#96 The Truth About Testosterone: Hormone Expert Candace Burch Reveals How to Navigate Male Hormone Changes

My guest is hormone educator Candace Burch. I have released a complimentary show about women’s hormones in my previous episode, but today’s show is all about the boys.

We talk in this podcast about MEN’s hormone health. There are so many natural ways to support hormone health from supplementation, lifestyle and more aggressive ways as we get older. Candace suggests strategic and safe ways to approach diving into navigating your symphony of hormones. Often times we think we can just throw the magic T, TESTOSTERONE at everything male hormone-related but it’s always about the whole picture. Did you know men go through something called Andropause?

I learned so much in both shows and I encourage you to listen to the one that pertains to you or even to your kids or partner.

Listen to the episode here:

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Key Topics:

• Men’s Hormones: How Does it Look? [00:02:14]
• Testosterone Management [00:04:44]
• Hormone Supplements [00:07:50]
• Men and Zinc [00:11:08]
• Testosterone Therapy [00:14:32]
• Low Testosterone Risks [00:19:09]
• Maintaining Testosterone Levels [00:26:42]
• Testosterone Management for the Overweight [00:29:29]

Candace Burch – Male Hormones & Testosterone

My guest is Candace Burch. I’m doing something a little bit different where I have two conversations with Candace who is a hormone health educator. I did one show that drills down more specifically for women. This show talks more specifically about men’s hormones. I’m not going to overgeneralize but I feel that men are interested in their testosterone. It’s like, “I need more. I should get it.”

It’s that conversation about the whole orchestration, the symphony of hormones. How do you go about testing that? What are you looking for? What are some more natural ways to do that whether it’s through lifestyle or supplementation? What are the more advanced things whether it’s patches, replacement therapy, or things like that? This is my guy show. I would encourage you if you have a daughter, a female partner, or a sister to listen to the women show. You find out that all of us are susceptible to many of the same things in health and it gets expressed not so differently even though biologically men and women are different.

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Thank you for joining me again. After we did our hormone show that was female-oriented, which makes sense, I feel like men’s hormones get neglected. There’s a big conversation on hormones like testosterone. It’s like, “Do you have it? Don’t you have it? How do you get more of it?” It’s all that. I thought it would only be fair to see if we could dig down a little bit and talk about men’s journeys.

I talked to Alisa Vitti quite a while ago. She talked about how women have a cycle that’s 26 to 30 days or whatever but men have a cycle that’s 24 hours a day. The joke was happy hour was developed because they would be done with their work or hunting if you will. That was when their hormones would drop enough that they were ready to be social, visit, and talk. The joke is that’s why happy hours were at that time and “Rah,” through the day. Now, “We’re ready to chill.” You’re in your mid-20s. What does the landscape look like?

We have tested a few hundred men and many of them are younger men in their 20s and early 30s whose girlfriend or partner persuaded them to do the testing because of different symptoms that were going on. Either fatigue, irritability, lack of enthusiasm for things. Even in younger men, there’s low sex drive and low energy levels.

To your question, it isn’t a bad idea to get a baseline to see what’s going on with hormone levels if there are symptoms. It all starts with symptom awareness. If your muscles are sore and you have a low tolerance for exercise and you’ve got belly fat at a younger age, that’s common in middle-aged men. If you have symptoms that don’t seem to jive with how you want to feel and how you want to perform and if you can’t think clearly, your cognition is off, there’s something going on, that’s a good time to test hormone levels.

You can do it in blood. Saliva is a better medium for testing because we test active levels that have become unbound and have moved to the cells where hormones do their thing. They dock up at the cellular site. We can capture that in saliva. It’s also non-invasive. Not to stick needles into someone is a better thing.

[bctt tweet=”Intermittent fasting can mostly be done in the hours of sleep.”]

The thing with men is it’s always about testosterone, “How do I get more of it? How do I optimize it?” That isn’t the whole picture at all. Testosterone is for both men and women. It’s an androgen derived from the Latin for male, andro. We refer to the hormones that have masculinizing effects, heavier bones, heavier muscles. Maybe in men, we’re supposed to think they have more drive than women do. They can be more aggressive, I suppose. The outward appearance of the male of the species, the macho thing is linked so much to testosterone.

It’s key to women too because it’s all about structure. It’s about bones, muscles, building them, and maintaining them. It’s about our drive, our ambition, our sex drive. It’s about how clearly we think about our mental sharpness, our memory. It’s huge. If testosterone is low, yes, it’s a big issue. The other hormones that work in symphony with testosterone have to be checked out importantly as testosterone.

When men say, “How do I raise my testosterone?” The question should be more, “How do I make sure not to lower my testosterone? What is it that depletes my testosterone level?” There are many things that cause a depletion of testosterone. If you start with symptoms, I named some of them. If you then get tested, you’ve got to test testosterone. DHEA, which is the precursor hormone, it’s the hormone that breaks down to testosterone. It’s the most abundant hormone in the body.

You’ve got to test cortisol stress hormones because when they’re high, the testosterone is low. You’ve got to test estrogen. When estrogen is high, that kicks testosterone in the butt. Estrogen, especially in aging men, starts to rise relative to testosterone levels because there is an inevitable decline. Every guy isn’t going to get into low testosterone levels.

The HIM study, Hypogonadism In Males, which looked at testosterone levels, hypogonadism referring to low testosterone, was a big study. It was 2007. They found that 39% of men over 45 who presented at a clinic, for whatever reason, were tested for testosterone levels and other levels and were shown to be low in testosterone and higher in estrogen levels. That was boiled down to about 13.8 million men in this country.

At the same time, they were mentioning in the study that men are notorious for not being aware of the symptoms. They hadn’t come in there for that reason. Maybe they came in because they were worried about angina during exercise or they felt they didn’t have any energy. They weren’t aware of the symptoms of andropause, which over 45, it’s that inevitable decline in testosterone. They weren’t doing anything about their symptoms. They thought they were part of aging.

The point is, men have andropause. Younger men, if their levels are low, off, or out of balance, it’s generally because of high stress, foods that have estrogens in them like meat and dairy that’s been injected with hormones. That’s an interesting story. I remember talking to a guy who had low testosterone and high SHBG, which is the protein that binds up testosterone and takes it out of circulation. That usually goes up, Sex Hormone Binding Globulin, when estrogen is up.

When we finally got back down to it or drilled down, he was a milkaholic. He drank too much milk that wasn’t Xeno-free. It was milk that had been mass-produced and thus the cows had been shot up with synthetic estrogens. His body was loaded with estrogens. There are eleven different kinds of estrogen in a glass of milk with our synthetic processing. That’s something that becomes important for men to be aware of that you don’t want to be eating any meat or dairy that is injected with hormones.

For younger men, over the last twenty years, they’re facing things that men in their 40s weren’t dealing with. Let’s take it from the most baseline level. Can we maybe bucket the lifestyle things? Do we like certain supplements that feel pretty good for a bigger group of people? We want everybody to get their blood work done so they know who they are specifically. Peptides, zinc, or things like that, do we know of some of these things that can support men’s health, energy, vitality, libido, and things like that?

When we look at the list of things that can help to raise testosterone, they’re natural. What they’re doing is they’re creating a better balance of estrogen to testosterone or a better balance of stress hormones to testosterone. A lot of those things come down to reducing high cortisol. One of the questions I noticed that came over Laird’s Instagram was, “What are 1 or 2 things to do when you have a high-pressure life to calm down and to be able to maintain your hormone levels and maintain balance in men with high pressure lives?”

The high performance of men leads to high cortisol, high night cortisol. Appetite hormones, which operate on the sleep-wake cycle, can be thrown off. There are sugar cravings and this needs to go for the quick fuel. A lot of men are not aware that they can use collagen. Collagen and testosterone work together to build bone, to build muscle. We can get collagen from the foods we eat and things like Laird Superfood Creamers. Thank you for letting me try them. They’re fantastic. That’s a great way to boost the interaction of these substances in the body that work together with hormones to build bone, to build muscle.

Get off the computer an hour or two before bed. This is becoming ad nauseam but a lot of people don’t realize that if they’re on the computer right up to bed, that blue light has blocked their melatonin, the master sleep hormone. Therefore, they’re not going to sleep as well and they’re going to have high-level cortisol. It means cortisol might be rising through the night. They wake up in the morning not feeling rested. They get into this syndrome of feeling tired and wired. They can’t sleep at night.

There was a review of fifteen studies looking at high-intensity exercise. The authors of this study, Scientific Medical Journal, said that what showed up with exercise is that if you exercise at a high intensity an hour before bed, you are not going to sleep well. It’s going to delay sleep onset and it’s going to delay the length of time that you stay asleep. You can lump those two, no vigorous exercise an hour before bed, and get off the computer. Turn it off. Liberate yourself from the computer or cell phone. However, high-intensity exercise 2 to 4 hours earlier in the evening, at least 2 to 4 hours before bed did help sleep onset and help duration of sleep. It’s things like that.

If we’re pressured, we’re rushing, we’re not eating properly, and we’re not getting the right nutrients, it’s possible to become mineral deficient, vitamin deficient, nutrient-deficient. For men, zinc is crucial because zinc interrupts the action of an enzyme in fat cells which turns testosterone into estrogen. Men need to know that.

When their diets are fast food, processed foods, if they’re restricting whole food groups by being perhaps too strictly vegan without balancing proteins and combining them properly, they can be missing out on proteins and good fats that are the building blocks of hormones. Also, all these essential nutrients like zinc, magnesium, iodine, and all of these different trace minerals. In particular, for older men, if they use zinc and get to know zinc in foods, it’s a good thing to know about cashews, chickpeas, dark chocolate, oysters.

Remember, they always said oysters are aphrodisiacs. Why? It’s because oysters are high in zinc. Zinc disrupts this aromatization in fat cells which is turning testosterone into estrogen. That’s something important to understand. Be aware of the fact that a nutrient-dense diet is loaded with amino acids that we can’t live without and that we don’t produce. Our bodies don’t necessarily produce all of those things.

Men can be driven to perform. I noticed that a lot of men that I talked to that are older are trying to hang on to that person they were when they were 40, 50, or 20. At a certain point, you’ve got to say, “I can’t overdo it,” because we get into adrenal fatigue. In older and aging men or even midlife men, adrenals are all we’ve got to maintain hormone balance. We aren’t making adequate amounts of the hormone, men nor women. We’re dependent on our adrenals.

If we’re beating them with the whip all the time because we’re overtraining, overperforming, not sleeping enough, and not getting a good nutrient-dense diet, not getting all those minerals and nutrients we need, the adrenals start to get whipped. They can’t keep up the action which is to provide us with energy to get up and go, to regulate our sleep-wake cycle, to harness our immunities against illness.

Men in particular who push and push can get injured easily. They can find that they don’t have the capacity for exercise. If they push themselves, they have sore muscles, they have sore bodies for a while, it takes longer to recover, bone injuries, and all of that. Muscle soreness that lasts can become a chronic problem.

[bctt tweet=”If you exercise at a high intensity an hour before bed, you are not going to sleep well.”]

For young men, if you become aware of your hormone levels, the male hormones that are important, the testosterone, the DHEA. Also, what’s your estrogen doing? Is it high? Is it balanced? What are your stress hormones? Are they too high at night when they should be low and low in the morning when they should be high? What’s going on with your DHEA?

Even progesterone is an important hormone because it blocks the conversion of testosterone into a much more toxic form of testosterone called DHT. It can be toxic. At a certain point, it can start enlarging the prostate. Progesterone can be helpful for that and calming and sleep-promoting. Women who are using natural progesterone topically can rub a little bit on their male partner over there on the other side. That can be helpful.

I was listening to a webinar by Dr. Pam Smith who’s an anti-aging physician who does a lot of male hormone balance. She was talking about how in younger men, testosterone therapy isn’t always indicated because you want to maintain fertility. If the testosterone gets too high, that can be a problem. Younger men are often on something I didn’t recognize and other nutrients to boost testosterone production. It’s some of those things I talked about to make sure they’re not reducing their testosterone levels by bringing in synthetic estrogens, etc., and being too stressed. She also said that testosterone replacement therapy can be amazing and that she’s seen men transformed.

The key with testosterone replacement is yes if we have a test result and we have symptoms that go along with it that show clearly that this person is low in testosterone. Usually, they’re going to have an imbalance of testosterone. Their estrogen is going to be high, their DHEA is probably going to be low, and their stress hormones are probably going to be out of whack where they’re not following the normal diurnal curve. They’re too high at night or they’re too low in the morning. All those things have to be checked out. If that’s all happening, what some functional medicine physicians are doing is using a combination of bioidentical testosterone.

Let’s say you’re using a transdermal. It’s a cream or a gel that can be rubbed into the skin. Five milligrams is the common dose. A compounding pharmacist who is working with a functional medicine doctor that knows what they’re doing can put in a little chrysin, which is a plant-based derivative. It comes from honey. It’s an aromatase inhibitor. It can be useful for making sure to maintain the proper ratio between testosterone and estrogen. Some also include in the mix, in that dispenser along with the testosterone, a little progesterone to stop the conversion of testosterone to that much more potent and possibly toxic version of DHT.

There were a couple of studies that showed that in terms of delivery systems with testosterone, transdermal seems to take the prize, 81% effectiveness with relief of symptoms, even erectile dysfunction. That’s one of the big definers of being andropause. 81% effectiveness with a transdermal either a patch, which delivers a steady-state of testosterone and possibly in concert with these other things I mentioned.

Whereas an oral approach to delivering testosterone is only 51% effective. Orally, you’ve got to use a lot more testosterone to get an effective dose because it’s got to go through that first-pass effect, the gut and the liver. There’s intramuscular, the pellets, which a lot of men get, and the injections but that only showed up as 53% effectiveness. This was a study in the Journal of Urology. Dr. Pamela Smith was saying she loves transdermal patches of progesterone. She’s talking about 2.5 to 5 milligrams and you can increase.

You switch the patch every seven days. I used a patch with estrogens. It’s easy-peasy. As long as you don’t get any rash or dermatitis that can be a really good way to go. There are transdermal gels that can have mixtures of up to five grams of testosterone. That is the maximum dose that most functional medicine doctors’ consensus is. I was the Director of Education for ZRT Lab. We do our testing through them. I’ve worked with all these functional medicine doctors. This is the consensus. You apply the gel in the morning. Men that use testosterone have to be careful to wash their hands.

Or your partner is going to have a beard in about six weeks.

Partner and kids. We’ve seen kids with high levels because dad wasn’t washing his hands or using his own towels. You’re supposed to apply it to hairless areas. The men have to find it somewhere on their foot or their inner leg or whatever. Those two ways do provide a steady state. They can be amazing. The point here is that these hormones have roles to play. Men that are low in testosterone are at risk for heart disease.

There’s a direct correlation between cardiovascular disease and low testosterone. There’s a direct correlation between low testosterone and insulin resistance where insulin is not being able to effectively transport glucose into the muscle cells that need it. More insulin is needed to do less and that’s when we get into this insulin-resistant picture where you’ve got lots of abdominal fat around the belly, which is, by the way, the most hazardous type of fat. Also, inflammation and all those things that are at risk for diabetes.

Think about it, the heart is a muscle. The heart is the most hard-working muscle in the body. It has more receptors or docking sites for testosterone than any muscle in the body. Men need testosterone, they do. We don’t want to be down on that. What they need to understand is if they’re going for the testosterone and they’re not conscious of the symphony of other hormones involved, they may not be getting the results they want.

For instance, if you get pellets at the highest dose, if you go into your doc and you say, “Give me the optimal dose. Hit me. I want it as high as possible. I want to run the Ultra.” An initial dose of testosterone that is too high in a short period of time is going to convert those fat cells to estrogen. At first, the man is going to feel fantastic. He’s on cloud nine. He’s got all the strength and power in the world.

I remember my dad did this when he was in his ‘70s. He called me up and said, “My legs are like rocks.” He was proud of himself telling me how he could think sharply. A couple of weeks later, he was down in the dumps because the levels had probably converted into estrogen. He was feeling emotional, tearful, and depressed. This is a big thing to look out for.

We’re not saying testosterone can’t be wonderful and life-giving, especially for older men. You need to start low and go slow. when you go to the doctor, you say, “I need all of these levels tested. I need to make sure my estrogen is in balance or not. I need to know where I stand before anything is prescribed or given.” Beginning there has to start low and then you can increase as you go if needed. Also, checking every six months is also a good thing if men are using testosterone.

I’m not at all down on it. With human growth hormone, the sources of that have been dubious in the past. Where is it coming from? A lot of it is coming from Asia. We don’t know what source materials are, necessarily. If testosterone is low and estrogen is high and cortisol and stress hormones are off the charts, HGH is going to be low. You’ve got to start somewhere.

[bctt tweet=”When estrogen is high, that kicks testosterone in the butt.”]

Do we start with thyroid hormone and repair that before we look at our sex hormones and all our underlying hormone levels that can easily cause a thyroid problem? No. We start with adrenal hormones. We start with our master female hormones or our master male hormones. We get those in order. We support our adrenals and that gets into B vitamins. Multivitamins are important. Also, adaptogens, adaptogenic herbs like ginseng, Rhodiola, ashwagandha. Men can benefit from those hugely.

Another thing I didn’t mention is testosterone being a bone builder. Men do suffer from osteoporosis. There’s a significant number of men with osteoporosis. There is a role for replacement but it’s not just in it of itself. It has to be accompanied by all these other great things that we’ve been talking about here that we can do.

I mentioned some of the sources of zinc. Flaxseed is great for inhibiting the conversion of testosterone into estrogen, green tea extract, EGCG, grapeseed extract, and resveratrol. That’s good news for people who like their wine. It’s probably better to supplement with resveratrol or quercetin, which are derived from red wine. A little bit of red wine doesn’t hurt you.

Eugene Shippen who wrote The Testosterone Syndrome says he does ask his guys that are drinking a lot of beer every night or wine to cut back by at least half. Alcohol is another issue. Alcohol raises SHBG levels. Sex Hormone Binding Globulin, you do not want SHBG if you’re a male who wants to perform and feel good for your age, no matter what age you are. You don’t want it binding up your available testosterone. If drinking alcohol is going to increase SHBG, the first thing to do is get down to no more than two drinks daily and that’s pretty generous. That’s fine. With two glasses of wine, everyday should be doable. Men who have extreme imbalance probably need to stop for a while.

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People never give their bodies enough credit. If people have things balanced out, they can do that in that moderate way for sure. Even for certain herbs, there’s something called Tongkat Ali. They say that it can also naturally boost your testosterone. There are a couple of interesting things out there. People have to realize that they can’t wing it. You’re not just taking some extra vitamin C. It’s important to know, first, where you are and then have somebody who can explain it. I always hear free testosterone and total. I never know what that means.

Let me add one, it’s called Muira Pauma. Have you heard of that one?

No.

Muira Pauma is from a shrub in Brazil and it’s meant to be an aphrodisiac. It helps with impotence. It’s evidently one of those things that help to maintain testosterone levels. Also, L-Carnitine, which is an amino acid. It’s maybe even more active than testosterone in aging men with sexual dysfunction. You have to be tested every six months or so to make sure that you’re not getting too much L-Carnitine. I wanted to mention why I’m thinking of these herbs. Cruciferous vegetables are important for metabolizing hormones in general down the proper pathways.

We want to use hormones and then lose them. We don’t want them accumulating and recirculating. For men and women who are estrogen dominant, they can be powerful in metabolizing excess estrogens down the proper detoxification pathway so that we don’t become and stay estrogen dominant. Cruciferous supposedly can also suppress the risk for prostate cancer by reducing those Xenoestrogens that come in through the environment, foods, plastics, chemicals, heavy metals, and all of that. Also, Saw Palmetto was another important one. I wanted to make sure we mentioned those.

As Eugene Shippen said in something I was reading, he mentioned that total testosterone isn’t the crucial measure. Total testosterone is that in a blood test if they measure total testosterone, they’re measuring all that hormone that is bound to the red blood cells that it travels on in your bloodstream. it’s bound by that binding protein. That sex hormone-binding globulin is not active. It’s not at the cellular level docking at the receptor site of the cell and doing its thing, flipping master switches.

It’s that 2% to 4% of hormone that escapes the bloodstream because it’s been called. It’s a feedback loop. You’re working out. You’re pumping iron. You need more testosterone. It becomes liberated from its binding protein and moves into tissue. In that sense, it becomes free. It’s free of its binding protein. It’s active. Another word for that is bio-available. That available testosterone is what we call free testosterone and that’s crucial. That’s what we want to measure because that’s what’s active and at work. It‘s that free circulating testosterone that can get snapped up in an aromatization, in conversion in fat cells.

One of the biggest things that men can do if they’re overweight is you’ve got to tighten their belt and start on some diet. I wanted to say that my daughter would kill me for having used the word diet. She bans that word from her vernacular. She’s a health coach creating a full plate of all the good food groups that we need. It’s not just overeating. Sometimes we overeat because we’re hardwired to overeat. Our hormones are out of balance and our stress hormones are high and the survival instinct says, “Eat more. We need to fuel you.”

That gets into the intermittent fasting thing. The question becomes, “If I’m fasting, am I robbing my body of the energy and nutrients that it needs to function and perform?” The answer is that intermittent fasting is great for improving insulin sensitivity. It has been shown to do that. It can be useful for getting rid of some of that belly fat and inflammation. That’s what they’re seeing.

With people that have tired adrenals who have been pushing it and killing it for years and their adrenals are flatline on a test result and they have no energy and they’re building fat around the waist like crazy, those people need to go slow. Intermittent fasting can mostly be done in the hours of sleep. If you stop your last meal at 8:00 PM and you go for twelve hours, most of that intermittent fasting is done while you’re sleeping. That’s not too bad.

If you can go another couple of hours, have your first meal at 9:00 or 10:00, you’re accomplishing some of that benefit without creating an adrenal crisis, a stressor that says, “This person is not eating. He has no energy. He’s not going to be able to perform, think straight, or work out because he’s got no nutrients.” We don’t want to restrict. There are some people that are restricting and intermittent fasting 16, 18 hours a day. I’m not all for that, especially if on a test the adrenals show some sign of fatigue or exhaustion.

It’s interesting where the fasting can either be you grabbing the reins a little bit. We’ve all gone through that. You have weeks where you’re like, “I’ve been a little loosey-goosey with my food or my schedule of eating.” Maybe put that conscious but soft window around it. It’s mostly through your sleep. There’s another level that on occasion if people are pretty healthy, they’re getting these macro and micronutrients and they’re getting their minerals. If they say, “One or two days a week, I’m going to go for it successfully.”

What you’re saying is smart. If you’re working hard and you haven’t had the chance to exercise and you’re a little bit behind it, jumping into long intermittent fasting may not be serving you. With training too, a lot of times people overtrain and it catches up to you through time. What we have also done in our house is a lot of sauna and icing. Dr. Rhonda Patrick does the best information on some of the benefits of sauna. If you want more information, she has a ton of information about heat shock proteins, the lowering of all-cause mortality. For men, in particular, if they go three days a week into a sauna, there’s a 65% less chance for Alzheimer’s. On a lifestyle part, I want to throw that out there.

There’s less information on the ice. You’re happy to be alive when you come out of the ice. It’s cold and uncomfortable. We do it at 32 degrees for about three minutes. There is some science that would suggest it does stabilize his hormones. Some of the thought is it’s almost like you’re going into survival mode. The body is like, “I have to get everything dialed.” Maybe if they don’t have access to ice, it’s cold showers for 30 seconds. If you can go a couple of minutes in a cold shower in the morning, we know that is not the worst thing for your testosterone in the mornings.

DHEA and testosterone are made in the morning by the body. I don’t know that much about the ice thing but I do know that cold showers or the cold plunge can be helpful. My husband does a sauna every day. In your household, how do you do the sauna? Do you do saunas every day and the ice every day?

Sometimes I don’t feel like getting sweaty in my hair. I try to get in there three days a week.

It’s much like a hot flash.

Our sauna is at 220 degrees. It’s a dry sauna. We don’t do infrared. We don’t do steam. Either one would be okay. To be consistent-basis, I enjoy that. That’s when we couple it with the ice because it makes the ice more bearable. If you had your opportunity to do one, the heat is still the king. There are many studies on it, all the health benefits.

If we have a young man reading, I would encourage you because it’s important to look under the hood. If you’re not feeling your best, maybe go get your bloodwork done. Also, it’s important that we put in place these lifestyle habits. We think we can hack everything or we can do a workaround. If we can start young trying to eat better and getting to bed and doing these obvious things, it’s better all the way through. We don’t want to have to play catch-up when we’re 50 or 55 and start saying things like, “I can’t do that because now I’m 50,” or, “I’m 60.”

“Now I’ve got diabetes.” It’s this inevitability, this fatalism that says, “I’m getting old.” Men are a bit notorious for that, not recognizing symptoms. This conversation, whoever’s reading, whatever your age, if you’re 22 or 72 and you’re still getting on it, be aware that hormones are not a female issue. They’re an important issue for all of us. These guys rule. They’re all about function.

Yes, organic is expensive but go for grass-fed beef. Find a farmer in your area. Always look for labels that say, “These animals were raised without artificial hormones.” Don’t microwave in plastic. Avoid all the chemicals, the obvious things that you can avoid, and the things that disrupt your sleep. How many people think that sleep is for sissies or they don’t have time to sleep? I’ve had way too many people say to me, “I’ll sleep when I die.” That’s depressing. You will have hormone imbalance right away at a young age if you’re not sleeping much.

I know a lot of people have anxiety. That also has to do with issues that are a lifestyle. How are we spending our days? Are we ever making time to do the things we love to do? Many people are crazy busy they’re not even remembering that after surfing, maybe the greatest thing is to lay on the sand and read a book you love. Whatever it is that is balanced, balanced exercise, high performance, and then the things that calm you down and help you chill with nature, getting out for long walks. Make a list of the things you love to do and do them. Make time for them. Go back and notice, “When’s the last time I did any of these things that I love to do?”

If you’re not a bodybuilder, is there ever a time for steroids? I don’t mean an inhalant to help you with your allergies.

If you’re talking about testosterone replacement therapy, it does have its advantages in individualized proper dosing. That’s the main important thing. We need to measure for the test first. Get your blood work or saliva testing done. I can offer $50 off any kit. We have a male hormone test kit that we can test all those levels for your readers. You can use the code GABBY. We’d love to test your levels. We tested some editors at Men’s Health some years ago at ZRT. They were shocked to find how out of whack their hormone levels were.

Getting the big picture and knowing it’s not all dependent on one level or the other. These hormones work in a symphony. They all have to be balanced. If there’s a place for anabolic steroids that build and maintain muscle and bone because you need that, at the same time, you’ve got to be making sure that you’re not stressing yourself to the max because high-stress hormones are catabolic.

You’re taking an anabolic steroid and at the same time, you’re still not getting enough sleep, you’re still pushing yourself to excesses that maybe aren’t fitting at this age or that are maybe burnout for you. At a certain point, wake up. You can’t have catabolism and anabolism going on at the same time. They always are but you don’t want to have the catabolic overtaking all the efforts you’re making to build yourself up when on the other side, lifestyle-wise, you’re breaking yourself down.

Let’s emphasize that these are things to boost you but these are things that are not going to fix if you’re not doing the stuff that you’re in charge of. Candace Burch, I appreciate you. People can find you at YourHormoneBalance.com. If they want to take a test, they can put the code in. They can get savings on the code.

Pay attention to the objects of our daily neglect. Take notice of those things that you’re feeling discontent about and know that there are many natural approaches to this. It doesn’t have to take the big guns, the draconian meds, and all of that to get feeling better. You can do it yourself with a little help.

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Thanks so much for reading. If you’d like, rate, subscribe and leave us a review. All of my music was graciously done by Frank Zummo and Tom Thacker. If you want to see some of the behind-the-scenes action, follow me, @GabbyReece. Remember, don’t miss new episodes every Monday.

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Resources mentioned:

• Candace Burch
• Alisa Vitti
• The Testosterone Syndrome
• Dr. Pam Smith
• BanyanBotanicals.com
• Dr. Rhonda Patrick
• @GabbyReece

About Candace Burch

Candace Burch is a Hormone Health Educator with a Masters’s in Health Education and over 25 years of experience in the field. In 2017, she founded Your Hormone Balance as a one-on-one consulting practice and is now joined by her two daughters, Ryan and Jess, who have expanded YHB’s reach to women around the world.

Candace’s background includes working as a health editor, writer, and investigative journalist in London, leading educational patient and provider initiatives for ZRT Hormone Laboratory (as their Director of Education for 12+ years), as well as spearheading “Body in Balance,” a hormone testing and rebalancing weight loss program at Metabolic Research Center (a nationwide weight loss company).