Hi All
First thing: - All my life up until April (I think) of this year, 2012, I have not ever purposefully touch any estrogen substances. -
I now notice that when I suck in my abs (move them in), my testicles rise. Then when I relax my abs, my testicles drop. I do notice that my testicles are not hanging like they used to after using the estrogen substances but I've never noticed the rising and dropping before. Anyone else notice this or is it "normal" and that I just have never ever noticed it before?
Thanks
(21-06-2012, 08:23 PM)Venus Wrote: [ -> ]Hi All
First thing: - All my life up until April (I think) of this year, 2012, I have not ever purposefully touch any estrogen substances. -
I now notice that when I suck in my abs (move them in), my testicles rise. Then when I relax my abs, my testicles drop. I do notice that my testicles are not hanging like they used to after using the estrogen substances but I've never noticed the rising and dropping before. Anyone else notice this or is it "normal" and that I just have never ever noticed it before?
Thanks
It's normal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cremasteric_muscle
you wouldn't have much change after only 2 months anyway.
Take a high enough dose and they will shrink by 25% over a year.
(You win some, you lose some).
B.
This is all normal, my tested have also shrunk quite a bit and I have reduced penis function.
Thanks. I guess all the times that I looked down there I did it by leaning forward which I think automatically pulls them up so I never noticed.
Actually back in April, I basically increased estrogen (red clover pills and cream) and progesterone (cream). As far as breast size, there was a noticeable small increase even in that short. But I think what I did was make my body think it was pregnant which usually triggers breast growth as one of the primary change of the body. And I was getting fat all over. I stopped it when I was feeling discomfort in my chest in the heart area. The doses were high.
I've only been on PM for about 3 weeks and the doses are small (50 mg at peak) and a dab of progesterone. If I continue to pursue (have conflicting thoughts) my breasts and feminine body, the peak doses will increase monthly for about two years. I'm currently on a diet and exercising less to lose muscle, I know it doesn't help with growth. But my breast size seem to be pretty stable.
I naturally have man-breasts if my body fat ratio is high. As far as I can remember, I've had a bigger chest since elementary school. I remember not liking swimming class back then because of my chest. I think being a fat kid and being in puberty, enough estrone was produce by my body fat to give me man-breasts. But in recent years I was able to pretty much flatten my chest through diet and exercise. Was able to wear a tank for the first time. But after some time, I kind of wanted my old body back, including my breasts. All the strenuous exercises, muscle building, and diets seemed to have created a few ugly effects like extra stretch marks, veins, and stuff like that. I guess I just feel a bit depressed with what I've done to my body. But I did like not having to slouch to hide my chest.
Either way of what I end up doing, I would say that I now have a bit more understanding and knowledge of the body, hormones, changes, and such.
Three thoughts here.
1) Man-boobs due to fat are nothing like female boobs, which have a solid, meaty texture caused by the development of mammary glands and ducts. Fat is squishy.
2) This may not be relevant, but there is a congenital brian disorder, caused by maternal distress, which limits the androgen exposure of the developing fetus, resulting in a feminised brain.
If (and only if) you have this problem, there is a very good chance that taking an estrogen-like substance causes you to question the desire to feminise.
Theoretically, the feminised brain is expecting a chemical balance in your blood that matches a feminine body. When it detects what it considers to be a testosterone "toxicity", it throws you into a "girl" mode, which makes you seek other means of expressing your femininity. By taking an estrogen-like substance, you reassure your brain, and the desire to cross-dress, grow breasts, etc diminishes.
Of course, if you stop taking PM, red clover etc (though PM is vastly more effective) then, the desire returns!
It's quite a Catch-22 situation.... welcome to the club!
3) Lastly, if weight is a problem, then I really have to urge you with all seriousness to consider discarding the following from your dietary intake:
Bread,
Rice,
pasta,
Root vegetables (potatoes, parsnips, beet, and more than a very few carrots)
Fruit, other than berries
If you get hungry between meals, snack on meat, cheese, or brazil or macademia nuts. (high fat, low protein).
The ONLY reason mammals put on fat is because they eat more carbohydrates than they need.
The ONLY purpose of fat deposition is to provide energy when the carbs consumed is less than the energy expended.
Therefore, if you eat no more than 30-100g of carbs per day (not less than 30 or you won't be able to metabolize your fat) then you WILL burn your fat. But, if you eat 1 gram more carbs more than the energy you expend, you WILL NOT lose any fat.
Forget calories. They are a nonsense. The way metabolism works, the only thing that counts are carbs. (The doctors are as stupid as the "climate scientists")
The only solid way to lose fat is with a lifestyle change based on very, very, few carbs.
Good luck!
B.
Don't know if I have a brian disorder, most likely not. My index finger is very slightly longer than my ring finger though. I think I have somewhat feminine hands, just a bit bigger than a genetic female's. The pic shows how my hands can look like, I took the pic some time ago just for fun. I find long nails really inconvenient can't even close my hands without them digging into my palms, don't know how some women with those really long artificial nails go about their daily tasks. I've seen some cashiers with nails like that. I can't even really type on the keyboard comfortably when they get as long as in the pic. (I know it's not a hand forum, sorry)
[attachment=1968]
As for my breast, the pics show how they look at 45 degree front and profile. Taken May 29, 2012. Before starting PM but after I had taken some red clover and progesterone (started in April). But I think there's not much of a difference in that pic from before that because I had stopped taking the clover and progesterone for about a month (stopped in May). I think I had took a pic before April too though. But still I would say not much difference would be seen.
[attachment=1966][attachment=1967]
Do they look like breasts at all? I think if I had a narrower chest, they would really stick out. From the front, they make more of an upside down V in the middle. Often female breasts make more of a V, right? Or is that just when they are push by a bra? I guess it depends on the size.
Weight wise I'm not too bad. At 5' 4", I was about 155 lbs at the start of this year, and now I'm about 144.8 lbs. My current diet is about 43% fat ("most": olive oil, salmon, meal replacement drink, granola bar, banana :"least"), 42% carbs (rice, meal replacement drink, banana, granola bar, skim milk), and 15% protein (skim milk, salmon, meal replacement drink, rice, granola bar, banana). I'm mainly trying reduce some muscle bulk particularly my legs. But not be too drastic on my diet. My calorie deficit is about 150 calories. I feel quite good on this diet. No stomach, washroom, throat problems. Some foods bring upon a whole bunch of those problems.
A few months ago I sprained my ankle and had to stay off that leg and I noticed that the calf muscles on that leg got slightly smaller than my other leg (I actually like the look of the smaller muscles). Too bad I don't quite remember if it was like that already before the sprain. Just wondering if I could spot reduce a muscle by not using it as much, unlike fat spot reduction which is not really possible. I think as my overall weight gets lower, my leg muscles will also get smaller over time since they will be moving less weight around.
If you don't use muscles they will start to atrophy from not being used. My right leg is half the size of my left from being off of it for a month.
(22-06-2012, 08:42 PM)bryony Wrote: [ -> ]Three thoughts here.
3) Lastly, if weight is a problem, then I really have to urge you with all seriousness to consider discarding the following from your dietary intake:
Bread,
Rice,
pasta,
Root vegetables (potatoes, parsnips, beet, and more than a very few carrots)
Fruit, other than berries
If you get hungry between meals, snack on meat, cheese, or brazil or macademia nuts. (high fat, low protein).
The ONLY reason mammals put on fat is because they eat more carbohydrates than they need.
The ONLY purpose of fat deposition is to provide energy when the carbs consumed is less than the energy expended.
Therefore, if you eat no more than 30-100g of carbs per day (not less than 30 or you won't be able to metabolize your fat) then you WILL burn your fat. But, if you eat 1 gram more carbs more than the energy you expend, you WILL NOT lose any fat.
Forget calories. They are a nonsense. The way metabolism works, the only thing that counts are carbs. (The doctors are as stupid as the "climate scientists")
The only solid way to lose fat is with a lifestyle change based on very, very, few carbs.
Good luck!
B.
I want to offer a different opinion on diet and weight lose. From the ongoing research I have done, I think Bryony is half (Well, maybe 2/3's but make up your own mind) right. Calorie counting is pretty frustrating and futile up to a point. Obviously, if you only need 2000 kcal's/D for your lifestyle and you are ingesting 4000 kcal/D then you WILL have a weight problem. But if you are talking differences of only a couple hundred kcal's per day, then I agree it makes little difference and it's not worth the effort.
From my research, it seems that processed foods, especially refined carbohydrates, along with low or no fat are the major problems with the modern diet. For optimum health, you should really focus on a high protein, low processed food/carbohydrate diet, without worrying about cholesterol and fat. These newer diet recommendations fly in the face of the last 50 years of dietary recommendations from most traditional authorities in the US, but sad to say, those previous recommendations apparently have little to no science backing them up. However, reducing your carbs while increasing your protein and fat (without increasing overall caloric intake) DOES have a substantial body of good research showing that it promotes optimum health of just about every organ system in the body. One of the big take home messages here is that dietary fat does NOT make you fat (overweight) when combined with a higher protein intake and low carbohydrate intake (especially refined carbohydrates.)
Some further believe that modern varieties of wheat that have been bred for mass production and long-term storage are further complicating the picture and need to be eliminated or at least severely reduced in our daily diets. This means little to no bread, pasta, baked goods and just about every food-like product (that isn't animal protein or dairy) that comes wrapped in plastic at your local grocery or convenience store.
Unfortunately, Bryony's understanding of human metabolism and the function of various tissues ("The ONLY purpose of fat deposition is to provide energy..." is patently false as fat has other VERY important functions in the body in addition to energy storage) is as skewed as his understanding of climatic change. The idea that fat is utilized for energy production "ONLY" if you ingest less than a certain amount of carbohydrates is as wrong as thinking that there is a "fat burning" zone in terms of heart rate when doing aerobic exercise (interval training apparently has more overall health benefits than long duration low intensity aerobic training.) It is an over simplistic misunderstanding of energy metabolism in the body. But hey, don't take my word for it, check out this search (
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fat+metabolism&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39) and in particular the following full-text sources:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...x/abstract
http://www.springerlink.com/content/16n5nj6xqa819xc6/
http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/298/3/E449.full
The last reference in particular shows that it is the relative amounts of carbohydrate compared to fat in the diet along with metabolic adaptation that determines the relative amounts of body fat or carbohydrate utilization for energy metabolism.
Now, I can just imagine the flame attack Bryony is preparing for me, claiming an "ad hom" attack (the phrase is "ad hominem" by the way, which neither the last post that invoked one of his tirades nor this one is.) He will no doubt claim that he achieved quite remarkable weight lose on just such a low protein, practically no carbohydrate diet, and therefore his conclusions are Right. I agree, one can lose weight on a diet like that, but I submit that a preponderance of research suggests a diet like that neither promotes optimal health nor is sustainable on a long term basis. In my opinion, if you want optimal breast growth, you should promote optimal health. On a long term basis, aberrant/fad diets do not promote optimal health and therefore do not promote optimal breast growth.
Flame on Bryony!
(24-06-2012, 03:06 PM)chrishoney Wrote: [ -> ] (22-06-2012, 08:42 PM)bryony Wrote: [ -> ]Three thoughts here.
3) Lastly, if weight is a problem, then I really have to urge you with all seriousness to consider discarding the following from your dietary intake:
Bread,
Rice,
pasta,
Root vegetables (potatoes, parsnips, beet, and more than a very few carrots)
Fruit, other than berries
If you get hungry between meals, snack on meat, cheese, or brazil or macademia nuts. (high fat, low protein).
The ONLY reason mammals put on fat is because they eat more carbohydrates than they need.
The ONLY purpose of fat deposition is to provide energy when the carbs consumed is less than the energy expended.
Therefore, if you eat no more than 30-100g of carbs per day (not less than 30 or you won't be able to metabolize your fat) then you WILL burn your fat. But, if you eat 1 gram more carbs more than the energy you expend, you WILL NOT lose any fat.
Forget calories. They are a nonsense. The way metabolism works, the only thing that counts are carbs. (The doctors are as stupid as the "climate scientists")
The only solid way to lose fat is with a lifestyle change based on very, very, few carbs.
Good luck!
B.
I want to offer a different opinion on diet and weight lose. From the ongoing research I have done, I think Bryony is half (Well, maybe 2/3's but make up your own mind) right. Calorie counting is pretty frustrating and futile up to a point. Obviously, if you only need 2000 kcal's/D for your lifestyle and you are ingesting 4000 kcal/D then you WILL have a weight problem. But if you are talking differences of only a couple hundred kcal's per day, then I agree it makes little difference and it's not worth the effort.
From my research, it seems that processed foods, especially refined carbohydrates, along with low or no fat are the major problems with the modern diet. For optimum health, you should really focus on a high protein, low processed food/carbohydrate diet, without worrying about cholesterol and fat. These newer diet recommendations fly in the face of the last 50 years of dietary recommendations from most traditional authorities in the US, but sad to say, those previous recommendations apparently have little to no science backing them up. However, reducing your carbs while increasing your protein and fat (without increasing overall caloric intake) DOES have a substantial body of good research showing that it promotes optimum health of just about every organ system in the body. One of the big take home messages here is that dietary fat does NOT make you fat (overweight) when combined with a higher protein intake and low carbohydrate intake (especially refined carbohydrates.)
Some further believe that modern varieties of wheat that have been bred for mass production and long-term storage are further complicating the picture and need to be eliminated or at least severely reduced in our daily diets. This means little to no bread, pasta, baked goods and just about every food-like product (that isn't animal protein or dairy) that comes wrapped in plastic at your local grocery or convenience store.
Unfortunately, Bryony's understanding of human metabolism and the function of various tissues ("The ONLY purpose of fat deposition is to provide energy..." is patently false as fat has other VERY important functions in the body in addition to energy storage) is as skewed as his understanding of climatic change. The idea that fat is utilized for energy production "ONLY" if you ingest less than a certain amount of carbohydrates is as wrong as thinking that there is a "fat burning" zone in terms of heart rate when doing aerobic exercise (interval training apparently has more overall health benefits than long duration low intensity aerobic training.) It is an over simplistic misunderstanding of energy metabolism in the body. But hey, don't take my word for it, check out this search (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fat+metabolism&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39) and in particular the following full-text sources:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...x/abstract
http://www.springerlink.com/content/16n5nj6xqa819xc6/
http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/298/3/E449.full
The last reference in particular shows that it is the relative amounts of carbohydrate compared to fat in the diet along with metabolic adaptation that determines the relative amounts of body fat or carbohydrate utilization for energy metabolism.
Now, I can just imagine the flame attack Bryony is preparing for me, claiming an "ad hom" attack (the phrase is "ad hominem" by the way, which neither the last post that invoked one of his tirades nor this one is.) He will no doubt claim that he achieved quite remarkable weight lose on just such a low protein, practically no carbohydrate diet, and therefore his conclusions are Right. I agree, one can lose weight on a diet like that, but I submit that a preponderance of research suggests a diet like that neither promotes optimal health nor is sustainable on a long term basis. In my opinion, if you want optimal breast growth, you should promote optimal health. On a long term basis, aberrant/fad diets do not promote optimal health and therefore do not promote optimal breast growth.
Flame on Bryony!
Wow. What an outburst of snide bitterness. Didn't know you had it in you Chris (not so honey today). Was the comment on my supposed lack of knowledge about climate change really necessary? I think the worldwide disinvestment there speaks for itself.... where was Obama during Rio+20?
As for the pedantry about the uses of fat, yes, I was being simplistic in terms of weight gain and loss, and if you call a lifestyle change of over 2 years now a "fad" diet, then I think you are showing a bit of bigotry. The point I was making, as you probably know, is that the massive obesity we are suffering in the West is pretty much solely due to the medical orthodoxy promoting carbs over protein using as flawed a hypothesis about cholesterol w.r.t heart attacks as computer models failing consistently in their prediction about global warming over the past >10 years. How's your BMI lately?
You also must be well aware (since you are so fond of it) that ad-hom is as popular an abbreviation of ad-hominem as tv is of television.
As we are discussing fallacies, I think you are guilty of a straw man (misrepresenting an opponent's position so as to more easily refute it) here aren't you? What's with all the predictions of my future "tirades"?
That "preponderance" of research you refer to is probably as reliable as the "consensus" of climate researchers papers... you know the ones who have all their friends on the peer review groups rejecting the papers that they don't like, and getting the editor of a journal fired after publishing one that they disagreed with? Have you even read the "climategate" email leaks? I have.
Anyway... I think the hormones must be working... this sure looks like PMT to me!
B.
Nutrition is something that has a lot of variables.
I would say there is are guidelines of recommendations. But in the end it really depends on the person's body. Stuff like age, metabolism, muscle/fat ratio, activeness, daily tasks, time between meals, starvation, diabetes, and everything else in between will affect what our body needs and what our body will do with it once it gets it.
Sometimes the body will make it very clear on what it needs, and it can be felt very strongly.
I notice that when I go grocery shopping while kind of hungry or feel a bit out of energy from a long bike ride. I tend to or have the need to buy ready to eat snacks, usually high carbs or sugary. And it's not from my brain telling me to buy those things because I normally would not. I guess the body knows what it needs, in this case that would be something that can be converted into energy fast which would be carbs/sugar and it automatically hunts for it. When I get that feeling, the meat section simply don't interest me as much as the like potato chips/pop/ice cream/etc sections. Now, I try to go after I've eaten something and not hours afterwards. And I don't get that feeling when I do it that way.
I would say that any new diets or even old diets we start going on, is basically an experiment until we see what the results are after some time. In the old diets case, yes it may have worked the past but depending on how far past it may not work anymore because of things like age, body composition, change of daily activities, change of lifestyle, etc.
My current diet seems to be working ok for me. Was 146.6 lbs on June 1, 2012 and I'm 144.0 lbs now, June 24, 2012. My log shows that I've been going down by about .2 lbs each day. Some days it stays the same as the previous day or higher if I eat something extra which happens once in a while. But overall, my weight is going downwards.
My lightest in all my adult life was about 128 lbs in 2009 when I was very active. Close to like a Bruce Lee figure. Sometimes I wonder why I'm giving that up, because I did put a lot time into it. For sure, that was a high maintenance body. And the workouts though short in duration in my case, was not exactly easy. But I also got angry easily, probably from the testosterone levels. Now when I do get angry it's more of a calm-angry.