Not completely hijacking thread just offering something to think about…constant balance between performance, “gainz”, and longevity. Good luck with the body recomposition and keep it up. I like your thinking regarding long term use of thyroid preparations in the absence of thyroid disease and would make sure you are testing TSH, free T4, and free T3 under the supervision of a qualified medical professional.
I have measured RT3 methodically over years and spoke with many MDs about its utility outside the context of acute illness. All honest folks will admit they don’t know.
I’d keep up the calorie deficit and find a long term sustainable strategy for you at the bodyfat level you desire.
If I could go back and speak with younger version of myself, I’d emphasize caution with simultaneously manipulating testosterone and thyroid levels without fully evaluating cardiac status. Even then you never know. It’s not fun when you run into problems and you are being admired by the paramedics asking “where you work out man? Damn Bro!” while they prep to do electroversion on the way to the ER. You think to yourself, “was all this worth it?” Not trying to scare, just true story.
Decline in the function of multiple organs may be considered in the context of preservation of homeostasis. Reserve function is required when the organism is stressed in order to restore the normal homeostatic equilibrium. As the reserve of individual organs declines in a linear fashion, the ability to maintain homeostasis in the face of a threat of a given magnitude declines exponentially (Strehler 1960); hence, the observations of physiology and the actuarial observations of Gompertz are reconciled (Figure 2). Natural death must ensue, without disease, when the reserve function has declined below that point, probably about 20 percent above basal levels, at which routine daily perturbations cannot be weathered. A transition from premature death to natural death occurs as the characteristics of the host resistance (homeostatic reserve) become more important than the specific nature of the insult to the equilibrium. The concepts of premature death (due to disease or accident) and natural death (due to senescent frailty) are complementary rather than antagonistic, and any dividing line must be an arbitrary one.
Linear Decline in Multiple Organs Exponentially Decreases the Area within Which Perturbations May Be Restored as Shown Here for Two Organs. Reprinted with permission from J.F. Fries and L.M. Crapo, Vitality and Aging (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1981).