I am 10 days into taking testosterone and feel great, it seems to have cured my acid reflux.
However I have gained over 1kg in a week and noticed a lot more tummy fat. On doing some reading it appears that testosterone causes insulin resistance in women. I was wondering if anyone else has noticed this issue?
I would lower the dose but I tried missing a dose yesterday and the acid reflux came back and it is hard to measure out a smaller blob than I am currently doing.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dmrr.872
Hi - I'm interested on what you're saying about insulin resistance. I had a look at that reference but couldn;t access the whole article so would reserve judgement about whether exogenous T can cause insulin resistance - I would want to see the studies where androgens had been given as pee this sentence:
"
Androgen administration to healthy women was associated with development of insulin resistance. Intervention studies in women with hyperandrogenism were limited by small subject numbers and use of indirect methods for assessing insulin sensitivity"
I haven't read a lot about it but do know T is partly responsible for muscle development and maintenance. Therefore my view on this is that there is the potential to mantain muscle mass in post-menopausal women, and reduce associated exercise-induced fatigue, but this is dependent on taking sufficient exercise, otherwise metabolically there could be a tendency to put on extra fat rather than muscle. ie muscle doesn't develop on its own. So this could be a reason for weight (fat) gain - especially around the middle - which happens anyway in post-menopausal women due to excess of androgen relative to oestrogens despite both declining.
I doubt though that gaining 1 kg in a week would be caused by taking T - though I don't know - the effects are longer term than this and gynae who originally prescribed mine in 2015 said effects can take 4-5 months to develop!!
I know I don't take enough exercise and could do with reducing by 7-10 pounds ideally - and have thicker waist than I used to....
Glad you are feeling better generally.
Re testogel sachets.
May I suggest changing to Testim if you can? I would recommend to anyone having difficultty measuring out blobs of T. Testim is 1% gel so 2/3 the concentration of the new Testogel sachets. Testim comes in little tubes with a screw top so you just unscrew the cap, squeeze out a little blob and scre it up again, I would suggest it is more viscous than Testogel and a bit more sticky, less runny. Being lower concentration then there is more scope for slight variation in blob size not leading to big variation in dose.
Hurdity x