leave yo body alone

i need to start listening to my own advice…

…but i doubt that will ever happen.

first, just due to the title, i have to state a couple quick things –

1. this is not an anti-vaccination bit. while i don’t have any current vaccines in my system, and i’m not planning on changing that, that’s just due to my overall distrust of the big-pharma-check-cashing western medicine world, not feeling you shouldn’t inoculate your child. i got them as a kid and grew up fine, so stop trying to blame that shit for your kids being slow. ever notice how the only “proof” of that is on anti-vaxer websites? yeah, that’s not called a “conspiracy”, it’s called “targeted marketing”.

2. this is not an anti-masturbation bit.

sometimes “you doing you” LITERALLY means “you doing YOU”. i get that. nothing wrong with that. helps take the edge off for me sometimes, too.

but i have, countless times, argued against hormone therapy or surgery for pubescent (or even prepubescent) kids because puberty is a confusing time as far as who we love, who we think we are, and how we feel we may (or may not) fit into the societal microcosm that is public school. likewise, i’ve argued similarly that anti-anxiety or anti-depressants shouldn’t be prescribed to adolescents because, again, the brain is still developing. at it’s core, i feel, our bodies are lazy and if we take something that makes our body NOT have to produce a chemical in our brains it will tend to ramp down production accordingly because…well…it can. it’s not like that energy is then transferred to another project, it’s simply vacationing and may, in fact, go away.

although hopefully not?

for my demographic (males over forty) there is a metric shit ton of products marketed towards the fact that as men age their testosterone level drops a bit. i have tried a few of these to combat general fatigue to no avail. i have noticed hair growing quicker (although not more plentifully), and gains in the gym (sometimes to the detriment of my joints, so i’ve had to back it off a bit) but no change in sex drive because, as the ufc will attest, i’m not having any issues in that department anyway.

it was due to said gains that i started back on an over the counter testosterone thing i’ve done before, and even written about before, as shown by the fact this was in the archival files of uploaded graphics:

(originally uploaded on valentine’s day 2017)

i started back on it because of the forced two months off proper workouts due to CoVid gym closures. i thought it would be a slight cheat to get me back to pre-rona level and it seemed to work for the most part, although having to workout in a mask makes my warm-natured ass very uncomfortable so i’ve been working out less and more often in the lockhart gym where i can’t get as good a workout in.

i also noticed this time that while i typically only take it for two months it’s actually labeled to be more effective if taken for longer stretches of time, so i double up and went for the four month bundle. the first two months i noticed a positive difference, but that seems to be reversing. now, i don’t know if that’s because i went longer OR because of the aforementioned mask issue, but either way we are reaching the september of this plan (both literally and figuratively) so i’m starting to step down the dose so i don’t “crash” if i just stop taking it after this long.

and doing so seems to be fucking with my energy level. again, it could also be due to the exhaustive late texas summer heat coupled with constantly feeling warm due to mask wearing, but i’m gonna air on the side of caution and continue the gradual step down in dosages until my body is back to producing all it’s own testosterone. and then i just need to stop this. i have friends that do the real medical-grade shit and speak volumes of how wonderful it is, but also seem to always develop crippling injuries that i somehow have avoided so far, so maybe i should just leave shit be…

…except, of course, for boosting my immune system with echinacea. there’s a pandemic afoot. that shit will remain part of the morning ritual probably forever!