If you're struggling with low libido and you're trying to figure out what's going on, and probably more importantly, how to fix it, this video is for you. Hi, my name is Lucas. I'm a yoga teacher, I'm a nutritional coach.
Clients often come to me during periods of stress, maybe they're taking a new medication, maybe they're sleeping badly, or who knows, but their libido has gone down and they'd like to do something to correct it. In this video we'll talk about what causes low libido, in both in men and women, we'll talk about testosterone ranges for men and women, and lastly we'll look at both lifestyle and some food supplement, vitamin interventions that can potentially help you find your way back to balance. As usual, I'll put a PDF link down below.
We'll be talking about milligrams, and international units, and a bunch of numbers, sometimes it's helpful to grab that reference that I'll drop down in the description below. A quick disclaimer: I am a nutritional coach, I am not a medical doctor. If you're dealing with a chronic problem, let's say three months or more, go get some blood work done, go see an endocrinologist, err on the side of caution.
It is possible that your low libido is a canary in a coal mine for something more serious. Please use this for educational purposes only. OK, what causes low libido?
If we went out into the population at large some of the biggest factors that are lowering people's libido would be stress and anxiety. When you have chronic stress and anxiety, not the intermittent stuff that we all suffer from, but when you're stressed longterm, that can potentially set off a domino effect with your hormones that can lead to a deprioritization of your sexual function. When you're chronically stressed, hormones like cortisol get elevated, your blood glucose gets elevated, your insulin gets elevated, and again, a deprioritization of sexual function can result.
It doesn't always result, but it can. The second one is sleep and it can have that same kind of effect where poor nights' sleep leads to chronic stress, leads to poor rehabilitation, and in many ways your body will simply allocate resources to other functions, other than your libido, for example. So, stress and anxiety, poor sleep, and the last one, this is a tricky one that people don't talk about enough, but less than ideal body composition.
If you've got a lot of extra body fat, this can screw up your hormonal profile and lead to low libido as well. I know that's a complex and a loaded topic to discuss, but it's something you need to put on the table. If you're overfat, not necessarily overweight, but overfat, this can be a really big factor in terms of messing up your libido.
When we talk about sex drive the conversation often, especially today, revolves around testosterone, and testosterone, both in men and in women, is a major factor, but it's not necessarily the factor. It depends on who you are, it depends on your age, and it really depends on your levels. Remember that libido is physiological, but it's also psychological.
If you're wondering if your low libido is connected to insecurity, or past trauma, or psychological distress, I would trust your gut and go see a therapist, explore those options. It's just as likely that it's psychological as it's physiological. Before we move on, I just want to make sure we don't reduce this conversation to pills and potions and blood tests.
Because for you it might be something a lot more cerebral and emotional. OK, but let's now talk about blood tests. If your problem is related to testosterone, or if you'd like to check it out, it's probably a smart thing to do.
Go get some blood work done, get your total testosterone as well as your free testosterone checked. Many people people think about testosterone only as total T, but your free T is the amount that you have available right now, and especially when you feel these ebbs and flows with your drive, that can often be related to your free T. Men obviously have a lot more testosterone than women.
A healthy range is often between 300 to 1,000 nanograms per deciliter for men, whereas women might have anywhere from 15 to 70 nanograms per deciliter, and this is total T, so you'd want to check that number. The second number which a lot of people don't test for, in fact you might have to ask your doctor to include that on your panel, is your free testosterone. You can have high total T, but you don't have access to it because it's all locked up, and if your free T levels are lacking that can really keep you stuck.
When you hear about people doing things that in the short term increase their libido, very often they're manipulating their free T. Their total T number, that can change too, but very often their free T is the number that's being manipulated. So, you want want to look at both of them.
In men, we might have a range, a reference range for free testosterone anywhere from 45 all the way up to 245 picograms per milliliter. Whereas for women, very, very low 0. 1 maybe up to six or a little bit more picograms per milliliter.
So, a very, very different range. But it can make all the difference in the world for both men and women with their drive. Now, whether your testosterone is low, or if your free T is low, again it may or may not be affecting your libido, but it's really important to understand that the most proven interventions for increasing T levels, both free T and total T, are things that you have control over, like strength training at least two days per week, a 25-26% plus increase in your testosterone levels.
For example, decreasing stress and anxiety, getting a better night's sleep, and improving your body composition, so lowering your body fat, that one of course is a lot more challenging, but if you were to look at the most effective interventions you should prioritize those things before you look at pills, or potions, or anything else that we will talk about. Let's put testosterone to the side now and let's talk specifically about some nutritional supplements that you might find. If you were in traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, or if you were in any Western country and went into a herbal shop or a nutritional store and started looking on the shelves, probably one in five products seems to claim that it will increase your libido.
And it seems like everything from chocolate to oysters to celery, and everything from ginseng to maca to tribulus is supposed to increase your libido. But, obviously, everything can't work, but clearly some things do work. So, what's going on?
The first thing to remember is that most of these things that you find in Ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, or in just alternative Western medicine, many of these things are not really affecting your testosterone levels, they're working on other pathways that we don't really understand so well. Why are they not researched more? Probably because there's not a lot of money.
A lot of these things are very inexpensive, easy to find, and nobody really has the incentive. Hopefully, as time goes on, people will explore them more. The other thing I want to mention is just because these are inexpensive, just because they come from plants, just because they're sold without a prescription, doesn't mean they come without risks.
Now, the risks are very low, but the thing you need to worry about number one is gastrointestinal distress, and not enough people talk about this. If you have a really great supplement that's increasing your libido, but you're making orchestral sounds in the bedroom because you have gastrointestinal distress, well that kind of defeats the purpose, right? So the number one thing you need to think about is can my stomach handle this?
And for a lot of things there's a scaling up process. You want to start off by taking a much smaller dose, take it with meals, let your body adjust, and I will warn you, some of these things your body just won't tolerate, you need to be open to that fail rate. The second thing to remember is that many of these things can, not necessarily, but they can put stress on your liver or your kidneys, for example, in the same way that something like a beer or a glass of wine could put stress on your organs of cleansing as well.
So, that's something you want to take a look at. And some things like we'll talk about today, like maca, these are goitrogens and so they could potentially affect your thyroid as well. Now, safety and efficacy around these is very, very high, I wouldn't be overly concerned.
But you should let your doctor know what you're taking. You might have interactions with certain drugs and medications, and depending on your condition, it might be something to take a look at. OK, with all that out of the way, we'll start off by talking about maca and I'm going to present these in order of suggestion.
Obviously this is just a partial list, there are literally hundreds of different things we could talk about. The reason I want to talk about maca is because of the anecdotal efficacy that you will find of people using it. Maca is Peruvian, it's from the Andes.
It's a root vegetable. You can look on Google and find pictures of it - it looks like a turnip. There's actually a number of different types of maca.
There is white maca, and black maca, and brown maca, and other colors as well. In terms of the potency, or the differences between them, people have different ideas. I personally haven't found a difference, except what I'm showing you here, this is called gelatinized maca.
And that doesn't mean there's gelatin in it. It's gelatinized in that they pull out a bunch of the insoluble fibers and you really want that. If you have pure maca root this will guarantee you will spend half the day on the toilet.
This gelatinized stuff is pretty well tolerated, the taste is pretty mild, it's pretty easy, pretty palatable to eat, and it's really, really effective. Now, can you take this forever? Probably not.
Can you take any of these things forever? Probably not. Why?
Tolerance level goes up and efficacy drops pretty quickly. I often use the analogy of coffee. If you're new to coffee, you will be amazed by the energy you have.
In fact, if you want to objectively measure your physical performance, in the short term, you'll probably actually perform a little bit better. But that initial period wears off pretty quickly, within 12 weeks or so it'll stop having an effect at all. Very similar to all of these things we'll chat about.
So, oftentimes you would cycle on and cycle off and think about this as a short-term way to find balance. When you're using maca the simplest thing to do is to start off by adding it to water, and you would be working with probably around one to two grams per day of maca. But I would encourage you to start off really small, like with 500 milligrams and then work your way up.
You can mix it with water, put it in a smoothie, and it's really, really effective both for men and women. What has the research shown? Does it increase testosterone?
No. Does it increase sperm count? Pretty interesting research, maybe, yes.
Does it increase libido in men and women? Pretty good data, both anecdotally and with studies that it does. And this comes from a plant, it's just a ground up root that's been gelatinized, it's a pretty safe one to start with, really inexpensive also.
The next one I'd like to talk about is getting a lot of press right now online. It's been around for a long time but different things have different media cycles. This is called tongkat ali.
I've deliberately whited out all these labels because this is not a brand endorsement, I just want to show you these real products, but I don't want to endorse any particular brand. Tongkat ali is often referred to as Malaysian ginseng. It's been used for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
It comes in this yellow powder form. This is allegedly a 100 to one concentration. This is the strongest stuff I've ever found.
Is it really 100 to one concentration? I don't know. How potent is it?
How potent are any of these things? It's really hard to know, which is one of the challenges with herbal supplements in general. When things have been extracted and concentrated, we don't really know.
What I do know is that tongkat ali, aka Malaysian ginseng, aka longjack, has two really big problems. The first one is heavy metal toxicity. For whatever reason, it's very difficult to find tongkat ali that is free of heavy metals and this is why you'll have a difficult time finding it online.
A lot of big platforms like Amazon and other sellers have actually banned it in the short term as they're trying to figure out heavy metal free forms of tongkat ali. I don't know if it has to do with the growing or the groundwater in Malaysia, where it's grown, but it's a very big problem, a very real problem. That's problem number one.
Problem number two is unless this is in capsules the taste of this is so awful that I've quite literally vomited immediately after drinking it multiple times. It is terrible, it's absolutely terrible. Now, once it goes down it sits in your stomach pretty fine if you take it with food, but getting it down is a real challenge without capsules.
When you're looking for it right now you'll have a really difficult time finding it. A typical dosage for what I'm taking here, this stronger, let's say 50 to one, 100 to one, anywhere from 200 to 500 milligrams per day. What have people noticed?
Well, the research is really mixed. There's some compelling research that shows that it might increase your testosterone in the short term. In the long term we don't really know, but tongkat ali, longjack, if you get your hands on it and you feel like it's heavy metal free, might be something to consider.
OK, the next one is another very, very common one that you'll hear in the bodybuilding community and it's called tribulus. And you'll hear bodybuilders online stating that it increases your testosterone levels and the research behind this is pretty clear that's a big zero, it does not. However, tribulus has been used in Ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, and all throughout the West for a lot of time, for a very long time.
And the anecdotal research is pretty clear that it does, in fact, increase your libido. It's inexpensive, relatively simple to try, and usually around a gram a day of an extract is what people are experimenting with. Again, keep in mind just because these are safe and natural, doesn't mean it's not going to upset your stomach, doesn't mean it's not going to mess with your liver and kidney functions.
These are not toxins, they're not renal toxins, but you should be warned and be careful. This is something you might experiment with as well. Very easy to find, very, very inexpensive.
OK, the last category, I'm going to call these nutritional dominoes and these are things that don't directly affect libido, but because of their effects on other systems they can have this domino effect where they can lead to positive outcomes in terms of your drive. The first one gets a lot of press and that is ashwagandha. Ashwagandha is a traditional Ayurvedic remedy, it's been used for literally thousands of years.
And what it does, and this is clinically, the data is pretty solid, it reduces your cortisol levels. When you reduce your cortisol levels oftentimes your body is able to allocate resources to other areas. So, sometimes when you see cortisol levels go down, not always, but sometimes your T levels will go up.
This is why you'll hear bodybuilders talking about ashwagandha. Don't get excited, if you take this I promise you will not grow giant biceps. However, it can be an interesting thing to try, especially when you have stress.
The solution to stress is not taking ashwagandha every single day, remember these are interventions, you take them in the short term, for a couple of weeks, 12 weeks max, and then you need to cycle off. Why? Because your body has these hormonal cycles and when you start to dampen down your own cortisol you can screw up other dominoes that can lead to other things.
But in the short term, ashwagandha is relatively well-tolerated. Do pay attention to your own reaction. It's very inexpensive and easy to find.
You might start with around a gram a day, concentrations do vary, but just to give you an idea. OK, these last two that we'll talk about, these are things that you could take every day, these are actually vitamins. The first one is vitamin D3.
As we learned during the pandemic, the vast majority of us in most countries are vitamin D deficient. It's very, very easy to supplement, very inexpensive to supplement, most people don't supplement nearly enough. I would recommend vitamin D3 10,000 international units per day.
You can get your blood tested every six months, every year. I've yet to meet anyone who over-supplemented on vitamin D and I've seen a lot of different blood panels. I've been taking 10,000 international units for three, four years, my vitamin D levels on my blood test are just above the normal range, just barely above normal range, nowhere near excessive.
Everyone is different. This is a fat-soluble vitamin, it is possible to have toxicity, but it's very, very rare. Vitamin D is a vitamin, but it's also a prohormone, so it's going to help with hormonal balance in general.
It's correlated with positive endocrine balance, positive libido. The last one we'll talk about is zinc. Specifically for men, it has been correlated with healthy levels of T, and you might think about taking 25 milligrams per day.
A quick warning here - when you take mineral supplements it can be hard on your belly, start off slow, you might break the tablet in half, you might take it with food and see how you go. Vitamin D and zinc, you could take these daily as part of your regime, I have done that for years. These other things, you want to cycle on and off and use sparingly, as needed.
Hope you found this video helpful. Again, down below grab that reference, the PDF, I'll list all of these, which of course, is just just a few of the things you'll find out there in the wild at the nutritional store. I'll also put reference ranges for your T levels, if you do get your blood work done.
If you'd like more science-based videos, hit subscribe down below. If you have experience with any of these, if they worked or didn't work for you, if they give you disaster pants, or if they worked, I would love to hear from you down in the comments below. You can always find my teaching calendar at yogabody.
com, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
