Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha (14 page)

Why Men Should Care About Hormones

T
he signs of losing fat and gaining muscle manifest themselves on the outside, but how well or how quickly you do either of those is very much determined on the inside.

By understanding how your hormones affect you and learning how to address them through application of our methods, you will create change from the inside out.

 

 

Alphas consider the problem from all angles to find solutions.

 

 

We've already mentioned several hormones through this book, but now we're going to show you specifically why fixing your hormones will help you attain the life you want. But before we can do that, it's important that you understand the most important hormones in your body, what they do, and how they're already holding back your mental, physical, social, and emotional health.

 

 
TESTOSTERONE

We're not going to beat around the bush with this one: testosterone is what makes you a man. It's what allows you to build muscle and melt fat. It's what makes you attractive to women, what powers your sex drive, and what helps you recover from workouts. It's part of your genetics, and it's a driving force in your health, your wealth, your energy, and your life span. If it weren't for the existence of testosterone, we wouldn't be writing this book.

But we are writing this book because there's a serious problem. In the past twenty years, the average level of testosterone has dropped anywhere from 20 to 30 percent. And for that very reason, men have become fatter, less sexual, and less satisfied—with how they look, how they feel, and how they fuck. That's not an opinion; it's scientific fact.

And therein lies the problem with most approaches to health—they don't focus on testosterone. You can do all the reps and sets in the world, but if you're not producing enough testosterone, you won't add muscle to your body. It's the reason why women's bodies don't naturally bulk up. They don't produce testosterone like men do, and therefore their bodies look different. And as you'll see, your abilities to maintain and build muscle are essential to helping your body function better and creating the type of life you want.

Do not misunderstand us. Testosterone is not about becoming big and bulky like a bodybuilder. (Although it will help if that's your goal.) This is more about taking control of the characteristics that enable you to become the Alpha. Did you know that low testosterone levels can kill your sperm? Or that decreases in testosterone have been linked to decreases in brain activity and memory function? And men with higher testosterone have lower incidence of heart disease, spend less money on health care, and live significantly longer—we're talking potentially more than a decade longer.

Your testosterone levels peak in your twenties, but then they instantly begin dropping once you hit your thirties. The good news is you don't need to spend money to boost your T levels. Most doctors are overly quick to prescribe hormone replacement therapy and fill your body with exogenous hormones. But it's been shown that small changes—such as sleeping more—can be all it takes to increase testosterone as much as 50 percent. And that's just one simple change.

The primary goal will be eliminating your beer belly. The more fat you carry, the more aromatase you produce, which is an enzyme that converts your testosterone (the good stuff) into the female hormone estrogen. This is what will make you look softer, have softer erections, and even make you softer emotionally. And we know you don't want that. By cutting down on your fat, you'll have the greatest impact on ensuring that you continue to produce more testosterone and stay young as long as possible. After all, Australian researchers found that testosterone levels don't have to drop as you get older. In fact, they can stay high up into your sixties if you exercise the right way, eat the right foods, avoid smoking, and limit how much fat is on your body.

You'll find plenty of tips to increase testosterone in this book, but here's your cheat sheet to higher T.

• 
Lift heavy weights.

• 
Do intervals.

• 
Practice sprints and work your lower body.

• 
Supplement with Vitamin D (at least 300 IU/day).

• 
Don't smoke.

• 
Supplement with zinc.

• 
Sleep more than six hours per night.

• 
Eat more protein.

• 
Do squats and deadlifts.

• 
Use shorter rest periods in the gym.

• 
Take fish oil.

• 
Don't overtrain (just follow our program).

• 
Include fat from animals and dairy in your diet.

• 
Eat eggs.

 

GROWTH HORMONE

If testosterone is the Batman of masculinity, then you could say GH is your Robin. This powerful yet understated hormone is oftentimes considered the fountain of youth, as doctors and antiaging clinics prescribe it readily to help combat old age. GH and testosterone work best together, meaning that each is very potent individually, but when present together, the impact is decidedly more prominent and beneficial.

GH has been shown to have the greatest physical impact on burning fat and increasing longevity. But what's even more useful is what GH does to help your body function more efficiently and effectively.

When you have more GH circulating in your system, you're able to make better use of protein and build more muscle. You're also able to improve the quality of your sleep and speed healing and recovery. Like the name would imply, GH improves the growth of your cells—it helps grow muscle mass, strengthen your bones, reduce the pressure on your liver, and maybe most understated, protect your immune system. Increasing your GH is one of the best ways to fight off disease and stay healthy.

You'll learn many ways to improve your GH, the most impactful mechanism being the new style of eating called intermittent fasting that we'll teach you in part 3. In the meantime, here are some easy ways to boost your GH:

• 
Sleep more.

• 
Fast during the morning.

• 
Improve sleep quality.

• 
Lift heavier weights.

• 
Supplement with BCAAs.

• 
Eat big before bed.

• 
Perform sprints (10–30 seconds are best).

• 
Do high-intensity metabolic resistance training (30–40 minutes max).

• 
Don't eat fat before a workout.

• 
Don't eat too many calories before exercise.

 

LEPTIN

We've all seen a friend drop twenty pounds with ease and then have trouble losing the next five, right? Perhaps it's even happened to you. It's frustrating to experience, and like most weight-loss phenomena, its roots are linked to your hormones; specifically, a hormone called leptin.

Named for the Greek word
leptos,
meaning “thin,” leptin is produced in your fat cells—which means that the more fat you have, the higher your baseline levels of leptin will be. Here's why this is important: one of the master hormones, leptin influences the production and secretion of other hormones that regulate metabolism, such as thyroid hormones T3 and T4. When leptin levels are high, your production of T3 and T4 will also be relatively high, allowing you to burn fat faster; when leptin levels drop, these other hormones go too.

The fact that leptin is produced in fat cells is an important reason why it's easier to drop weight when you have more excess weight to lose. However, leptin levels also share a direct relationship with caloric intake—when you eat fewer calories, your leptin levels drop considerably. This, in turn, lowers your other fat-burning hormones, bringing your fat loss to a crawl.

For this reason, leptin is often called the anti-starvation hormone—your body is slowing your metabolism to keep you alive when food is scarce. This means that leptin decreases your hunger. That's great for survival, but it creates a pretty clear fat-loss catch-22: you need to eat less to burn fat, but eating less compromises your body's ability to produce leptin. And the less leptin you produce, the hungrier you become and the more likely you are to eat more than you need.

All of this means that if you want to keep making progress, you need to keep leptin levels elevated while you're in a caloric deficit—and we'll show you how to do exactly that in chapter 7. For now, keep these leptin-boosting tactics in mind:

• 
Fast at least sixteen hours a day.

• 
Include strategic cheat meals (maximum of one day per week).

• 
Perform resistance training.

• 
Perform long-distance cardiovascular training.

• 
Avoid anabolic steroids (yes, they are illegal; and yes, they decrease leptin).

• 
Eat a high-protein diet.

• 
Don't eat too much fructose.

• 
Don't drop your calories too low on a diet (at most, drop 500–600 calories per week).

 

GHRELIN

Of all the hormones, ghrelin is the most fun to say because it sounds like gremlin. And, like gremlins, it's an annoying little bugger. Known as the hunger hormone, ghrelin is produced in your hypothalamus (located in your brain), kidneys, and pituitary gland, but most of it is synthesized in and released by the stomach, and it is released in a pulsatile manner throughout the night, peaking when you wake. No matter where it's produced, it always has the same effect: snack attack.

You see, ghrelin both induces hunger and is also secreted by it. Your stomach produces ghrelin when it's feeling empty. Whenever you start producing ghrelin, you'll feel hungry—and anytime you get hungry, ghrelin is secreted. Now, here's the important thing: your ghrelin secretion schedule largely follows your eating schedule, because ghrelin is what we might call a trainable hormone—the more often you eat, the more often you'll produce ghrelin.

This is one of the many reasons why the multiple-meal hypothesis—the one that states you need to eat five to six mini-meals per day—is flawed. This style of eating—from a hormonal standpoint and in light of the way our bodies are built—is designed to make you hungrier. This might be great if your goal is to gain weight. In that case, you
want
to be hungrier. But if losing weight and becoming leaner are your goals, training your body to eat less frequently, while still feeling full, is a more sustainable and enjoyable approach to eating without feeling frustrated or constantly hungry.

A better meal schedule will help you balance your ghrelin levels, and so will sleep. Research published in the
American Journal of Human Biology
found a direct link between a lack of sleep, overeating, and obesity. Many people think the reason less sleep leads to more eating is because when you sleep less, you're awake longer; the more hours you're up, the more time you have to eat. The real reason is that a lack of sleep impacts hormone levels and brain functioning in a way that pushes you toward more foods—and in particular the crap you should avoid.

It's a three-pronged attack designed to make you fat. When you don't sleep enough:

 

1. Cortisol levels rise, which activates reward centers in your brain that make you crave food.

2. You produce more ghrelin and it's harder to decrease the levels, meaning you feel hungry
all the freaking time.

3. The lack of sleep and higher levels of ghrelin appear to make you more likely to grab for dessert foods and fattening, sugary snacks.

 

While cheat foods will have their place in our program, the goal is for you to eat them when
you
want—not because your brain creates a desire that you can't resist. But that's exactly what happens when you don't get enough sleep. When researchers from Columbia University used MRI testing on sleep-deprived participants, they found that the areas of the brain that desire junk food were more activated with less than six hours of sleep. So unless you want to be a mind-control experiment that is at the beck and call of every fast food commercial on television, your best protection is ensuring more rest.

Here's how to prevent high ghrelin: