Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - 204. What They Don't Warn You About Peptides and Steroids | EP. 0204

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Is jumping on peptides and steroids worth the risk? Let's talk about it.42% OFF - Get your Digital Man Up book + Audiobook + 2 Exclusive MASTERCLASSES https://bit.ly/manuptribeOPEN A FIT BODY LOCATIONA High-Profit, Scalable Gym Franchise Opportunity Driven By Impacthttps://bit.ly/bedrosfbb

Who wants to live a suboptimal life because, oh, I'm over the hill and it's too late for me. And I'm just going to have to live with broken down body and having low energy and being fatigued and foggy headed and depressed all the time. You don't need that, brother. You don't. Welcome to the Bedroskoolian show. Here's what they don't warn you about peptides and testosterone. Guys, welcome to the Bedroskoolian show. My name is Bedroskulian.

And I'm going to tell you right now, in my mid to late 20s, I have been. abused steroids and testosterone. I did. And guess what? They work. They work. They make you strong. They make you leaner. They make you more athletic. Recovery is faster. You get an overall sense of well-being, all of that stuff. High libido and sex drive. All of it, all of it, all of it, all of it. However, it also comes with a lot of risk, especially when you're abusing testosterone and steroids. For example, I had cystic acne in my early 20s, mid-20s, all the way into my late 20s. I almost throughout the entire 20s, I think I started taking testosterone to competitively build muscle and strength to get into powerlifting meats by the age of 22. By 29 is when I stopped.

And I can tell you with 100% clarity and certainty and transparency, I did not stop at all. I don't recall ever stopping in those eight years that I used steroids. And I used large amounts of it. Not only did I use injectable testosterone and stuff that I bought from Mexico, like Cestinon 250. I stacked multiple things and even took orals like Diana Ball and anadrol 50 and Winstrawl and things that would obviously help benefit me in building muscle. Now, did I get side effects?

Yeah, I got cystic acne from it. I got high blood pressure from it. I was oftentimes very quick to anger. And the thing that got me worried the most was when I started to get jaundice in my late 20s. And I started to notice that the whites in my eyes were turning yellow. And that is when I actually went to a doctor to get a blood test done. And they started to notice that my liver enzyme values were too high.

And when your liver stops processing the way it's supposed to because your liver is your body's filtration system along with your kidneys, you begin to develop. up jaundice, right? You have toxicity that stays in your body instead of getting filtered out, and you could see it in the whites of your eyes when they turn yellow, not the best thing. So you're like, well, Pedro, uh, clearly the, the topic of this episode being what they don't warn you about peptides and testosterone replacement therapy, uh, that's the stuff, right? No, not really. Because like I told you, I was taking a ton of this stuff for prolonged period of time without running any blood labs and without looking for any red flags because I was mission focused as a young,

dumb man on getting big, strong, and lifting heavy. Now, today I'm in 52. I'm 52 years old. I'm in my early 50s and I've been taking TRT testosterone replacement well since my early 40s. So all throughout my 30s I stopped taking testosterone and 41. all the way to the end of 42 is when I started taking testosterone because I noticed specific things that were not favorable in my life, right? Quality of life was suffering. So you're probably thinking, hey, Bezos, you know, there's these telehealth testosterone companies. You go, you do blood draw, they measure your testosterone levels of T levels are low.

They'll put you on TRT. Cool. Hey, listen, I'm all for it. I'm on testosterone right now. And I'm on peptides right now. However, however, I'm going to tell you what you ought to consider doing. and what you should know before you get on testosterone and peptides. And I'm not a doctor, but I do track my health optimization fiercely.

I am self-educated. And then I have very awesome and intelligent, smart people who look after my health. Like Dr. Gabriel Lyon is my own personal doctor. Dr. Doug Lucas, a dear friend and coaching client, is also looking after my health and advising me. And then Trevor Bachmeier, like one of the. number one authorities on peptides on social media and YouTube like the guy knows more about peptides than most people other than researchers researchers would know. In fact, doctors reach out to him all the time trying to learn about peptide use. And then my dear friend Todd Gets, who is,

you should look all these people up and follow them by the way. They're all authorities on health optimization. And many of them will tell you like don't use testosterone, TRT and peptides unless you do the things I'm about to share with you here. And that is what we mean to talk about because you might need testosterone. You might need peptides, especially if you are feeling lethargic. If you are feeling lazy, if all of a sudden you've kind of lost your sex drive, if you're maybe having some mood issues, if you're working out and you're not recovering fast enough, right?

These are all indicators. I can tell you that I experienced all of those things in my late 30s all the way to, you know, end of, you know, my 41st year of life. And I was like, you know what? I better have my test levels checked because I've, I've done all that I can naturally and nothing seems to be working. And I can tell you that I ruined my endocrine system in my mid to late 20s by abusing steroids and testosterone. And therefore, my body doesn't produce it naturally like it should have, right? So because of that, my ignorance should not be something that you don't learn from. It should be something that you should take as a cautionary tale when I was a young man so that you know what to do.

And if you're in your, you know, 40s and 50s and even 60s right now and you're like, I'm considering taking testosterone and going to give a blood draw, it's a lot more than a blood draw. So hear me out. So like I said, you might be experiencing a various amount of things and while you're considering testosterone. Cool. Your body's not recovering well.

You're not sleeping well. Your sex drive is low. Your mood is jacked up. You know, all those things, right? But then you take. you take a blood draw through some telehealth company and, and I'm not knocking these telehealth companies. Some are very reputable, but most will just send you to go get a blood draw. They'll take a look at your free testosterone levels and your testosterone levels and your blood testosterone levels, and

they'll go, hey, your test levels are low. And so we're going to prescribe you testosterone. What they don't really check for is to see if there's any red flags and risks, right? For example, Are your liver enzymes high? Are your kidney enzymes high? Is your cholesterol high? Is your thyroid functioning at an ideal capacity? Where's your estrogen levels, right? What is your prostate levels?

Your PSA? What about your hemoglobin levels? Your red blood cells? Are they already naturally high? Because if they are, testosterone is going to jack it up and bring it even higher. And so if you don't check for all these other risk factors before you get, on testosterone replacement therapy, you might actually already have some of these precursors and red flags, not know it.

You're just on testosterone because they said, hey, your testosterone levels are low, but they didn't check all the other stuff because they are incentivized to sell testosterone. And look, this is coming from a guy who's on testosterone replacement right now, right? And I've been on it since the age of 42. I'm 52 now. So for a decade, I've been on it. But the amount that I'm taking right now, such a trivial, tiny amount, one cc of testosterone a sip and eight a week split between two shots, right? So I think a half a CC on Monday, half a

cc on a Friday. And then on top of that, there's three peptides that I continue to use on a regular basis. And I explain all that to you so that maybe you want to optimize your health too. But before you do all that, go get a blood draw done and have the doctor, if the telehealth company says, hey, all we look is for testosterone levels and that's it. Go find another doctor, your primary care physician or find a better doctor online who could read your blood draw results and check all those things liver kidney cholesterol thyroid estrogen prostate hemoglobin right make sure that all these things are fine look you don't want to increase the risk of prostate cancer if your PSA levels are already naturally high right so why not have that checked because testosterone

could doesn't mean it does but it could increase all those levels and if you're think about this Maybe you're having thyroid issues. Maybe all you need is thyroid supplements or you need thyroid medication depending how fucked up your thyroid is, right? Maybe your thyroid is messed up and that's why you're feeling lethargic and you don't have a lot of energy and your estrogen is naturally high, but your testosterone is fine. And so your estrogen just needs to be lowered instead of your testosterone increased, right? There's two ways to go about it.

You can increase your testosterone levels or you can lower your estrogen levels if your estrogen is high and your testosterone is low or your testosterone is good, not necessarily low. But I shared this with you because there's way too many factors to go into this blindly. And because I give a shit about you, I want to tell you how to do this the right way. And the most important thing, even before any kind of baseline blood draw, is to actually optimize yourself first. And there's six factors that you want to optimize first. And I did that. I did that in my mid-30s, probably 35, 36, 37. And for about three years, I was able to stay off of testosterone replacement therapy.

but ultimately it caught up with me. Those things are nutrition. Think about this. If you're not optimized, what's the point of getting on testosterone, especially if you're not giving yourself enough protein to be able to rebuild the muscles, right? If right now you're not taking in enough protein and you're exercising, so you're not recovering fast enough because there's not enough amino acids in your body,

you ought to consider fixing your nutrition first. Figure out what your macros should be, your proteins, fats, and carbs. for your specific goal and to achieve the body leanness and body mass that you want and attack those macros like optimize your nutrition and then optimize your training is my training conducive to the nutrition that I'm eating and to the results that I'm looking for if your training is dialed in then the next step is your sleep your sleep has so much to do about how much hormones your body pumps out how much growth hormone your body pumps out how much testosterone it pumps out and how well you recover after a workout, right?

So if you're getting shitty sleep, you're not sleeping enough or you're sleeping, you're tossing and turning because you might have sleep apnea, or you're taking too many stimulants, caffeine, energy drinks, whatever, and you're not sleeping well. All of those factors because of sleep are causing you to lower your testosterone levels and therefore not recovering. you can fix those things, right? Your sleep should be consistent. Get your seven and a half to eight hours a night, seven days a week, and try and sleep at the

same time and wake up at the same time. And then you got to manage your stress. Can you manage your stress? Because if you can manage your stress, you're going to reduce your cortisol levels, which is going to have a massive impact on healthy testosterone levels, right? And if you can manage your stress, do it, right? And then there's supplementation. There's probably some supplements.

that you can take to help give you an edge. Vitamin D, zinc, and other things like that can increase your testosterone naturally. In fact, if you take the Trulian Wellness Shot, the everyday wellness shot that we sell, it's already got your daily supply of zinc and vitamin D. Now you should get out there and get some sun as well. Because when you get sun, yet another proven factor of naturally increasing your testosterone levels and naturally decreasing cortisol levels, your stress hormone. So why not go out there and get some sun and take the supplements that you need by getting a simple blood draw or just figuring out doing a search on what supplements increase natural testosterone levels, right?

And then if you've done that, then you consider your lifestyle factors. Like are you drinking alcohol? Are you smoking so much weed where your body's pumping out all this estrogen and suppressing testosterone? Because if you're drinking alcohol, your body has to stop recovery, has to stop building muscle. to get rid of the poison out of your body, right? I know you hate when I talk about stopping alcohol, but the reality is alcohol is toxic. It's poison to your brain, to your kidney,

to your bloodstream, to your heart, and to your liver. Therefore, your body stops all metabolic, not stops necessarily, but slows down. All metabolic function, building muscle, burning fat, recovery, lowering stress, and just focuses on getting the poison out of your body. Even if you're a social drinker, you just have a couple of drinks a week, that's what you're doing, is you're retarding, your retard your progress in burning fat and building muscle. Guys, quick break from the show to tell you all about this.

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And so if you could fix your lifestyle factors, so that you have a higher quality of life. Reduce weed or eliminate weed. Reduce alcohol or better yet eliminate alcohol. Go outside and walk for 20 minutes in the sun, right? Get those steps in. Other lifestyle factors might include what kind of processed food you're eating. Eat natural foods that your grandma,

if your grandma read the nutrition label, like she'd be like, I understand the ingredients on that label. Those are the things to eat. If it's fucking words or grandma couldn't pronounce and understand, it's probably so overly processed that again, just like alcohol, your body has to eliminate the toxins and the inflammation that comes from those processed foods you're eating and the energy drinks that you're taking in. Lifestyle factors also include the high amounts of sugar that you're consuming, right? The average American today is taking in eight times more sugar than your grandma's generation did. Like, that's insane.

You're probably borderline diabetic and you don't even know it. Your insulin spikes happen and all of a sudden you start falling asleep and the answer to you is, I better go get my two o'clock energy drink or Starbucks coffee when in reality you just need to reduce your sugar intake. And so again, if you track those six factors, nutrition, training, sleep, stress, supplements and lifestyle, you might have a healthy boost in testosterone and a reduction in cortisol, the stress hormones. Now, if you've done all that, right, and you've done the blood draw, and you've checked for all those risk factors that we listed off, and you're like, dude, nothing else is working and I still can't increase my testosterone level to a place where I feel healthy, I feel motivated, I feel like I'm clearheaded.

My libido is strong. I wake up with a morning erection and I feel like clearheaded and not depressed. Then, bro, get on testosterone, right? That might be the time once you're optimized or taking in enough proteins to rebuild the muscles that you're going to break down when you're working out. Some of you aren't even working out. You're not even eating right. It's like going to a construction site and just digging and digging and digging with all the equipment, but never bringing in any lumber, any concrete, any rebar, any glass to actually build the building. Sleep, nutrition, stress reduction, water, all those things.

the supplementation, those are all of the building blocks of the hormones that you need to start rebuilding your body and burning fat as you build muscle. And so the reason I share this with you guys is many of you are of the mindset that when someone takes testosterone, especially TRT, you're like, oh, I see. The reason you're in shape is because you're on TRT. No, no. There was times that I was taking, just to give me an idea, I take 250 milligrams of testosterone a week right now. During the peak times when I was competing in powerlifting in my

mid-20s, I was taking 750 to 850 milligrams of testosterone combined. And if I didn't have a clean diet, yes, I would get stronger, but you wouldn't see muscle definition. You wouldn't see abs like I have today where I'm using like a fraction of what I used. The reason I have abs, the reason I'm leaner. The reason I'm more functional is because I focus on function when I'm exercising. I focus on mobility and flexibility. I'm doing cardiovascular training and jujitsu to burn fat. I'm monitoring my nutrition like a hawk. I'm taking the least amount of testosterone I can take to produce the best amount of positive results. On top of that, I use peptides. Because again, once I've optimized and I've created an environment that my body can use the nutrition

in the supplementation, like for example, you hear about peptides like BPC 157, TB 500, Tessimorellin, Mott C, all of those things are useful once you optimize your body first. If you're not getting your sleep and you're stressed to hell, like you can ask all these people, Dr. Gabriel, Dr. Doug Lucas, Trevor Bachmeier, Todd gets, you can ask them all. If you're not sleeping well and you are not managing your stress, those things aren't going to work as well. The BPC 157 and the TB 500, right, that's designed to help you heal from an injury, they're not going to work well if you're not getting enough protein and collagen in. So not only do I take 200 grams of protein a day, but I take two scoops of collagen a day.

That helps me provide the building blocks for the BPC and the TB 500 to do the work. I get my sleep and I keep my stress managed so that the MOTC can actually help rebuild my mitochondria. so I can have the energy that I need, right? And then a couple times a year, I'm either on two I use of growth hormone or I'm taking Tessimorellin, which naturally gets my pituitary gland to produce growth hormone.

These are the things that I use to optimize my body beyond the stuff that I could do through nutrition, sleep, lifestyle, et cetera, right? And if you're not doing those things, and you're going to have to find yourself using more of the peptides, using more testosterone, and starting to use more stimulants, thinking that that will make you better. It won't. It will just increase the risk of kidney, liver, prostate, hemoglobin issues. Too much red blood cells? Your blood gets thicker. It's like an

engine that has really thick oil in it and you start it. That thick oil doesn't get to all the gears as quickly as it should with thinner oil. In other words, blood that doesn't have so many red blood cells, and therefore you start grinding your gears and eventually breaking down that engine sooner, right? You have a higher chance of a blood clot in your brain as a stroke or near your heart as a heart attack if you have too many red blood cells. And so the idea here is not to take as much testosterone as I need to feel great. So what is the least amount of testosterone can I take on a TRT program? By the way, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a physician.

These aren't recommendations of dosage that you should take. I'm just telling you what works for me and what I've heard from these experts who literally seek to my, like look after my health. And I share that with you because I do so much massive research, man. And if you want to be healthy, you want to be optimized mentally, physically, you want to be flexible and functional and strong with the least amount of peptides and testosterone use, optimize, optimize, optimize first. Right?

And when you do, the next thing is, every 90 days, I'm doing a blood draw. I do a blood draw. Then I get on the phone with Dr. Gabrielle. She reads through everything for me and I go through it myself with her. All right. Red blood cells are up. Go donate blood. Cool, right?

I get to not only help because I also got a rare blood type. So not only do I get to help by donating blood, I get rid of red blood cells to help improve my health. Right? And that's the cool thing about it. I don't have to worry about are my kidney levels and liver levels and prostate levels high or not because every 90 days we get to track it. And then we have years of history now from every 90 days apart. And it's crazy, but you can see the times that I was stressed, the times that I was

not sleeping well, my lifestyle factors would literally show up in my blood lab results. It's insane. If you think lifestyle factors don't have any bearing on your blood draw results, I'm telling you they do. As someone that's been tracking my blood draw results four times a year, three to four times a year, sometimes I'll skip a blood draw. I'm going to be honest with you guys. I'm never going to feed you bullshit.

But as someone who gets a blood draw three to four times a year and has been tracking it for almost a decade now, I could see a pattern of like, oh, yeah, I was stressed. I wasn't sleeping well. Cortisol was high, right? And then your body might be, you might have one of those bodies where you take a little bit of TRT and your estrogen goes up. Well, guess what? Your doctor can actually prescribe you something to lower your estrogen levels so that you have a healthy balance of testosterone to estrogen levels. There's so many more factors than just taking TRT and thinking you're going to get

jacked and you're going to have high libido and all of a sudden the brain fog is going to go away and then you're going to be motivated and inspired. No, man, you've got to optimize. And by the way, the older you get, the more these things matter. You catch when I'm pitching. So what do you need to know? Ain't nothing wrong with peptides and TRT. I'm here to tell you that. Because for decades, the medical industry will track a woman's estrogen levels, especially as she goes into menopause, and they'll do that for free. It's a free blood draw.

We'll track it, and then we'll get you on estrogen, we'll get you on medication and hormones to manage your mood and energy and body composition. Yet it's still so taboo for men. And the worst of it is when men throw other men under the bus, by discrediting them and saying, oh, that guy's in his late 40s, 50s or 60s, and he's jacked. Oh, it's probably all the TRT he's taking. You assume that you inject yourself with the needle

of putting testosterone in your body, and all of a sudden you're going to be lean, jacked, athletic, have great hand-eye coordination. That ain't true. Remember, I told you, I was taking 700 to 800 to 850 grams or milligrams of testosterone steroids a week. and I was not keeping a clean diet and I was fat

I was fat I was thick I was not defined I had no abs strong as fuck and then when I needed to meet a weight class then I started cleaning up my diet and then all of a sudden you would see the veins you would see the abs come out right so I'm here to tell you man lifestyle matters

optimization matters tracking your labs matter you do all those things things go do your peptides go do your TRT live an optimized life because you deserve it man who wants to live a suboptimal life because oh I'm over the hill and it's too late for me and I'm just going to have to live with you know this broken down body and having low energy and being fatigued and foggy headed and depressed all the time you don't need that brother you don't guys thank you so much for watching and listening to this episode of the bedrose coolian show if you got a lot of value

from this, please do me a favor. If you're watching this on YouTube, subscribe to the channel, give it a like and drop a comment. It would mean a lot to me and it would trigger the algorithms to share this with more men. And also remember this, that averages the enemy. Success is your responsibility and change can take place in an instant if you are willing to flip the switch. I'll see you next time.