26 year old male with odd symptoms

I am 26 years old and seem to have odd symptoms for my age, loss of sex drive, no morning erections.  I am trying to see if there is a way to reboot my system or find out what kind of test I can take to determine the cause of this.  I would hate to continue living with out my sex drive at this age forward.  I would work out daily take proteins and pre-workouts and little by little I started to lose the drive to do any of those things.  If there is something you recommend or a test that can help me get back to my normal self I’d really appreciate it a lot.
     – Eddie

There’s really no way to reboot your system.  If you came to me with these symptoms, the first test I would do is a saliva test for testosterone.  If it is low at 26, I would recommend seeing your doctor to get a prolactin level.  If the prolactin level is high, it may indicate an underlying problem that is causing low testosterone production at 26 years old.  I don’t do prolactin levels.  If prolactin comes back normal, and testosterone is low, then we can supplement.

Most likely, your testosterone level is going to come back normal.  You may be extra sensitive to the surrounding xenoestrogens in the environment.  These are man-made, estrogen-like chemicals that cause estrogen-like effects in the body.  In men, they will competitively block out your testosterone from binding.  Also, they will increase your sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG).  Sex hormone binding globulin will bind to testosterone and acts as a checks and balances system in the body.  Too much hormone and your SHBG goes up, too little and SHBG goes down.  That is very simplified but basically that’s how it works.  If it is increased because you are sensitive to the xenoestrogens, more testosterone will be bound and unusable by the body.  So your total testosterone will look good on a blood test, but your free testosterone will be low on a saliva test.  There are ways to lower SHBG but you have to test to check SHBG level before you go messing with it.

You may also convert testosterone more readily to estrogen.  So your balance could be tipped in favor of estrogen.  Again, testing is the only way to know on this.  You could have normal testosterone but high estrogen and you’d have the symptoms of low testosterone.  This can be solved with medication also.

Now, you mentioned that you would work out daily and then lose drive.  Your could easily be over training if you don’t know what you’re doing.  In this case, your cortisol is going up because of the stress involved in training too much, blocking out your testosterone from binding.  Again, your levels appear normal but you’re not getting the binding to cells that you need because of the high cortisol.

I can’t recommend anything without testing first.  When you’re training, you’re stressing out your body and your diet has to have enough calories and nutrients in it to rebuild.  Again, it’s a vicious cycle and we would need to eliminate causes stepwise, one at a time, until we come up with something.