Derek (More Plates More Dates)

Like imagine finding out like for 10 years you've been on like hormone therapy and you could have kept your testicles where they were the whole time.

And now you just have like these shriveled, you know, like raisins that you have to like re-stimulate the baseline through like insane aggressive dosages of HCG and FSH.

Like not cool.

Um, it's pretty quick because like the suppression of the gonadotropins happens like within days.

Like once you start to inject that hormone, like you've introduced an amount that is going to tell your brain, we have enough, don't make any more.

And once the gonadotropins bottom out, you have no signal, like you will atrophy over, you know, the next months and get to some level of atrophy that is variable depending on the person.

But

Regardless, you're not stimulating activity.

So even if like the structural size isn't like as significant of a drop, like there's a lack of activity entirely.

So like, you know, it's all kind of individual dependent, but like you should expect shrinkage within weeks to months.

I would treat it very seriously.

Like it's you know that you want to be on it.

It's not something to experiment with, in my opinion, if it's like the route of hormone therapy.

Yeah.

Treat it as such.

Treat it like you are on it forever, probably.

Yeah, I think hematology, you know, this kind of like covers the basics of,

you know, red blood cell count, hematocrit, hemoglobin, et cetera, metabolic parameters.

There's a lot of stuff you want to incrementally assess, like how well it's working too, like how much more metabolically like fit are you becoming in your blood work and insulin sensitive and whatnot, because these are metrics of progress you can use to actually determine how well this is going for you.

So it's not just about like, where did your total T and free T end up on paper?