AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Nah, they’ll go after memento first for spreading the keto heresy. When he goes 404 I’ll know it’s time to go into paranoid mode.

Before I wandered off-track in my last reply, I intended to say that when Testosterone Replacement Therapy became common in the US, it was normal for a doctor (actually, a nurse or "practitioner") to administer each dose via injection at the doctor’s office or clinic. This was a "medical procedure" that you had to pay them for, so it was a small but steady source of income.

When insurance started covering TRT, they adopted the usual shot-every-two-weeks system that was already in use.

Every two weeks was never optimal; the half-life of a TRT injection is 8 days, according to the datasheet n on Pfizer’s web site. But most patients would have balked at getting the shots more often; not many men could take off work for however long it took to get to the doctor’s office and back much more often without losing their job for absenteeism. The insurance companies don’t want to pay for shots more often, either.

However, a good thing about that was that they now mostly approve of patients doing their own injections, which means they don’t have to pay anything. I even have to buy my own needles. But that also means I’m not locked into their injection schedule. I started off at once a week, and later went to every two days, using the tiny insulin needles. All they know is that I’m getting my prescription every month, and when they do the blood labs every six months to check for "compliance" my testosterone level looks like what they expect.

Next time you see your doctor, tell him about the "crash" when the previous dose wears off, and bring along a printout of the data from Pfizer or another pharmaceutical manufacturer. If you’re getting testosterone cypionate, it should say the half-life is 8 days. If you’re getting one of the other injectables, it might be different. Ask him if you can get the injections more often, or if they can show you how to DIY, since "more often" would come out of his operating overhead. He might say no; as I mentioned previously, he’s not a free agent; he has to conform to a bunch of standards set by bureaucrats who don’t give a damn about your health. But sometimes there is some leeway in the system, or he might care more for his patient than some random rules. You won’t know unless you ask.

I know this is from a while back but "Alien encounters" I think you just encaspulated 90% of my existence.

"Welcome to my world."

I’m starting to understand why some guys develop the "thousand yard stare." After a while, the world just gets too random to waste time interacting with.

I didn’t read the thread, could have been mentioned already, but have you heard about Ray Peat diet / lifestyle? It is pretty much the opposite of all mainstream diets.

Check raypeatforum.com. It’s a huge rabbit hole. Approach in this community is not all size fits all but there are many details. There are a guy who sell cheap supplements which legit increase T and male health and are not some mumbojumbo herbs.

Weight:

256 down to 237. I went from carnivore to ‘low carb’ early in the year, and my weight loss slowed way down. I wasn’t worried about it, because after dropping over a hundred pounds, my skin was starting to fit me like a boiler suit. Time and Red Light Therapy have done wonders for that.

Despite only losing 19 pounds, the tape measure says I’ve lost a couple more inches off my torso and thighs; enough that it’s visible even to me. That’s probably from exercise.

Fitness:

I spent the first half of 2023 doing stretches and light exercise to get some mobility back. It turns out you really *can* reduce or eliminate (at least some kinds of) arthritis that way. It takes a long time, and the suck factor is high, but "it worked for me." Moving from "Standard American Diet" to keto, then carnivore, helped that a lot as well.

I went from using a cane all the time and crutches on bad days at the beginning of the year, to completely abandoning the cane in April. I got around slowly and carefully, but I was moving.

I used a cable machine and dumbbells for the first third of 2023, until I was able to handle a barbell. Then I switched to Mark Rippetoe’s "Starting Strength" program, and worked until I started losing ground from overtraining. I should have read the damned book all the way through. Oh, well, I know what I did wrong and how to fix it. I was putting in three of four hours a day, six days a week, getting up before daylight to work out before it got too hot.

The plan was to take a couple of weeks off and restart, but that slid, as plans tend to do. But I wasn’t a total loser. After almost two years Workout Buddy (who worked out maybe three times) wanted to go to the city gym, so I started going with him, and wound up buying a membership for a year. We go for an hour, three days a week. WB hasn’t ever been noted for consistency or reliability, so I’m somewhat astonished to say he’s only missed the workout a handful of times in three months. He had to work late once, an anniversary trip with his wife, and another bout of COVID. I’ve mostly been using the treadmill, recumbent bicycle, and rowing machine; stuff I don’t have at home. I even got Mrs. Andy to go with us a couple of times.

I also shifted from "just exercising" to "training". I now have a specific goal: I’m preparing to shoot a three-gun event in 2024. A three-gun may include any or all of: running, climbing, crawling, contorting into strange positions, and shooting while moving. Pretty ambitious for someone who was shopping for a wheelchair ramp a year ago, but I’ve made so much progress in the last year, I’m not *that* far from it right now. I don’t expect to be competitive; my goal is simply to finish the course without leaving in an ambulance.

PE:

I experimented with various dietary supplements, seeing if they affected testicle size or ejaculate volume. I used a caliburated buret and digital calipers. I got no detectable results from anything I tried. I have a list of some other stuff that I’ll try in the forthcoming year.

Gains were gratifying in 2023, but hard to quantify. While some of the improvement is doubtless attributable to my heavy PE work, I expect most of it is due to the combination of diet, exercise, and cryolipolysis getting the near end of the ruler closer to my pubic bone. I’m still not quite able to get a proper bone-pressed measurement. I can feel the bone if I press my fingers hard at the base of my shaft, but it’s a steeply curved surface that’s not practical to measure from. There’s about an 1-1/2" of "fluffy" fat making up the majority of the pad, sitting on top of 1/2 to 3/4" of a much harder layer that doesn’t compress much with the ruler.

Later this year I’ll do a few more cryo rounds. If anyone is interested, I’m using the cryo protocol from DIY cryolipolysis

Two of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2023 were to learn Morse code and to learn some basic knot tying. The Morse thing never materialized, but at least I got some rope and a knot book.

For 2024, probably more pumping, though I’d like to do more hanger work.

Happy new Year Andy and congrats to the awesome progress with your physics! It requires some mental strength to not give up along the road. You seem to have it! Good luck on this year’s journey.

I just read this log over the last three days. Talk about inspiring.

Congrats on getting healthier and more functional. Very inspriational!

Also thanks for being a pillar of this community. I really appreciate the culture of support you help create for all of us.

Hope 2024 is a wonderful year!

Thanks, guys!

Interesting… I’m also on a similar program, prescribed by doctor. Been on TRT about 5 years now myself (I’m also on Test C).

Keep it up! That’s signficant weight loss. I lost about 75lbs in the last 9 months, and it’s made a world of difference for me. However, my skin is getting loose from such massive weight loss. I’m going to look into red light therapy / never heard of it before I read your thread. Also, a friend of mine lost 65lbs on the carnivore diet (I’ve seen it work, but know little about it). There’s a book I highly recommend (free on audible) called "The Big Fat Suprise"… this convinced me to give Keto another try. In the end I combined intermitent fasting, keto, lifting & cardio to get my weight loss (I plan to lose maybe 20 more pounds, to try & get down to 8 to 5% bodyfat). The book gets more into the "why" than the "how"… Also, my Keto diet is almost a carnivore diet (I’m probably protein heavy — I just count carbs, not calories too, I try to stay under 25 carbs per day)

If you have any suggestions on red light therapy, send them my way (weight loss is great, but loose skin is horrible).

It lost over 100 pounds in 2022. On strict carnivore, I was dropping about two pounds per week, like clockwork.

I’ve had excellent results with a large therapy panel from eBay. I just roll to an appropriate position and lay it directly on the skin for 15 or 30 minute sessions. The recommended time is 20 minutes, but my shutoff timer only has 15 and 30 minute settings. The panel goesn’t get more than noticeably warm.

It works very well for stretch marks and crepey "old man skin."

Canivore sounds extreme, but I think of it as "The Lazy Man’s Keto." Screw all that macro meal planning and portion size shit. It it meat? Then eat it. Simple. I found a few carbs here and there - low-carb burrito shells, some kinds of nuts, some condiments - didn’t affect the weight loss progression or the reduction of athritis and allergy symptoms.

Increasing the carb count up to "keto" kept the arthritis and allergy benefits, but I stopped losing weight. So when I get down to my target weight, I have the option of switching back to keto if I want.

Gary Taubes’ "Good Calories, Bad Calories" goes into tedious detail on the physiology of keto. And indirectly, the institutional disaster of the medical/pharmaceutical industry in general.

That’s how I do it. Calorie counting is for rubes; per the documents at FDA.gov, the numbers are basically simply made up from thin air. Long ago there was some testing, but nowadays they just take the vendors’ word for it. That’s why none of the calorie charts agree. (except the ones from the web ripping off each others’ content)

A long skinny panel is more useful than a squareish one for arms and legs. Larger squareish ones are good for the torso. They have flexible ones now; I have one wrapped around my pump tube. They also have shapes optimized for a face or throat, if you care.

The major problem is that, even with the recommended 20-minute sessions, it’s slow. There’s a lot of body area to cover. An NIR "tanning bed" would be ideal, but bulky and expensive, so I make do.

I had zero expectations that the red light therapy stuff would do anything useful, even with the papers at nih.gov and endorsements by NASA and acceptance by various insurance companies. But the panels were cheap enough to be worth trying, and I was pleasantly surprised.

There are some creams marketed primarily to pregnant women, for control and repair of skin damage due to pregnancy. Most of them contain hyaluronic acid and retinol. The theory behind them seems solid enough, based on their composition, but I hate anything slimy on me, even bug spray or sunblock. So I have zero personal experience there, but you might want to try one. Just read the ingredient label and make sure it’s not chock-full of pthalates and phytoestrogens (most stuff targeted at women is), and if it says "fragrance" anywhere, it probably means it’s dosed with something that smells like a goat’s asshole. I don’t think the female sense of smell is the same as that of the male.

thank you for the advice and wow, that’s horrible but funny too (about the smell)

I went back to "dirty carnivore" on 01/01/2024. From experience I know it will take about 40 days before the weight loss kicks in.

My plan was to put off workouts at home until it isn’t so freaking cold, but while the city gym has a good assortment of machines, their weights are pretty much limited to dumbbells and kettlebells. My intention is to bundle up, go next door, and do one set of lifts each day - squat, deadlift, bench, overhead - before my fingers go numb.

I have a refrigerator and freezer over there; a couple of years ago I found out they quit working at about 50F. In 2021 I put a desk and a desktop computer over there, which I mostly used for logging workout information. Last winter I found that the LCD monitor doesn’t work below 55F. If you turn it on and leave it on, it will start showing an image after about an hour. Makes me wish I hadn’t thrown out that 21-inch Mitsubishi Diamond Scan CRT years ago. CRTs are, for practical purposes, unaffected by temperature. That was 1800 1988 dollars, btw. By the CPI Inflation Calculator, that’d be $4800 bidenbux. Of course the Mitsu pulled over 300 watts when it was on; the three LCDs on my desk nowadays pull about 90 watts combined.