PMO really does block fat loss

https://nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12986-019-0406-z

To put simply:

PMO > nullified androgen receptors > little to no T uptake > carnitine not present in skeletal muscle > fatty acids cannot be used as energy.

Low T to E ratio is also bad for fat loss.

There's a lot more studies on this, but I'd been eating in a caloric deficit (higher healthy fats and protein, lower carbs) and running for an hour a day. Sometimes adding sprints.
After some initial weight loss it immediately stopped, and carb/calorie cycling to stop the metabolism from slowing did nothing.

PMO was still an issue, having stopped this and started taking an ashwagandha supplement (to get T regulation back to a good level after such deprivation) and taking L-carnitine with carbs (to get it back into skeletal muscle). I'm now seeing good fat loss. Fatty acids aren't just floating around aimlessly awaiting transport that'll never come.

I've also started easing myself back into cold showers as in the past I found this was affective in various ways.

If you want to lose body fat (amongst many other positives), throw PMO in the bin and do everything to keep the lid on it.

 

No problem, I'm glad the info was helpful. That sounds very much like my experience, after eating clean and so much exercise, it gets to a point where the only other issue could be the endocrine system and PMO (when I found out about carnitine's function and how PMO removes it, it felt like it could be an answer). And for me it should've been impossible to not lose stubborn fat as I was training fasted, drinking black coffee and using yohimbine HCL (alpha-2 adrenergic receptor antagonist) so could only be carnitine.

And I found this study on male rats:

"(5) The androgen receptor density in brain areas closely related to the expression of masculine sexual behavior, such as the medial preoptic nucleus, was drastically reduced in sexually exhausted animals. Such reduction was specific to certain brain areas and was not related to changes in the levels of androgens. These results suggest that changes in brain androgen receptors account for the inhibition of sexual behavior present during sexual exhaustion. (6) The recovery process of sexual satiety after 4 hours of ad libitum copulation reveals that, after 4 days, only 63% of the males are able to show sexual behavior while after 7 days all animals display copulatory activity"

I've read elsewhere a good week of abstinence should get AR density back to a healthy level.
Oh I did read that people with prostate cancer take T/Androgen blockers, which greatly reduces their quality of life (depression, anxiety, fat gain etc we'd low expect with no T uptake) their case is a little more extreme than ours. But I remember they were prescribed to exercise to maintain better quality of life, and up to 6 months of exercise after stopping androgen blockers, they'd gotten back to a good level of T and such. So a week should be fine, and in extreme cases (Most of us here have been doing this since teen years) a couple months perhaps, our brain should certainly be rewired by then if not already with full AR density.