Fat is Turning You Girly

It is common knowledge to the astute reader that testosterone is a male sex hormone and estrogen is a female sex hormone. Therefore, it stands to reason that as men trying to achieve ultimate masculinity, we should be optimizing our testosterone and estrogen hormonal levels accordingly. 

Testosterone and estrogen molecules are related to each other in that your body aromatizes (or converts) testosterone to estrogen to keep them in balance. In fact, bodybuilders and other exogenous steroid users will use an "aromatase inhibitor" or AI to prevent the conversion. Skipping or misdosing your AI is a major cause of gynecomastia, or breast tissue growth, in men who take steroids. 

Outside of taking some kind of pharmacologic substance like an AI, we can modulate our body's rate of aromatization through more organic means. This means we can keep our testosterone higher and our estrogen lower naturally. The key lies in reducing our excess body fat. In fact, "going from obese to just overweight could potentially raise testosterone levels in men [...] by 13 percent".  This is because of "overexpression of aromatase in the adipose tissue" which causes "obese individuals [to] exhibit increased estrogen concentrations". In other words, the more body fat you have, the faster your testosterone gets turned into estrogen. This effect is not overstated; fat tissue is the "primary site of estrogen production [...] in men".

In addition to the insidious effect of fat tissue testosterone aromatization, excess body fat has a direct effect on our masculinity. "[Fat] men present with symptoms of hypogonadotropic hypogonadism", which is the medical term for having testicles that produce little to no sex hormone. Put another way, when you have too much body fat, you run the risk of barely making any testosterone to begin with and then having that testosterone quickly converted into estrogen!

GREGER, MICHAEL. “The Problem.” How Not to Diet: The Groundbreaking Science of Healthy, Permanent Weight Loss, BLUEBIRD, S.l., 2021, pp. 40–40.