Lifting is essential for a man. It is his second most important tool, and it supports his most important tool - his mind. The state of your mind is inseparable from the state of your body. Your body's health determines your hormones, which determine your mood.

The hormones Testosterone, Cortisol, and Thyroid hormones are the focus of this post. Testosterone improves focus, energy, and confidence, and a lack of it results in feminine characteristics like whining, self-pity, and mercy. Lifting raises Testosterone.

Cortisol is a stress hormone, produced in response to stress, and it is the antithesis of Testosterone. It causes fatigue, poor sleep, brain fog, weight gain, low sex drive, and it even eats your muscles. Lifting raises cortisol.

So if lifting raises Testosterone, but it also raises cortisol, then what in the fuck do you do? You have to eat. Calories raise Testosterone, but lower Cortisol, and without enough food you're fucked.

If you want build to muscle and train hard, you need to eat alot. This means lots of carbs. Low carb diets are not bulking diets. They lower Testosterone because carb restriction raises Cortisol, and lowers Thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone determines Testosterone. We will come back to this. You will probably need to eat some junk food to get enough calories. Do what you need to to get it in.

On the subject of protein: It doesn't raise Testosterone. You don't need a fuckload, unless you're promoting a supplement company. You will never need more than 1 gram per pound of LEAN body mass (estimate your weight with 0 bodyfat).

Why do you need to eat so much? Because you need to avoid overtraining / underrecovering. Why? Because you will destroy your testosterone and jack the shit out of your cortisol if you don't. This means you will feel sad, have less sex drive, be tired, and eventually grow a vagina, even though you pray at the Iron Temple.

It's pretty self explanatory what overtraining / underrecovering means, but it is much harder to actually catch it happening to yourself. Lots of guys will tell you to lift if you're sore, or you feel like shit, and push yourself, and go to failure, no pain no gain, man. Those guys are on steroids or they are gifted athletes, because normal people can't do that shit. When you under recover, the first thing you'll notice is that you start to feel some anxiety or depression after your workouts, or when you wake up the day after lifting. It will then become hard to fall asleep, and stay asleep. Your body temperature will begin dropping, eventually you'll get cold hands and feet, and you'll probably contemplate suicide. Oh, and you will stop making gains, and eventually you'll start going down in all your lifts.

People that do this shit long term end up with low Thyroid hormone(hypothyroidism), which means you need to do some serious thinking. You can tell you have low Thyroid hormone by your body temperature. If it is lower than 97.5 in the morning, you are frequently cold, and you wake up to pee in the middle of the night, and you are fatigued and find it hard to focus, then you got the low Thyroid. Thyroid determines your Testosterone, so many of the symptoms are the same. What you need is a prolonged refeed, and some Iodine (15-30 Mg of Nascent Iodine, or 25-50mg of a Lugols type solution with Iodide). Iodine is absolutely critical for treating low Thyroid. You need lots of carbs, and calories.

If you are looking to cut, things change a little. First off, don't even think about cutting if you wake up in the morning with a temperature below 98.3. You need to heal your Thyroid or you can't keep weight off. To actually lose, you need a slight calorie deficit, but it should not be very large. The larger the deficit, the lower your Testosterone, and the higher your Cortisol. And the more you exercise in a calorie deficit, the worse it gets. You cannot exercise like you are bulking if you are cutting. You need SIGNIFICANTLY less intensity when you cut. Training to failure is out of the question.

The only time you should go strict low-carb is if you're doing zero exercise, and you should never go below 100-150g, depending on your size, or you'll end up like low-carb blogger Jimmy Moore. You should feel optimistic 100% of the time. If you don't, you're doing it wrong.

I'm not supplying links to studies, because most nutrition studies are manufactured bullshit and there are literally studies 'proving' every viewpoint. I've acquired my knowledge through years of reading and trial and error, and it took me years to really understand my training capacity and how much food impacts my performance in the gym, and out of the gym. I started lifting with low T/Thyroid years ago, and have only recently amended the issue, without relying on a doctor to provide me with expensive drugs. I've come to realize that calories are a cure for many issues that are often left untreated. If you want your genes to express themselves in a healthy way then you need to feed them right.

Edit: This post isn't about debating 50g carb verse 100g. It's about finding balance between stress and relief. Carbs, calories, and rest (also salt, btw) = relief. Low-carb, exercise, and calorie restriction = stressors. If you are putting stressors on yourself and feeling bad / not making progress, then perhaps you have too many stressors and need some relief.