235: Testosterone Is Not the Magic Bullet: Ollie Matthews on Sleep, Steroids and Fixing the Foundations

From The Penis Project Podcast: Breaking Taboos in Men’s Sexual Health · 54:21

Show by Sexologist Melissa Hadley Barrett

Episode Overview: In this episode of The Penis Project Podcast, Melissa is joined from the UK by Ollie Matthews of OJay Health. Ollie is a certified functional medicine health consultant, nutritionist, health coach and trainer with close to twenty years working with high performers, business owners, Olympic and endurance athletes. He is not a clinician and does not claim to be. This is functional medicine coaching, not medical treatment. But his lane, sleep, stress, cardiovascular and metabolic health and energy, sits directly upstream of a great deal of what walks into Melissa’s clinic as an erectile function or libido complaints. Ollie’s reason for doing this work is personal. His dad died of a stroke at 47. Ollie was 15, heading into his last year of school. He went into the summer holidays with a dad and came out of them as the kid whose dad had died, and nobody quite knew what to say. That grief turned into emotional eating and years of hiding away, until his early twenties when he could not run to the end of the driveway without being out of breath. What came next was the gym, and then bodybuilding, and then, as Ollie describes it with complete honesty, an obsession that tipped into disordered eating. He would not go to events where he could not control the food. He took chicken and broccoli to the cinema on a first date. Unsurprisingly, there was no second date. At 26 he used steroids for a single bodybuilding show. He did not place. What he did get was a body that never recovered. Ollie is blunt about the part nobody selling gear at the gym mentions: they are addictive, that feeling of being superhuman keeps you reaching for more, and when he tried to come off, his testosterone never came back. He has been on testosterone replacement therapy ever since. The turn came through a client. Rick Barker, Taylor Swift’s first manager, messaged him out of the blue saying he was sick and tired of being sick and tired, and that he knew what to do, he just needed someone to tell him to do it. Ollie spent that first call wondering why Taylor Swift’s manager was messaging him and where he had got his number. A few months later he was standing in Rick’s house in Nashville with Rick’s wife Jill and their children, and Rick told him he had given his wife back the man she married ten years ago. That was the moment it clicked. Ollie could not help his dad, but he could help parents not die before they see their children grow up. Years later, when he and his wife wanted a child, his sperm count was practically nothing due to artificial testosterone replacement. His testosterone was sitting in a comfortable place on therapy, but coming off sent it into the floor, and the fertility clinic’s advice was essentially to stop and wait a couple of years. With his wife facing an age cut-off for their one funded round of IVF, the numbers did not add up. So, Ollie applied everything he had learned to himself. You will need to listen to find out the results. From there, the conversation is a genuinely useful, practical one about what really helps men be their best self from a physical perspective. Ollie walks through the four foundations he works through with every client. He argues, and Melissa agrees, that sleep is a more powerful intervention than jumping straight onto testosterone, and that testosterone therapy should be near the last option rather than the first. They talk about morning erections as a barometer of health, why erectile function tells you about your heart, why accountability is so important and why the man who cannot get to a gym still has no excuse. Ollie is also refreshingly honest about the state of the industry: clinics that find it easier to sell three drugs to one person than one drug to three people, social media that will happily advertise a miracle cure while removing a post about gut health, and the peptide boom where men who say they cannot afford proper care are somehow finding hundreds of pounds a month for unregulated product from unknown sources. His closing message is not glamorous, and that is rather the point. Golden Tip: “Do something. Consistency over perfection.” Ollie Matthews Key Message from Ollie Ollie’s point is not that men in their forties and fifties should be chasing the body they had at 25. That version of you did not have children, a business, twenty years of accumulated stress and a mortgage. The goal is not to go back. The goal is to improve from where you are now. Business: OJay Health Email: [email protected] Website: https://ojayhealth.com/ Podcast: The Optimal Health Podcast Guide: The Optimal Man: Ollie’s written guide £14.99 www.ojayhealth.com/optimalman if someone honestly cannot afford it then email [email protected] mentioning the show and Ollie will send it over for free. Socials: www.instagram.com/olliematthewshealth Resources & Links Book a telehealth appointment with our sexual health nurse practitioners at https://rshealth.com.au/book-appointment or email…

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