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Testosterone levels are on a rapid decline worldwide. Countless men experience chronic fatigue, obesity, lack of focus, and other worrying symptoms of hormonal imbalance.

Thankfully, if you know what lowers your testosterone in the first place, you can start to improve your situation. There are several products and lifestyle factors that not only disrupt your hormones, but worsen your overall health.

By eliminating alcohol, sugar, and other toxins from your life, you’ll increase your energy levels, motivation, muscle mass, and relearn to enjoy life.

In this article, we’ll cover 7 things that kill testosterone, how they do it, and how you can cut them out of your life for good.

Things That Kill Testosterone

Testosterone levels can be influenced by many factors, including your genetics, country of residence, lifestyle, and diet. Since you can only fully control your lifestyle and dieting, we’ll focus on these 2 areas.

The biggest danger to your testosterone is living a sedentary lifestyle.

1: Sedentary Lifestyle

Most intellectual workers suffer from a severe lack of activity. They work in the offices for 8-10 hours a day, rarely leaving their desks. When they come back home, they usually lay on their couches to scroll on TikTok or watch Netflix.

While it is fine to indulge in content consumption from time to time, doing it as a habit harms your health. The less active you are, the more you gain excess weight. Therefore, your risk of getting a heart disease increases too.

What doesn’t increase, however, is your testosterone level. Due to the accumulation of fat, your body gets more building materials for estrogen, which directly decreases your testosterone.

The more estrogen you have, the less your testes produce testosterone, and the more fat your body stores in itself. It’s a self-amplifying cycle that can only be stopped by being more active.

Get a membership for a local gym, lift weights 3 times a week, and do high intensity interval training (HIIT) on the weekend. Additionally, you should walk outside for at least 20 minutes a day to get sunlight and vitamin D.

The next thing that harms your T is chronic stress.

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2: Chronic Stress

Short-term stress is a great thing. It can boost your focus, productivity, help you push past the limits, and win. It can also help you survive dangerous situations if the need for it arises.

However, if your body is constantly in the fight-or-flight mode, it won’t be able to rest properly. Under chronic stress, you’ll have poor sleep, paranoia, irritability, and a bigger likelihood of getting sick.

Cortisol is the hormone of stress, responsible for generating this feeling and regulating the work of the sympathetic nervous system. Just like estrogen, it is inversely proportional to testosterone. Therefore, it is one of the things that kills your testosterone.

If you constantly live in fear of possible future events and regret of past actions, your hormonal levels will become disbalanced. How do you deal with this?

Stress isn’t easy to fight, especially if you’re used to it. To deal with it in the moment, breathe in deeply, tell yourself that you’ll make it, and distract yourself with a task or activity.

To decrease stress in the long-term, I suggest you start meditating and learning about stoicism. Meditate for 10 minutes right after waking up, and read about ways to be more stoic to boldly face the hardships of life.

This way you’ll drastically reduce your stress and allow testosterone levels to stabilize.

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3: Poor Sleep

In the previous section, I mentioned how chronic stress reduces your quality of rest and sleep. I didn’t mention, however, that lack of sleep itself drastically hurts your testosterone levels.

Testosterone is mostly produced during sleep, when the body repairs itself and prepares it for the next day. Therefore, constant lack of sleep prevents it from being made in the first place.

It isn’t only the lack of sleep that hurts you, though. Sleeping irregularly and inconsistently also disrupts testosterone production. So going out to parties and scrolling on your phone until 3 AM harm your hormones too.

The obvious solution is to normalize your sleep schedule and improve its quality. There are several things you can do to achieve this:

• Stop using gadgets 1 hour before bed
• Ventilate your room 30 minutes before sleep
• Avoid eating heavy meals after 8 PM
• Go to sleep and get up at the same time (e.g. 10 PM – 6 AM)
• Change your alarm sound to something quieter (birds or rain)
• Avoid looking at bright lights in the evening
• Read for 30 minutes after work

These things are simple and easy to implement. Try doing them for about 2 weeks, and you’ll notice a great improvement in your quality of rest. These changes allow your body to go into rest mode quicker and produce more melatonin necessary for sleep.

One of the worst things that kill testosterone is alcohol.

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4: Alcohol

Alcohol is one of the worst substances you can take. It is poison that affects the whole body, most notably the liver and brain.

If you drink too much, it will literally destroy the cells in your liver, eventually causing cirrhosis. Moreover, alcohol impairs some areas of the brain, including the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex, responsible for movement and decision-making respectively.

It does a lot of other things too, including creation of cancer cells. When it comes to testosterone, though, alcohol causes inflammation in testes by producing harmful free radicals.

In simple words, alcohol erases your ball cells, which means that less cells will be able to make testosterone in the future.

The solution is simple. You should either drastically decrease your alcohol usage, or quit it entirely. Abstain from alcohol, quit clubbing (there’s nothing good in there anyway), and only drink it at celebrations and important events.

If you want to quit alcohol entirely, there are some strategies you can use:

• Throw all alcohol into the trash
• Avoid going to bars and clubs
• Drink water when you want alcohol
• Occupy yourself with various hobbies
• Avoid the alcohol section in supermarkets

These actions will help you minimize the urges and decrease your alcohol usage. Aside from alcohol, sugar is another thing that kills your testosterone.

5: Sugar

Before we proceed, it’s important to differentiate between table sugar (sucrose), and natural and essential carbohydrates (fructose and glucose). The latter are necessary for bodily function and energy production, and are commonly found in fruit, vegetables, and grains.

Table sugar, however, is terrible for your health in the long run. Added sugar intake has several side effects, including higher blood pressure, inflammation, fat gain, diabetes, and fatty liver disease, all of which are linked to heart disease and stroke.

When it comes to hormonal effects, high sugar levels suppress testosterone production, because materials needed for it are spent on creating insulin, which is necessary for controlling blood sugar levels.

Moreover, decreased testosterone levels automatically stimulate estrogen production, which eventually leads to gynecomastia (man boobs), weight gain, and even infertility.

So, what can you do to cut down on sugar? If you’ve consumed it for a while, it’s hard to resist the sweet urge to grab some candy bars or soda cans.

A good way to quit sugar is gradually replacing high-sugar products (candy, cakes, cookies, pastries, donuts, sweetened drinks) with foods containing natural sugars (fruit, dark chocolate, berries, grapes, fruit juices).

This way you’ll keep enjoying the sweet taste on your tongue while quitting poison at the same time. Decide that you’ll stop harming yourself, pick healthier foods, and remember to spend your blood sugar on exercise and work.

6: Trans Fats

Aside from alcohol and white sugar, another substance category you should avoid eating is trans fats. When regularly consumed, they clog your arteries, increase “bad” cholesterol (LDL), blood pressure, and risk of getting a heart attack.

White the exact mechanism isn’t known, consumption of trans fats is shown to reduce sperm count and testicle size, affecting testosterone production as a result.

The mere thought of having your balls reduced and blood vessels clogged should bother you, and the sooner you reduce your trans fat intake, the better your health will be.

Some of the foods that contain trans fats are:

• Commercial baked goods (factory cakes, cookies, and pies)
• Shortening
• Popcorn
• Frozen pizza
• Fried food (french fries, donuts, fried chicken)
• Stick margarine

In short, you should avoid eating commercial baked products, and cut down on deep fried food. These two steps are enough to reduce your trans fat intake and protect your hormones.

Finally, the last thing that kills your testosterone is tap water.

7: Tap Water

You should avoid drinking tap water at all costs, at least because it isn’t always sterile, and can contain microorganisms harmful to your digestion system.

How exactly does it kill testosterone though? It turns out that tap water often contains hormone disruptors, usually estrogenic chemicals from contraceptive pills.

When high amounts of estrogen enter your blood, testosterone production is suppressed. If this process repeats consistently, your testicles’ ability to create this hormone deteriorates, causing severe long-term consequences for your health.

The obvious solution is to stop drinking tap water, and drink bottled water instead. Bottled water is better filtered and treated, making it a better alternative.

Additionally, you should always check if the water source you want to drink from is safe, and abstain from drinking if it can contain harmful chemicals. Sounds simple, but too many people forget about it.

The more you care about your health, the better your life gets. Remember this rule, and cut the junk out of your life.

Avoid the Things That Kill Testosterone

Most people don’t care about their health, taking it for granted, and suffering the consequences later in life. One of the most important aspects of maintaining your health is keeping your testosterone levels high.

This hormone is essential for bone health, muscle growth, fertility, and production of new blood cells. It is literally what makes you a man, capable of achieving new heights.

These are the main things that kill your testosterone:

• Sedentary lifestyle
• Chronic stress
• Poor sleep
• Alcohol
• Added sugar
• Trans fats
• Tap water

If you can avoid these traps by exercising, sleeping well, living a simpler life, and eating better foods, you’ll drastically increase your testosterone. The power to change your life is all yours.

Avoid the things that kill testosterone, work, read, pray to God, and be a good man. Good luck, and see you soon, brother.

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