing levels and balance at last.

  1. Because we invented medicine. Without it humans were dying like rats.
  2. If a body is broken, the mechanisms should be controlled.
  3. TRT isn’t natural process, a body have zero ideas how to deal with it it, we control it manually.
  4. After 30 lots of humans tend to firmly sit on bunch of medications, without which mother nature kills them very quickly and painfully.
  5. Once I met a psychiatrist, that told me I should cancel all antidepressants and rely on my body. And know what? In a matter of several months I dropped into depression, derealization, tachycardia, low blood pressure, intense suicidal ideation, fatigue, and sleepiness.
  6. Then I met a neurologists, telling him I feel tired, sleepy, cognition is poor, memory is meh. He replied: “Oh, I feel tired and stupid too, you are OK, go away.” Often, if a doc tells you set a situation adrift, he is either stupid, or want to get rid of you.

An there is another topic:

Guys nicely discuss controlling estrogen. Which means there are different opinions.

And I seriously want to stop talking about abandoning endocrinology, about mother nature, bodies that know everything, pulling ass from the head, or growing balls, as it makes no common sense, logic, or scientific evidence. Thank you.

33

I surely can follow this suggestion, if I feel at least OK. I mean my problems with the current regimen isn’t of funny level of “dick not working, watery eyes”, but more like “I sleep 2/3 of every day, can’t work, can’t think straight, don’t want to talk to anyone, feel like crazy.” I’m able to distinguish between mild side effects and alarming situations.

34

I think you are strongly misunderstanding the purpose of medicine. Medicine does not heal your body. It allows (or gives your body the tools and materials it needs to) HEAL ITSELF. It’s other purpose is to alleviate the discomfort and pain associated with your body screaming for help from you!

Humans were dying like rats from diseases of plague, but even more died from malnutrition and bad habits. Yes modern medicine has slowed the spread of common diseases, but open your eyes man. People are STILL dying like rats every day because medicine is NOT a “get out of jail free” card to eat whatever or live however the hell you want to. It cannot offset a shitty lifestyle…

Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying…your diet and your lifestyle are shitty. If you don’t correct that, medicine will do jack shit for you (besides slightly prolonging the inevitable) and you will still become another modern rat.

Best of luck to you friend and I hope you well.

35

Bro, you seem secondary just like me.

I live in Bulgaria. We also have only fucked up esters like it seems in Russia.

If I go TRT I would better maybe find a trusted dealer to get high quality cypionate instead of the crappy nebido and the crappy 4 esters blends.

36

My e is at 50 and I feel great. I actually just upped my dose too so e will climb a little higher. Many guys here feel great at 50 or higher

37

That sounds like thyroid problem. Go find a proper doc. What state?

38

You really need a doctor who can fix this. Trying this on your own becusss your doc is incapable is not the best way.

I can guide you. Jsut tell me which state you are in.

39

That’s Russia, Orenburg city.

40

Oh shit ok.

Yes go get free t3 checked along with t4.t3. And the reverse.

Sounds like you need thyroid medication. I had the exact same fatigue and trt didn’t help anything but libido.

I took thyroid and within 1 hour I felt amazing.

41

Here are results from 2019-03-21:

TSH:      1.67
Total T3: 92.6
Total T4: 6.5
Free T3:  3.4
Free T4:  12.5
Anti-TPO: 10.0
Anti-Tg:  5.4

Other tests show TSH jumping between 3.2-3.5. Which is likely too high and should be kept under 2.

A few days ago I started iodine 125 + selenium 75 daily. I’m gonna check what this give me after ~1 month.