My hope is that I can finally be done with the weight loss by the end of the summer or early fall. It would be nice to see the end of the ridiculous calorie restrictions and get on with some fitness goals that I might find enjoyable, such as building muscle and making lifting gains. In any case, it is still wonderful to feel like I’ve got the part of my life back that I seemed to have lost. Not dragging around tired all the time is worth every penny it costs for the therapy.

Monday I weighed in at 286 lbs, which means I haven’t gained any weight in the three months since I started the therapy. Unfortunately that’s still about 40 lbs up from where I was a year ago, but almost all of that was gained in the three month period at the end of last year when I was exhausted all the time and craving sweets 24/7…right before I discovered my gingerboy status. I’m setting an albeit ambitious goal of losing 15 lbs/month for the next three months, to get me past my previous low and back on track. How it will all turn out remains to be seen. Monday I ate 1040 calories and yesterday I was 282.6, down 3.4 lbs in one day. It would be a nice fantasy to say that’s all fat, but of course most of it wasn’t. Today I was 282.0, down 0.6 from yesterday. That’s more realistic and could certainly be all, or nearly all, fat loss.

So far I have had no stress or decreased energy, in spite of low calories and hard workouts. Granted, today is just the third day, but before I started the therapy I would almost instantly feel stressed and tired the day I cut calories or increased cardio. Seeing this level of success for only these few days is still encouraging considering what I’ve gone through the last several months. Again, how things will go from here still remains to be seen.

After about a month they did some blood-work again to see where my levels were. They discovered that I was still firmly a gingerboy at: 223, and considering that the goal is for me to be between 400-500, the doctor increased my dosage by 20%. They will do a full work-up again the first week of April to see where I stand, and then adjust it again if necessary. The doctor (let’s call him Dr. Staubach, since he HAS to be a quarterback), said that if I was already seeing positive results with the lower dosage then he expected me to see significant improvements with the increase. That is very welcome news to me…we’ll see.

Currently I’m finding that I don’t get tired quite as fast as I did a few weeks ago, although my energy level is still way down from where it used to be a year or more ago. I’ve also stopped gaining weight. I’m not losing it yet, but for the moment I’ll take what I can get. What Dr. Staubach keeps telling me is that it is a slow process, and that 90 days is really the amount of time it can take to determine if it is helping significantly. Considering that I’m already seeing steady progress, the future looks encouraging.

LowT Center update: Sadly, KISS is gone. Perhaps they have been exiled to a far corner of the office…maybe to the restroom. They were knocked out by a framed boxing robe. Further, I noticed that by the scale there is now a signed picture of Lou Ferrigno as the Incredible Hulk. Now there’s a picture that I find completely appropriate! Ferrigno has probably taken more testosterone in his life than all of the LowT Center’s patients combined, so who better to have framed and prominently displayed? Maybe next week I’ll find a Chuck Norris photo there…but of course I hear that Chuck Norris doesn’t take testosterone, his body produces so much of it naturally that he donates the extra to a poor body-builders fund.

 After feeling bad for so long, it was gaining so much weight in such a short time that finally pushed me to the doctor Thursday afternoon to get things checked out. All my blood work and vitals ended up being normal, except for my testosterone level. An optimum level would be in the 400-600 range, low would be under 300…mine was 70. That’s so low that he wanted me to come back and be tested again in the morning, since testosterone levels are highest in the morning. If the morning test showed less than 150 then I’d have to go for an MRI. Thankfully I squeezed by at 162, so no MRI, but they started me on Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT). This amounts to an injection every week, a blood test again in a month, and then blood work every three months after that for, well, forever.

I did a lot of research and read a ton of articles before continuing, because I’m not comfortable with the thought of potentially having to get an injection every week for the rest of my life.  The main difficulty I have with it is that there have been no large, long-term studies done yet. All of the studies I read about (as positive as they are) have been fairly short-term, such as two years or less. Bigger studies are being done, but they’re not finished yet. The short-term benefits, however, do look very promising, and the known potential side effects are relatively minor and manageable as long as you are monitored.

The cost is significant, but if it solves the problems I’ve been having then I’ll be happy to pay it and deal with the modest risks, because I want the part of my life back that I feel like I’ve lost in the last year. The expected results from TRT vary, but the research so far indicates that about 10% of men in my position are ecstatic with the results, 10% see no improvement, and the other 80% have varying levels of improvement. I’m just hoping I’m not on that “see no improvement” side.  The doctor told me that the results aren’t quick, but some improvement is generally seen within 30 days, but most is within 90-180. In any case, I had my first injection this morning and I’ll regularly post any progress I see.

One side note. I’m getting the therapy at the Low T Center, which in retrospect should have a giant banner flying above the building reading, “Caution! Testosterone Stereotype Work Zone Ahead.” All the employees seem to be “perky” young women who lead you past the waiting room (equipped with a large HDTV that apparently only gets ESPN) through a building where every foot of dark, oak, wall space is covered with sports memorabilia. There are framed and signed things everywhere: photos, jerseys, shirts, balls in cases, helmets in cases, Wheaties boxes, NASCAR models, and so on. I had my blood drawn in a shrine to UT Football/Peyton Manning and got my injection in the NASCAR shrine next door. I’m positive that the doctor who saw me today replaces his lab coat with quarterback pads after work and hits the field for practice. Strangely, on one of the walls in a hallway there was single, forlorn frame with a couple of signed photos of the ’70s rock group KISS. I guess the doctors figured they needed to throw a bone to their 50-year-old-rocker patients. I’ve never been a sports (or KISS) fan, so I was left feeling a little cold and out-of-place by the whole thing. But who knows, maybe next time they’ll give me my injection in the heretofore unseen Classic Movies room. Oh well, what’s a gingerboy to do?

Regardless of exactly how much fat I’ve lost, I know it isn’t even remotely near what I lost the first nine months or so of my program. Something has definitely changed in the last 8-10 months. If I get really strict on a reduced-calorie diet I lose very little weight, at least relative to what I used to lose. I also find that as soon as I cut the calories I get tired much quicker during a workout and have a hard time making it to the end. After a few weeks of that I start getting stressed, start thinking about food all the time, and the tiredness progresses beyond just workouts and starts affecting me all the time. Before long I can’t continue like that and I give up on the diet, just to feel “normal” again. According to all the research I’ve done, however, this isn’t something significantly out-of-the-ordinary for someone in my position. For the better part of the last year and a half I’ve been following a pretty strict diet and have lost in the neighborhood of 100 lbs of fat. That takes its toll on the body and can have a variety of unintended consequences (i.e. lower metabolism, out-of-whack body chemistry, and the like).

So where do I go from here apart from just continuing my four days of training per week? Clearly low calories isn’t working for me any more…it is just causing me to yo-yo up and down like I used to. I keep setting goals and missing them because I can’t sustain the diet for more that a few weeks at a time, with very little weight loss even while I’m on it. What do I try now? What have I decided?

First of all, I’ve increased my cardio after each weight-training session. I work out with the trainer about 45 minutes and then do an additional 45-60 minutes of cardio. I typically burn from 900-1000 calories per workout. Secondly, I’m done with low calories. Done. Finished. It’s over. I can’t handle that any more. I’m tired of being tired and tired of the stress. For now I’m going to try modifying my diet to something close to what I’d do if I were finished with weight loss, except the calories will be slightly reduced. I’ll be eating the same sorts of food that I eat now (i.e. lean meats, good carbs, egg whites, and the like), but much more of it. I’ll still be counting calories but increase them to around 2800-3000/day. My hope is that I’ll be able to lose at least a half a pound per week, or possibly a bit more. Even if that means it takes me another year or more to lose the rest of the weight, that would be better than the last year, and without all the stress and tiredness. I’m also considering doing another body composition test at the Cooper Clinic to see exactly where I stand now—how does my lean body mass now compare to where it was over a year ago? While I’m at it, I’m thinking that it would probably be wise to get a blood workup as well, to make sure there isn’t something else going on that’s contributing to my problem.

In any case, I’m still at it, working out as hard as ever, and not giving up.

According to my heart rate monitor I’m burning about 3000-4000 calories per week during my workouts, and since increasing the cardio I’ve been seeing a drop of about two pounds per week. That’s a little less than I’d like but I can live with it. If that rate continues I should see the end of the weight loss portion of my program right around two years after I began, in February.