Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

a toy car with a dying battery.
    Declining sex drive is a direct effect of lower testosterone, and it’s not normal. It’s not okay. It should be a very obvious indicator that you need to make a change. Put in the most blunt terms possible: You’re a man, man. * If you don’t want to fuck, something is wrong.
    Some might write this off as one of the natural signs of aging. And to some extent, that’s true. However, falling testosterone is no longer solely the province of middle age alone. Whereas you might expect a guy in his fifties to experience what the pharmaceutical companies call “Low T.” This is happening to guys as young as twenty-five. Yes—there are a host of guys just out of college who don’t want sex.
    Even worse, new research from Australia has found that declining testosterone is not as much a result of aging as we once thought. Your decline in hormonal production is actually the result of your health and your body fat. “It is critical that doctors understand that declining testosterone levels are not a natural part of aging and that they are most likely due to health-related behaviors or health status itself,” says Gary Wittert, MD and study coauthor.
    The good news: this is easy to fix for guys young and old. While we can’t promise that you’ll have the same sex drive at forty-eight as you did at eighteen, it is possible to naturally increase your levels of testosterone—and thereby your sex drive—without pills or creams or doctors. We can tweak them with the right training approach. It’s not lifting weights—it’s how you lift them and when you lift them. Mix that with some nutrition secrets that you won’t find on the cover of your favorite magazine, and you have a potent cocktail that primes you for less fat and more confidence, resulting in more testosterone and, even better, more incredible sex.
    3. Accelerated Aging
    Listen, we’re not going to call you old and slow. But odds are, your body looks a lot older and moves a lot slower than it should. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a twenty-year-old guy or a sixty-year-old boss; the nutrition advice you’ve received is creating an impending apocalypse within your body.
    You’ve probably heard of cleanse diets—most likely from your wife or girlfriend, or if you were trying to pass a drug test. (Yeah, we know why you really visit your favorite supplement store.) These are the juice cleanses or liver and kidney detoxifiers that are supposed to rid your body of toxins, improve the functioning of your internal organs, and help you age better. Or, at the very least, you’ll eat more fruits and vegetables and be a little healthier. But mostly it’s just a marketing scheme to get you to buy a product.
    The only real cleanse occurs at the cellular level. It’s called autophagy, and it’s your body’s ability to regenerate and become better. Autophagy helps you repair injuries, makes your brain function a little better, helps with muscle growth and fat loss, and even assists in your ability to walk and breathe.
    You see, every day there are millions of cellular reactions occurring in your body. Some of this activity causes damage within your body. As with any equipment that is used a lot, the daily stress causes breakdown. Fortunately, your body is built for such circumstances and can naturally heal anything that isn’t working at an optimal level. This is autophagy.
    So what happens when your internal repair is slow and lazy and doesn’t get the job done? That’s when you have a damaged internal environment. More specifically, when your workers don’t repair your mitochondria—the cellular power plant of your body—then your body is basically fucked.
    You age faster. You suffer from chronic disease. You lose your hair. And you get fat.
    That brings us back to hormones. Your lack of growth hormone (GH) is limiting the natural process of autophagy. And as your GH levels continue to sputter along, your tissue continues to degenerate. It’s why you have more aches and pains. Why food seems to make you fatter than it used to. And why muscle just won’t appear on your body, no matter how many reps and sets you perform.
    What’s the best way to pump up your GH and turn the autophagic process into a group of grind-it-out interns that will work when needed? Strategic eating.
    This isn’t about specific foods or how many grams of protein, carbs, and fats you eat. It’s simpler than that. This is about when you eat.