What? Assuming you live in America, "many" people's bodies are not catabolic for any meaningful portion of a given week. Not even close. You can force a catab

What? Assuming you live in America, "many" people's bodies are not catabolic for any meaningful portion of a given week. Not even close. You can force a catabolic state onto yourself...but how does TRT help? Note also that insulin levels associated with obesity also modulate that mechanism, in the opposite direction of your argument, but let's ignore that. Theoretically you prevent loss of lean muscle mass while in a calorie deficit while intermittent fasting, but that's an obscure edge case for someone looking to increase in size. Also, TRT is a steroid. At high enough doses. And, if that holds, how can it be less effective? Ignoring some of the biology itself. Sorry for the sharp rebuttal but what are you talking about. If you look at the research there's a very narrow band of philiosogic changes available to new and intermediate gym goers. The exact figures escape me, but if I recall with perfect nutrition and perfect gym adherence I believe I previously calculated for an average american male for that top end to be around 0.2 to 0.7 pounds of lean muscle mass additions per week. Based on an older paper. And that's the theoretical ceiling. But, the flip side was that even for "hard gainers" with "feminine qualities in facial structure" (for which I've never seen research for but will take you at face value on that, no pun intended) that also means that gradual incremental changes are probable and positive with enough adherence. Saying that a healthy strong body is not attainable without growth hormone or steroids seems like a cop out, when just sticking to it will (very very slowly) yield incremental progress.