Testosterone is the fuel that drives our very being. Have you ever been tired for no reason even after a good night sleep or maybe felt mentally exhausted with little to no work? This is a simple case of low testosterone levels. When the levels are low like this for a prolonged period of time your body is more susceptible to illness or disease in the future. This might lead to being prescribed synthetic testosterone which requires injection and no one want that on your every day to do list. So i am just simply giving you guys awareness of the situation that may occur in the future if the lifestyle is not changed.
1. Weight Loss
Body fat contains aromatase, an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogens, the main sex hormones in women. Having extra estrogens floating around your system triggers your body to slow its production of testosterone. And the less testosterone you make, the more belly fat you accumulate and the more estrogens you spew. In fact, though a beer belly might seem to some like a dramatic (if unattractive) declaration of manliness, a study of 1,822 men by the New England Research Institutes (NERI) confirmed that a man's waist circumference is the single strongest predictor of low testosterone levels. It's even more accurate than age or overall health. Researchers have also targeted midriff weight as the strongest predictor of a condition called symptomatic androgen deficiency, or AD. It's marked by low libido, erectile dysfunction, osteoporosis, depressed mood, lethargy, and diminished physical performance. According to the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, the prevalence of AD among American men between the ages of 40 and 79 is nearly 8 percent.
2. High-Intensity Exercise like Peak Fitness
High-Intensity Exercise is like for example you are on a track coarse. There are the straight aways and there are the curves. If you would to sprint as fast as you can on the straight aways then walk the curves that would be High-Intensity Exercise.
High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT is a method of training that involves repeated bouts of high intensity work followed by periods of recovery. The timings range and vary but previous research has suggested work intervals of between 30 seconds to several minutes, separated by rest intervals of 1-5 minutes
Sure, you lose some testosterone naturally as you age. But weight gain can accelerate that process. When NERI researchers monitored the health of men ages 40 to 70 for 9 years, they found that the men who became overweight or obese experienced a more rapid drop in testosterone than those who'd kept a normal weight. Thinner men might just be manlier men.
3. Consume plenty of zinc
The mineral zinc is important for testosterone production, and supplementing your diet for as little as six weeks has been shown to cause a marked improvement in testosterone among men with low levels.1 Likewise, research has shown that restricting dietary sources of zinc leads to a significant decrease in testosterone, while zinc supplementation increases it2 -- and even protects men from exercised-induced reductions in testosterone levels.3It's estimated that up to 45 percent of adults over the age of 60 may have lower than recommended zinc intakes; even when dietary supplements were added in, an estimated 20-25 percent of older adults still had inadequate zinc intakes, according to a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.4Your diet is the best source of zinc; along with protein-rich foods like meats and fish, other good dietary sources of zinc include raw milk, raw cheese, beans, and yogurt or kefir made from raw milk. It can be difficult to obtain enough dietary zinc if you're a vegetarian, and also for meat-eaters as well, largely because of conventional farming methods that rely heavily on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. These chemicals deplete the soil of nutrients ... nutrients like zinc that must be absorbed by plants in order to be passed on to you.In many cases, you may further deplete the nutrients in your food by the way you prepare it. For most food, cooking it will drastically reduce its levels of nutrients like zinc … particularly over-cooking, which many people do.If you decide to use a zinc supplement, stick to a dosage of less than 40 mg a day, as this is the recommended adult upper limit. Taking too much zinc can interfere with your body's ability to absorb other minerals, especially copper, and may cause nausea as a side effect.
4. Strength Training
In addition to Peak Fitness, strength training is also known to boost testosterone levels, provided you are doing so intensely enough. When strength training to boost testosterone, you'll want to increase the weight and lower your number of reps, and then focus on exercises that work a large number of muscles, such as dead lifts or squats.You can "turbo-charge" your weight training by going slower. By slowing down your movement, you're actually turning it into a high-intensity exercise. Super Slow movement allows your muscle, at the microscopic level, to access the maximum number of cross-bridges between the protein filaments that produce movement in the muscle.
5. Optimize Your Vitamin D Levels
Vitamin D, a steroid hormone, is essential for the healthy development of the nucleus of the sperm cell, and helps maintain semen quality and sperm count. Vitamin D also increases levels of testosterone, which may boost libido. In one study, overweight men who were given vitamin D supplements had a significant increase in testosterone levels after one year.5Vitamin D deficiency is currently at epidemic proportions in the United States and many other regions around the world, largely because people do not spend enough time in the sun to facilitate this important process of vitamin D production.So the first step to ensuring you are receiving all the benefits of vitamin D is to find out what your levels are using a 25(OH)D test, also called 25-hydroxyvitamin D.A few years back, the recommended level was between 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml), but more recently the optimal vitamin D level has been raised to 50-70 ng/ml.To get your levels into the healthy range, sun exposure is the BEST way to optimize your vitamin D levels; exposing a large amount of your skin until it turns the lightest shade of pink, as near to solar noon as possible, is typically necessary to achieve adequate vitamin D production. If sun exposure is not an option, a safe tanning bed (with electronic ballasts rather than magnetic ballasts, to avoid unnecessary exposure to EMF fields) can be used.As a last resort, a vitamin D3 supplement can be taken orally, but research suggests the average adult needs to take 8,000 IU's of vitamin D per day in order to elevate their levels above 40 ng/ml, which is the absolute minimum for disease prevention.
6.Reduce Stress
When you're under a lot of stress, your body releases high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This hormone actually blocksthe effects of testosterone,6 presumably because, from a biological standpoint, testosterone-associated behaviors (mating, competing, aggression) may have lowered your chances of survival in an emergency (hence, the "fight or flight" response is dominant, courtesy of cortisol).In the modern world, chronic stress, and subsequently elevated levels of cortisol, could mean that testosterone's effects are blocked in the long term, which is what you want to avoid.My favorite overall tool to manage stress is EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), which is like acupuncture without the needles. It's a handy, free tool for unloading emotional baggage quickly and painlessly, and so easy that even children can learn it. Other common stress-reduction tools with a high success rate include prayer, meditation, laughter and yoga, for example. Learning relaxation skills, such as deep breathing and positive visualization, which is the "language" of the subconscious.When you create a visual image of how you'd like to feel, your subconscious will understand and begin to help you by making the needed biochemical and neurological changes
7.Limit or Eliminate Sugar from Your Diet
Testosterone levels decrease after you eat sugar, which is likely because the sugar leads to a high insulin level, another factor leading to low testosterone.7Based on USDA estimates, the average American consumes 12 teaspoons of sugar a day, which equates to about TWO TONS of sugar during a lifetime.Why we eat this much sugar is not difficult to understand -- it tastes good, and it gives us pleasure by triggering an innate process in your brain via dopamine and opioid signals.What it is doing to us on both a physical and emotional level is another story entirely, and most people stand to reap major improvements in their health by cutting back on, or eliminating, sugar altogether from their diets. Remember foods that contain added sugar and fructose, as well as grains like bread and pasta, should all be limited.If you're struggling with sugar addiction and having trouble dealing with cravings, I highly recommend trying an energy psychology technique called Turbo Tapping, which has helped many "soda addicts" kick their sweet habit, and it should work for any type of sweet craving you may have.
8.Eat Healthy Fats
By healthy, this means not only mon- and polyunsaturated fats, like that found in avocadoes and nuts, but also saturated, as these are essential for building testosterone. Research shows that a diet with less than 40 percent of energy as fat (and that mainly from animal sources, i.e. saturated) lead to a decrease in testosterone levels.8My personal diet is about 60-70 percent healthy fat, and other experts agree that the ideal diet includes somewhere between 50-70 percent fat.It's important to understand that your body requires saturated fats from animal and vegetable sources (such as meat, dairy, certain oils, and tropical plants like coconut) for optimal functioning, and if you neglect this important food group in favor of sugar, grains and other starchy carbs, your health and weight are almost guaranteed to suffer. Examples of healthy fats you can eat more of to give your testosterone levels a boost include:Olives and Olive oilCoconuts and coconut oilButter made from raw grass-fed organic milkRaw nuts, such as, almonds or pecansOrganic pastured egg yolksAvocadosGrass-fed meatsPalm oilUnheated organic nut oils
9.Boost Your Intake of Branch Chain Amino Acids (BCAA) from Foods Like Whey Protein
Research suggests that BCAAs result in higher testosterone levels, particularly when taken along with resistance training.9 While BCAAs are available in supplement form, you'll find the highest concentrations of BCAAs like leucine in dairy products – especially quality cheeses and whey protein.Even when getting leucine from your natural food supply, it's often wasted or used as a building block instead of an anabolic agent. So to create the correct anabolic environment, you need to boost leucine consumption way beyond mere maintenance levels.That said, keep in mind that using leucine as a free form amino acid can be highly counterproductive as when free form amino acids are artificially administrated, they rapidly enter your circulation while disrupting insulin function, and impairing your body's glycemic control. Food-based leucine is really the ideal form that can benefit your muscles without side effects.
(http://www.diabetesincontrol.com/testosterone-levels-increase-50-with-weight-loss-exercise/)
(https://www.bodybuilding.com/content/high-intensity-interval-training-the-ultimate-guide.html)
(http://www.healthline.com/health/testosterone-and-zinc)
(http://www.webmd.com/men/features/exercise-and-testosterone)
(http://blog.insidetracker.com/can-vitamin-d-restore-low-testosterone-levels)
(http://www.predatornutrition.com/articlesdetail?cid=stress-and-testosterone)
(http://drhyman.com/blog/2014/08/29/killing-sex-drive-one-bite-time-5-surprising-ways-sugar-lowers-libido/)
(https://www.anabolicmen.com/fats-and-testosterone/)
(https://www.anabolicmen.com/protein-testosterone/)