My husband has been on Testosterone replacement for over a year now. It has been so good for him that I started thinking about doing it myself. He thinks it could be great for me but knows nothing about female hormones unfortunately.
I would like to try something equivalent to what he is doing (he says he’s taking 120 mg per week, injecting himself every day) and experience similar benefits. More energy and initiative (he’s more like when we were younger now, always wanting to try new things, and I find myself resisting and finding excuses for everything…), higher sex drive, less anxiety…and of course a little muscle would be nice even though I’m not trying to become a professional athlete
What kind of dose would a woman take? Will I develop male traits such as facial hair and a deep voice? Most important for me, will it impact my fertility and chances of getting pregnant in the future? Would I need to stop taking it if I do get pregnant (what happens then?)?
I know for men it shuts down their testicles and can throw all their other hormones off balance. Does that happen for women too?
No, using testosterone will have no impact on your testicles. In fact I cannot imagine anything you could do to really effect your testicles.
Women who use testosterone tend to start at very low doses (5mg) and almost always use the propionate ester daily. There’s a subreddit specifically for females using steroids. I believe it’s r/steroidsxx, that’s where I would start my research.
You’re welcome to do some research on this, but the only women I know who take testosterone are competitive athletes. I can’t imagine doing this essentially just to ‘feel better’ and ‘maybe add a little muscle’ as a female. It’s a bad idea, there are much better ways to achieve your objects, and there are a lot of risks involved, including but not limited to most of the things you mentioned. This is, of course, unless you have a diagnosed condition that is resulting in a sub-optimal hormone imbalance (in which case you should be working with a doctor, not an internet forum). If you don’t have a medically diagnosed issue with your hormones, and you don’t have plans to compete in anything physical that would be aided by this, I would highly recommend staying away from it.
My wife has been on testosterone for 4 years. 10 mg every 4th day. She hasn’t had any negative side effect on this dosage. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.
Could you please expand on this? Are you talking about other steroids/chemicals or lifestyle changes? I’m already doing everything I can naturally. I do yoga and meditation, exercise regularly with a trainer, and eat a very clean diet.
So she’s taking almost 20 mg per week? She hasn’t seen any masculinization effects on that dose?
I did some more research and was thinking of starting with only 3.5 mg per week of Testosterone Propionate and seeing how I react, but that now sounds very low.
How has the Testosterone treatment affected your wife in terms of her mood, energy levels, sex drive?
Has it changed her personality in ways she or you find regrettable? Has she become colder or more aggressive or is she basically the same person she was but with more energy and drive?
I think one worry I have is that it’ll change my personality significantly and be detrimental to my marriage.
Do you know whether Testosterone has affected her fertility? Do you guys plan to have children in the future and would that be a problem?
Does she have to supplement with other hormones because Testosterone has changed her hormonal balance? For example I know my husband had to start taking DHEA also because his went down a lot after starting Testosterone treatment. I read that for women, T could crash your Estrogen over time but there’s not a lot of information about it out there.
I did expand on this. you quoted one sentence out of my post. The rest of the post was ‘expanding on this’.
I’ll try to be more clear. Taking testosterone just to make yourself feel good, in the absence of a medically diagnosed condition that warrants it, carries more downside than upside. SOME people are able to do it without any negative effects, but there’s absolutely no way to guarantee it. I can’t tell you how many people, men and women, I know who would not choose this lifestyle again if they could go back.
And nobody is doing ‘everything they can naturally’. There are always things you can do better. How are your stress levels? Do you have a therapist? What is your diet actually like, specifically? Are you sure you’re getting proper macronutrient intake? Diet is something that a LOT of people think they’re doing well because they eat ‘clean’, but they end up nutrient deficient in one way or another because their diets aren’t properly balanced or lack sufficient diversity for optimal health.
The fact is, you’re looking for a simple solution to a complex problem, and as I’ve suggested 3 times at this point, ONLY go this route if it’s through a doctor that agrees that this is, specifically, what is negatively affecting your life.
I think if you want to try anything in the realm of testosterone, you should go on Amazon and buy a 100mg/day DHEA supplement. It will boost your testosterone levels but will not do much of anything in terms of virilization.
As everyone here has said - you REALLY shouldn’t be messing with actual injectable testosterone.
Do you weight train? What does your program look like? PR’s? I should probably also ask your age and height/weight (and how long you’ve been training), but I know better than to do that.
If you haven’t looked into the negative effects (which i don’t believe you have, considering your posts) of what can happen when women take AAS, please look this over:
I’ll try to answer your questions in order, but first let me say that @flipcollar is absolutely correct. My wife is prescribed testosterone by her doctor. They first tried estrogen, DHEA, and progesterone before testosterone. She is very healthy and active, exercises 3-4 days a week (resistance and peloton). Hormones are no substitute for healthy weight and lifestyle.
Her dose is 10mg every 4th day so pretty close to 20mg/week
She hasn’t experienced any masculinization at this dose, however at 10mg every 3 days she did have some.
Her mood, energy and sex drive have all been positively effected. Especially her sex drive
She isn’t aggressive or cold at all, probably more affectionate and loving.
We tried moving her out to 10mg every 5th day but she doesn’t feel well on that dosage and she gets irritable by the 4th or 5th day.
I can’t speak as to the fertility, we had 4 children before either of us were prescribed testosterone.
She does not take any other hormones or supplements.
Thanks for the advice and recommendation. I’m 37yo, 5’9 and 125 pounds. I was a professional dancer, I don’t weight train but I still dance on a daily basis and am very lean and pretty muscular at that weight, I have visible ab definition.
Isn’t it true with DHEA that you cannot really predict what it will convert into, though?
About the negative effects of Testosterone, I was planning on taking a very small dose to have the same levels I had when I was a teenager (the peak for women’s Testosterone levels), not anything more. Would that be ok or are you saying those negative effects happen to women on Testosterone regardless of dose? It seems many warnings come with men’s Testosterone supplementation as well.
To my knowledge, no. I have my wife (31) taking 100mg daily based on the research cited in the link, but I will do more research just to be sure now. According to the clinical study, there was virtually no bad side effects and many women felt much better when taking DHEA. Their bloodwork also verified this. My wife can also attest to feeling better while taking this.
I understand the want to take Testosterone, believe me, I do. I’m also not saying it is guaranteed you will get these symptoms, I’m saying that many of them are irreversible and should you develop something like an enlarged clitoris or deepened voice, it will be something you will likely regret for a very long time. Simply put, you probably don’t have a need for something with this bad of a risk.
Before assuming your hormone levels are significantly reduced from what they were in your 20s, you will need to get a female hormone panel done - this is the only clinical way to know. To actually verify your levels have dropped, you would have needed to get this same panel done in your 20s to have a baseline to compare. Regardless, finding a TRT clinic and getting these tests would be your first steps. It is also important to keep in mind that these clinics do not give a shit about your health and are simply providing pharma grade test for access to your wallet. IF your levels are below the reference range, ONLY THEN is it even worth considering taking something with the androgenic capacity of Testosterone.
You are very lean, and taking anything like this WILL make you build muscle. Whether you want it to or not.
If you are hell bent on this as the solution, go get bloodwork done for a full Testosterone/hormone panel and post results, please. Getting your GH levels checked may also provide insight, or perhaps a better route to the solution you seek.
I promise you that every person here is truly advising what is best for you.
To show you that this advice is consistently given out to females looking for enhancement, I’m going to link this thread. First Female Cycle - Feedback Please
Very early on, you will see that OP was interested in test and that she too was dogpiled with advisement not to take Testosterone.
In the words of Obi Wan… “these are not the supplements you are looking for”.
Total T 144 ng/dl. Unfortunately her doc doesn’t check free T. But then again my doctor doesn’t either. Her doctor is a female urologist with many female patients on testosterone. Mostly pellets though.
I’m not advocating that you use testosterone. I would definitely recommend exhausting all other options first. There are several hormone replacement pages on Facebook, some specifically female. You could speak to other women about their experiences there.
You can. There’s hormone replacement therapy for women. This is usually done through a medical doctor which I would recommend.
As @antimadder suggested it’s a bit different for women than men. Women would start out by replacing estradiol (I think @hrdlvn s wife does this with great success). If that doesn’t work one can manipulate progesterone and testosterone. With testosterone you only take minute doses compared to men and you have to watch side effects.
What worries me is that you and your husband are still in the baby making years. Usually women start HRT during menopause or after. If you are not feeling well while having optimal hormones of a young woman, then the hormones are not the problem.
Testosterone gets converted to estradiol in the body. In the female body this is done by your ovaries and happens before the testosterone enters the bloodstream (it’s androstene to E1 really). Therefore if you take testosterone, your ovaries won’t produce it anymore but still convert it to E2. So taking any random dose won’t work because you’ll have your levels for 5 minutes and then the T gets converted to different stuff and excreted at a rate you don’t know. This is a delicate process and the dose should be handled by a physician.
Feeling like you are 14 again is also likely not a very positive outcome at later stages in life. Yes you’ll be more horny but that’s only one effect it will have on you.
If your hormones are fine and you are healthy then you should be able to get aroused often and you should also be able to handle life with no problems. HRT won’t make you feel like a superhuman.
Fertility wise it’s no different than a contraception pill, women usually recover well after shut down although it can take up to a year to get pregnant after stopping suppressive hormone treatment. For men it can be more problematic but is usually around the same time frame.
I did get tested and my Total Testosterone came back at 29 pg/mL (2-45 range) and Free Testosterone at 2.8 pg/mL (0.1-6.4 range). DHEA was decent at 150 (range up to 250, don’t remember units), but not great. My IGF-1 levels (my husband said that’s what you look at for GH) are low around 100 (50-330 range). All my other health markers are great. Thyroid is good also.
My husband said I have to look at Testosterone ranges by age group, and during a woman’s prime for T levels (late teenage years), the ranges are up to 70 pg/mL for Total Testosterone, and 15 pg/mL for Free Testosterone. So relative to prime levels, my Free Testosterone is pretty low and even for my age I’m below average.
I read the thread you linked, she was thinking of running a real cycle with Anavar every day and 50 mg per week (!) of Testosterone. Just to be clear, I was thinking of trying to take 0.5 mg per day (3.5 mg per week) to try to get my levels around 3/4 of the Free Testosterone range for a young woman, nothing more than that.
But I really appreciate your warnings and they’re definitely giving me pause. I love singing and don’t want my voice to start cracking or to deepen. My thinking was that it wouldn’t happen on such a small dose, but maybe that’s not true.
I could try DHEA first. Anecdotally, my husband started taking DHEA because his got really low after starting Testosterone treatment, and his Free T went up dramatically from 10 mg per day. It’s from a pharmacy though so maybe it’s more potent?
As far as reference points from my younger days, I unfortunately don’t have any blood tests from that time in my life.
My Total T came back at 29 pg/mL and Free T slightly below average for my age (but below the 25th percentile for an 18 yo woman). So I’m not all the way at the bottom, but definitely not great either
I don’t feel terrible. Mostly this would fall under optimization. I handle life fine, but “fine” is not my idea of a life worth living. I feel like I’m settling down more, I have less initiative and am less spontaneous, less likely to pick up on the weekend and go anywhere on an adventure, that kind of thing. My husband had also lost some of that “energy of life”, as I call it, but got a lot of it back with Testosterone. He now drives everything we do and I see myself lagging behind, finding excuses not to do things. I know it’s a natural part of aging, but I don’t want to accept slowly decaying like that if there’s a way not to.
To me (and to be clear, that’s just me I’m not judging anybody’s philosophy of life), what makes life exciting and worth living, is precisely that kind of initiative and spontaneity. When I look at older people who experience no more adventures and new things, it really depresses me. I never want to be like that, but no matter how I feel about it I understand there’s a chemical reality to it. It’s as inevitable as gravity. At least it used to be it seems, since I see my husband regaining some of that energy of youth. So I was thinking maybe I could take a very small dose (3.5 mg per week) and that would give me just enough of that youthful energy without negative side effects.
But…
…It seems it’s more complicated than that, haha. Would you mind expanding on this a bit? I vaguely understand but not completely.
Are you saying that taking even a very small dose would create hormonal imbalances and that I would inevitably find myself lacking certain hormones necessary for my well-being over time?
I was also a ballerina, and yes haha my calves are disproportionately defined for sure. Although we would never talk about our calves as bowling balls, how dare you?!
I assume his DHEA was injected rather than pill form, and if this is the case - it would be far more potent than any oral supplement. What id recommend for you is certainly the oral supplement available through any regular store - hell even Amazon has it.
Your levels are still very much in range, even though they may be a bit low on some scales. I am quite concerned that injecting Test would give you some bad side effects, and I still wouldn’t recommend getting TRT for females. Your IGF-1 levels being low can be supplemented with HGH if you’re really looking to take something, but it is expensive. I would still recommend HGH (or HRT via clinic) over test for sure.
With your levels in range, I see no justification for Testosterone at all, but HGH may not be a bad bet for you IMO. No virilization, no androgenic activity, better skin (cell turnover rate) and metabolism… sounds pretty solid to me.
It would also be worthwhile to look into pill form DHEA to boost your levels a bit without any real risk. MY wife takes a DHEA available for $15 on Amazon and its a 6 month supply… pretty low risk investment on both health and $$.
I don’t believe I have anything else to add here, I just hope you don’t take the risk with Test.
