Testosterone, a hormone produced primarily by
the testicles, is often associated with the
epitome of "manhood" (although women have
testosterone, too).

Indeed, it does play a large role in male
sexuality and reproduction, impacting such
factors as sexual and reproductive function,
muscle mass, and hair growth, but also has some
less "flashy," albeit equally important, roles like
maintaining bone density, levels of red blood
cells and a sense of well-being.
Beginning around age 30, a man's testosterone
levels begin to decline, and continue to do so as
he ages.
A wide range of chemical exposures included
prescribed drugs like statins, adversely impact
testosterone production in men. At the same
time, estrogen levels typically increase due to
widespread exposures to estrogen-mimicking
compounds in food, water and environmental
pollutants.
What are Your Options for Replacement?
If you're a man who's experiencing symptoms
such as decreased sex drive, erectile
dysfunction, depressed mood, and difficulties
with concentration and memory, and you think
low testosterone may be to blame, you can have
your levels tested. Since testosterone levels
fluctuate throughout the day, you'll probably
need more than a blood test to get a true
picture of your levels.
If your levels are indeed low, there are a
number of synthetic and bioidentical
testosterone products on the market, as well as
DHEA, which is the most abundant androgen
precursor prohormone in the human body,
meaning that it is the largest raw material your
body uses to produce other vital hormones,
including testosterone in men and estrogen in
women.
I only recommend using bioidentical hormones,
and only then under the guidance of a holistic
doctor who can monitor your hormone levels to
ensure you need supplementation.
But, before you opt for this route, there are
numerous strategies you can try to boost your
testosterone levels naturally. These are
appropriate for virtually anyone, as they carry
only beneficial "side effects."
9 Ways to Naturally Increase Testosterone
Levels

1.   Lose Weight
If you're overweight, shedding the excess
pounds may increase your testosterone levels,
according to research presented at the
Endocrine Society's 2012 meeting. Overweight
men are more likely to have low testosterone
levels to begin with, so this is an important trick
to increase your body's testosterone production
when you need it most.
If you are serious about losing weight, you have
got to strictly limit the amount of processed
sugar in your diet, as evidence is mounting that
excess sugar, and fructose in particular, is the
primary driving factor in the obesity epidemic.
So cutting soda from your diet is essential, as is
limiting fructose found in processed foods, fruit
juice, excessive fruit and so-called "healthy"
sweeteners like agave.
Ideally you should keep your total fructose
consumption below 25 grams per day and this
includes fruits. This is especially true if you
have insulin resistance and are overweight,
have high blood pressure, diabetes or high
cholesterol.
In addition to eliminating or severely limiting
fructose, it will be vital to eliminate all grains
and milk (even raw) in your diet. Milk has a
sugar called lactose, which has been shown to
increase insulin resistance so it will be wise to
avoid it if you are seeking to lose weight.
Refined carbohydrates like breakfast cereals,
bagels, waffles, pretzels, and most other
processed foods also quickly break down to
sugar, increase your insulin levels, and cause
insulin resistance, which is the number one
underlying factor of nearly every chronic
disease and condition known to man, including
weight gain.
As you cut these dietary troublemakers from
your meals, you need to replace them with
healthy substitutes like vegetables and healthy
fats (including natural saturated fats!). Your
body prefers the carbohydrates in
micronutrient-dense vegetables rather than
grains and sugars because it slows the
conversion to simple sugars like glucose, and
decreases your insulin level. When you cut
grains and sugar from your meals, you typically
will need to radically increase the amount of
vegetables you eat, as well as make sure you
are also consuming protein and healthy fats
regularly.
I've detailed a step-by-step guide to this type
of healthy eating program in my comprehensive
nutrition plan, and I urge you to consult this
guide if you are trying to lose weight.
The foods you choose to eat will be the driving
force behind successfully achieving your weight
loss goals -- high-intensity, short-burst-type
exercises, such as my Peak Fitness Program,
two to three times per week, combined with a
comprehensive fitness plan, is important too,
and has an additional benefit as well (see
below)!

2.   High-Intensity Exercise like Peak Fitness
(Especially Combined with Intermittent Fasting)
Both intermittent fasting and short intense
exercise have been shown to boost
testosterone.
“ Short intense exercise has a
proven positive effect on increasing
testosterone levels and preventing its
decline. ” That's unlike aerobics or prolonged moderate
exercise, which have shown to have negative or
no effect on testosterone levels.
Intermittent fasting boosts testosterone by
increasing the expression of satiety hormones
including insulin, leptin, adiponectin, glucagon-
like peptide-1 (GLP-1), colecystokinin (CKK) and
melanocortins, all of which are known to
potentiate healthy testosterone actions,
increase libido and prevent age-related
testosterone decline.
Having a whey protein meal after exercise can
further enhance the satiety/testosterone-
boosting impact (hunger hormones cause the
opposite effect on your testosterone and
libido). Here's a summary of what a typical high-
intensity Peak Fitness routine might look like:
Warm up for three minutes
Exercise as hard and fast as you can for
30 seconds. You should feel like you
couldn't possibly go on another few
seconds
Recover at a slow to moderate pace for
90 seconds
Repeat the high intensity exercise and
recovery 7 more times
As you can see, the entire workout is only 20
minutes. Twenty minutes! That really is a
beautiful thing. And within those 20 minutes,
75 percent of that time is warming up,
recovering or cooling down. You're really only
working out intensely for four minutes. It's
hard to believe if you have never done this that
you can actually get that much benefit from
four minutes of exercise. That's all it is.
Keep in mind that you can use virtually any type
of equipment you want for this – an elliptical
machine, a treadmill, swimming, even sprinting
outdoors (although you will need to do this very
carefully to avoid injury) -- as long as you're
pushing yourself as hard as you can for 30
seconds. But do be sure to stretch properly and
start slowly to avoid injury. Start with two or
three repetitions and work your way up, don't
expect to do all eight repetitions the first time
you try this, especially if you are out of shape.
You can find more information about this in an
article previously written on intermittent
fasting.

3.   Consume Plenty of Zinc
The mineral zinc is important for testosterone
production, and supplementing your diet for as
little as six weeks has been shown to cause a
marked improvement in testosterone among men
with low levels. Likewise, research has shown
that restricting dietary sources of zinc leads to
a significant decrease in testosterone, while
zinc supplementation increases it -- and even
protects men from exercised-induced reductions
in testosterone levels.
It's estimated that up to 45 percent of adults
over the age of 60 may have lower than
recommended zinc intakes; even when dietary
supplements were added in, an estimated 20-25
percent of older adults still had inadequate zinc
intakes, according to a National Health and
Nutrition Examination Survey.
Your diet is the best source of zinc; along with
protein-rich foods like meats and fish, other
good dietary sources of zinc include raw milk,
raw cheese, beans, and yogurt or kefir made
from raw milk. It can be difficult to obtain
enough dietary zinc if you're a vegetarian, and
also for meat-eaters as well, largely because of
conventional farming methods that rely heavily
on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. These
chemicals deplete the soil of nutrients ...
nutrients like zinc that must be absorbed by
plants in order to be passed on to you.
In many cases, you may further deplete the
nutrients in your food by the way you prepare
it. For most food, cooking it will drastically
reduce its levels of nutrients like zinc …
particularly over-cooking, which many people
do.
If you decide to use a zinc supplement, stick to
a dosage of less than 40 mg a day, as this is the
recommended adult upper limit. Taking too much
zinc can interfere with your body's ability to
absorb other minerals, especially copper, and
may cause nausea as a side effect.

4.   Strength Training
In addition to Peak Fitness, strength training is
also known to boost testosterone levels,
provided you are doing so intensely enough.
When strength training to boost testosterone,
you'll want to increase the weight and lower
your number of reps, and then focus on
exercises that work a large number of muscles,
such as dead lifts or squats.
You can "turbo-charge" your weight training by
going slower. By slowing down your movement,
you're actually turning it into a high-intensity
exercise. Super Slow movement allows your
muscle, at the microscopic level, to access the
maximum number of cross-bridges between the
protein filaments that produce movement in the
muscle.

5.   Optimize Your Vitamin D Levels
Vitamin D, a steroid hormone, is essential for
the healthy development of the nucleus of the
sperm cell, and helps maintain semen quality and
sperm count. Vitamin D also increases levels of
testosterone, which may boost libido. In one
study, overweight men who were given vitamin
D supplements had a significant increase in
testosterone levels after one year.
Vitamin D deficiency is currently at epidemic
proportions in the United States and many other
regions around the world, largely because people
do not spend enough time in the sun to facilitate
this important process of vitamin D production.
So the first step to ensuring you are receiving
all the benefits of vitamin D is to find out what
your levels are using a 25(OH)D test, also called
25-hydroxyvitamin D.
A few years back, the recommended level was
between 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter (ng/
ml), but more recently the optimal vitamin D
level has been raised to 50-70 ng/ml.
To get your levels into the healthy range, sun
exposure is the BEST way to optimize your
vitamin D levels; exposing a large amount of
your skin until it turns the lightest shade of
pink, as near to solar noon as possible, is
typically necessary to achieve adequate vitamin
D production. If sun exposure is not an option, a
safe tanning bed (with electronic ballasts
rather than magnetic ballasts, to avoid
unnecessary exposure to EMF fields) can be
used.
As a last resort, a vitamin D3 supplement can be
taken orally, but research suggests the average
adult needs to take 8,000 IU's of vitamin D per
day in order to elevate their levels above 40 ng/
ml, which is the absolute minimum for disease
prevention.

6.   Reduce Stress
When you're under a lot of stress, your body
releases high levels of the stress hormone
cortisol. This hormone actually blocks the
effects of testosterone, presumably because,
from a biological standpoint, testosterone-
associated behaviors (mating, competing,
aggression) may have lowered your chances of
survival in an emergency (hence, the "fight or
flight" response is dominant, courtesy of
cortisol).
In the modern world, chronic stress, and
subsequently elevated levels of cortisol, could
mean that testosterone's effects are blocked in
the long term, which is what you want to avoid.
My favorite overall tool to manage stress is EFT
(Emotional Freedom Technique), which is like
acupuncture without the needles. It's a handy,
free tool for unloading emotional baggage
quickly and painlessly, and so easy that even
children can learn it. Other common stress-
reduction tools with a high success rate include
prayer, meditation, laughter and yoga, for
example. Learning relaxation skills, such as
deep breathing and positive visualization, which
is the "language" of the subconscious.
When you create a visual image of how you'd like
to feel, your subconscious will understand and
begin to help you by making the needed
biochemical and neurological changes.

7.   Limit or Eliminate Sugar from Your Diet
Testosterone levels decrease after you eat
sugar, which is likely because the sugar leads to
a high insulin level, another factor leading to
low testosterone.
Based on USDA estimates, the average
American consumes 12 teaspoons of sugar a day,
which equates to about TWO TONS of sugar
during a lifetime.
Why we eat this much sugar is not difficult to
understand -- it tastes good, and it gives us
pleasure by triggering an innate process in your
brain via dopamine and opioid signals.
What it is doing to us on both a physical and
emotional level is another story entirely, and
most people stand to reap major improvements
in their health by cutting back on, or
eliminating, sugar altogether from their diets.
Remember foods that contain added sugar and
fructose, as well as grains like bread and pasta,
should all be limited.
If you're struggling with sugar addiction and
having trouble dealing with cravings, I highly
recommend trying an energy psychology
technique called Turbo Tapping, which has
helped many "soda addicts" kick their sweet
habit, and it should work for any type of sweet
craving you may have.

8.   Eat Healthy Fats
By healthy, this means not only mon- and
polyunsaturated fats, like that found in
avocadoes and nuts, but also saturated , as
these are essential for building testosterone.
Research shows that a diet with less than 40
percent of energy as fat (and that mainly from
animal sources, i.e. saturated) lead to a
decrease in testosterone levels.
My personal diet is about 60-70 percent healthy
fat, and other experts agree that the ideal diet
includes somewhere between 50-70 percent
fat.
It's important to understand that your body
requires saturated fats from animal and
vegetable sources (such as meat, dairy, certain
oils, and tropical plants like coconut) for optimal
functioning, and if you neglect this important
food group in favor of sugar, grains and other
starchy carbs, your health and weight are
almost guaranteed to suffer. Examples of
healthy fats you can eat more of to give your
testosterone levels a boost include:
Olives and Olive oil
Coconuts and coconut oil
Butter made from raw grass-fed organic
milk
Raw nuts, such as, almonds or pecans
Organic pastured egg yolks
Avocados
Grass-fed meats
Palm oil
Unheated organic nut oils

9.   Boost Your Intake of Branch Chain Amino
Acids (BCAA) from Foods Like Whey Protein
Research suggests that BCAAs result in higher
testosterone levels, particularly when taken
along with resistance training. While BCAAs
are available in supplement form, you'll find the
highest concentrations of BCAAs like leucine in
dairy products – especially quality cheeses and
whey protein.
Even when getting leucine from your natural
food supply, it's often wasted or used as a
building block instead of an anabolic agent. So
to create the correct anabolic environment, you
need to boost leucine consumption way beyond
mere maintenance levels.
That said, keep in mind that using leucine as a
free form amino acid can be highly
counterproductive as when free form amino
acids are artificially administrated, they rapidly
enter your circulation while disrupting insulin
function, and impairing your body's glycemic
control. Food-based leucine is really the ideal
form that can benefit your muscles without side
effects.: