Quote Originally Posted by LetsGo View Post
I feel like something is holding back my progress in a major way, so I’m making some more changes.

Diet Stuff
I’m avoiding rice for carb backloading, even though the TMO protocol says it’s a clean carb. I've had a bad reaction to rice noodles with gluten-free tamari in the past, every time, and I think rice noodles are super-concentrated rice. Hopefully cutting out rice will make a noticeable difference within the next two weeks; we’ll see. I’m going to have potatoes instead, so I'm getting a potato ricer to make oil-free hash browns for post-workout carbs. For some reason I just don’t like baked potatoes that much.

If I notice good results from eliminating rice, then that will be a huge win. I'm okay with eating like a dog - meaning, eating the same thing every day. I just want to feel like I have everything dialed in 100%, and I need to do whatever it takes to get there.

I’ve been having 125 calories of spinach most days, but I need to incorporate more fruit into my diet.

Workout Stuff
I'm back on creatine (currently in the loading phase this week,) and I'm working harder than ever in the gym. This is part of why I've been feeling frustrated; my workouts are great, so things should be going better.

NoFap Stuff
This is going to sound weird, but it is what it is. My issue with fapping is never me consciously deciding “I feel horny, let me go fap” - it hasn’t been that way since I got PFS, except for certain upswings and sometimes when I went on vacations. I think the issue was my bedding, which I always washed regularly. I never fap when I sleep on my couch, which has a quilt. The problems happen with my luxurious sheets and blanket that I’ve been using the entire time I’ve had PFS.

I put the sheets and blanket in the closet, where they’ll stay until I’m 100% recovered. I've been blaming myself for having a lack of willpower for so long, but I need to make it easier for myself - to put myself in a position where I don’t need massive willpower. I’m back at 1 day of not fapping, and I’m going to place an order for a bed-size quilt that can hopefully keep me warm.

I read some research that says that masturbation lowers the amount of androgen receptors in your brain, and that it takes 4 to 7 days for them to replenish. So maybe I wasn’t giving my receptors time to replenish - I very much wanted to, but I couldn’t manage it with that bed setup. So hopefully I can make it to at least 30 days and also start feeling some improvements along the way.

Maybe it’s not possible to recover if you’re fapping every few days. It always seemed like an insurmountable problem, but I think it was due to my setup, and hopefully this will solve that problem.

Summary
Let’s see how things go over the next few weeks.
Hey there, I'm just curious to know what your reaction to rice was precisely? Do you feel this was more of a gastrointestinal disturbance, or a psychological/hormonal disturbance?

Regarding the nofap, I recall reading something similar to what you mentioned. I believe it was a study done on an animal model that showed androgen receptors in the brain regenerated after 4-7 days of no release...its a difficult part of this protocol, at least for some of us, but I have repeatedly seen users on here doing it successfully for weeks on end prior to their recovery.