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Saw Palmetto
June 24 2007 at 11:26 AM
twinklepose (Login twinklepose)
SENIOR MEMBER

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Hello,

Does anyone know a "safe" dosage of saw palmetto that I can take? I think someone on here suggested a while back to take 750mg daily - but my bottle says take only 250mg.

I've Googled this and the highest dose I can find is 320mg.



Author Reply

Moonstruck
(Login moonstruck61) Re: Saw Palmetto June 24 2007, 11:34 AM


I take 12 per day.
4 caplets three times a day. Been doing it a long time, no problems.



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Fennel Fairy
(no login) Honey... June 24 2007, 12:52 PM


The pills sold online and over the counter are for prostate problems, not breast enlargement. A daily intake of 320 mg is recommended for men with an enlarged prostate - yes. But for feminisation purposes, that dose is FAR too low. Do you honestly think that guys would buy the stuff if it made them grow hooters? I took the stuff for a while and on my jar it said "one pill of 320 mg/day". I took 3. But that dose is of course low enough to not make men grow breasts, otherwise not many would buy the pills... I am sure you can at least triple the dose and still be safe.

General facts about SP:
http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Serenoa+repens


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stefanie
(Login stefanie_ss) Re: Saw Palmetto June 24 2007, 1:07 PM


i am taking 3,450 a day. no problems. actually my urine stream hasn't been this good since i was a kind writting my name in the snow..lol

not to mention, some people think that sp will stop testosterone from converting to dht which causes male pattern baldness.


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Fennel Fairy
(Login fennelfairy)
SENIOR MEMBER Upper limit June 24 2007, 2:11 PM


I read somewhere on this forum that one should never take more than 5000 mg/d. I can't remember where I read it but I thought it important to remember so I copied and pasted it into a document.


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twinklepose
(Login twinklepose)
SENIOR MEMBER Re: Saw Palmetto June 24 2007, 4:00 PM


Thanks, guys and girls. All very helpful.

But where did you get your figures from? Where did you find out it was safe to take 12 pills or three pills a day - or are you just guessing?

And has SP and lower testosterone meant things like impotence or shrinking of the testes for any of you? I really don't want that to happen, hence my caution.

Twink x


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Fennel
(no login) The truth is... June 24 2007, 5:20 PM


There is no set level for what's considered safe. These are not medicines and have not gone through the same testing so we don't know all the side effects and at what dose they occur. With medicines, we know all the side effects and how big a dose you can take and still live. :-)Before new medicines come out on the market, large groups of patients are used to experiment on and will be closely monitored and then test results are evaluated before the rest of us idiots get to buy it. With herbs, we don't know for sure, but all we can do is to check how much others have taken without undesired side effects.


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Moonstruck
(Login moonstruck61) Re: Saw Palmetto June 24 2007, 8:07 PM


TP,

I have no idea about "safe" levels. All I know is, I've been doing it for about six months now and so far, I'm still here.
I've read all over the net about other people taking large amounts of the stuff with no serious side effects.

From what I've read, Saw Palmetto is an Anti Androgen, that it basically interferes with that evil testosterone in some way, causing your body to not use any testosterone that's in your system.

I've read that over time, taking AA's and the various forms of female hormones WILL sterilize you.
I may already be there but I don't care. Fine with me.
I can say with for sure that there have been sexual side effect for *ME* in *MY CASE* that I consider to be
a wonderful benefit. Before, orgasms were just ho-hum boring and not even really worth the effort.
Now, after being on HRT for six months, orgasms are INSANE ! It scares me how intense and dramatic they are!
I've written about it several times here so I won't go on again but let me tell you, I'm not having typical *male* orgasms,
this is way beyond normal. Let me put it this way, if this is a small taste of the way natural women experience orgasms, I can tell you it's GOOD to be female!

I don't think Saw Palmetto alone will cause you to grow tits. I think it will help contribute towards that effect though.
I do not believe there are any female hormones, phyto or otherwise in it. I think it is just an anti androgen.
I take lots of it because I want to totally disrupt all testosterone / androgen activity in me.
From what I read, this will help with my biggest problem, body and facial hair.
I want that to be 100% GONE forever. Whatever it takes, it must be done.
The other thing that I'm lead to believe is that the AA's help to allow the estrogen to latch into my system better because it blocks the testosterone from doing so. Since the testosterone can't "step up to the plate" the estrogen steps right on in and takes it's place. I think that's sort of what happens. I'm not a doctor so I can't give you all those technical explanations.

Fennel is much better at detailing these things, she's our resident genius and guru chick.



twinklepose
(Login twinklepose)
SENIOR MEMBER Re: Saw Palmetto June 25 2007, 6:09 PM


Thanks for the responses Fennel and Moonstruck. Bless ya. Lovely girls, lovely girls!

MS, if you've been on this stuff for six months, have you noticed any difference with your facial hair? I've been trying various things since last November and mine's the same - mind you, so too is my chest. :-(

Sometimes I think I'm getting somewhere - but I've just nearly a stone on a diet and the girls are going, going gone as well. Maybe it was just fat and nothing to do with mones. Quite sad really.

I've spent all this money and time on them for what? Nada! Feel like giving up sometimes. :-(



Alien Sheep
(Login moonstruck61) Re: Saw Palmetto June 25 2007, 10:38 PM


Um, well. I haven't had any reduction in the facial hair. Yet.
From what I've read though, nothing really helps much there.
That's why everyone ends up doing laser and or electrolysis.

Back about 17 years ago I had my face & cheeks stripped pretty clean by electrolysis.
I don't know how many hours it was because I slept through a lot of it but it was several thousand dollars worth in 1990 dollars.

There were a lot of dormant hairs that came back though but over all, my face was probably stripped by 80%
over what it had been. However, they never got to my neck because I had to stop for financial reasons. (kids)
I think she may have thinned my neck a little but not nearly enough. My neck is like 80% like it was before, or more.

Back to the face in a minute.

As for the rest of my body, I use an epilator. For the past 17 years I've just left things alone so as to pass as a "normal male", so I could
be a normal dad. So the body hair was pretty much a problem.
My torso was just nasty with the stuff. As was the rest of me. The stuff was like horse hair, I mean thick and tough. It did not want to come out.
The first time I tried to remove it, I bled like a stuck pig. I tried plucking my chest but that hurt, was slow and I was really damaging my skin
badly with the tweezers. So I found out about "sugaring" and started doing that. But that's dangerous stuff. I burned myself pretty badly and did even more damage to myself than with the tweezers.
Well, since I refuse to shave (it causes me horrible rashes) I decided to bite the bullet and buy an epilator.
Woa! Much better and much faster! And SAFE! Well, when I got it in I decided to do my legs. ONCE.. One time I told myself, just once for old times sake and I would let it grow back. Yeah right. Well, the first few months the epilator was pulling and breaking hairs at about 50/50.
But I kept at it, like every other day I would do my entire body. Every time, it gets better, goes easier, hurts less, goes faster, better results, etc.. And now after several months of HRT and the epilator, I can go 3-4 days without using it if I have to.
I prefer to do it often though because I can't tolerate feeling one single hair.

The thing is though, the hair that is coming back, it's very fine hair, compared to 6 months ago, it's like comparing rope to thread.
It's that much of a difference. I'm sure it's a combination of the constant removal and the AA's & whore-moans that's making it finer and just slightly slower to come back. Still, I'm sure that eventually I'll have it all lasered off. But In a year or two, if things keep going like they are now, the hair ought to be fine like women's hair and much slower coming back.

Testosterone makes for aggressive behavior and aggressive body hair growth.

Anyway.. As for my arms, oh boy. That's a sore point for me. I pretty much have "chimp arms".. My hands and arms are extra hairy, and probably beyond what's normal. And people are used to seeing me that way. Back when I first tried transition, I stripped my arms down and everyone FLIPPED OUT.. Yeah, it was that dramatic of a difference. I might as well have strolled around the mall buck naked.
If I do this again people will flip out again. There's just no way to do it without causing extreme trauma for everyone that knows me.
When I do it, everyone is going to have a stroke and three heart attacks.. They will KNOW what I'm doing. There's plenty of other hints going on but their subtle. That one, there's no subtle to it. It's major drama and trauma.
My dad most of all seems to have a big problem with body hair on OTHER PEOPLE.. When he sees someone with a lack of body hair he has a major malfunction and meltdown. What a retard.

It's WAAAAY to hot here to wear long sleeves. It's not possible. Not going to happen.
Come winter time though, I'm going to strip them down and keep them stripped clean for the entire winter.
Come summer time when I'll be forced to go back to short sleeves, the hair should come back much finer, like my legs.
I may be able to leave it so that there'll be some there for those people that have problems with how other people appear but it will be fine enough that it won't cause me any more trauma. Yes, I'm having trauma over having to leave the crap alone. You don't know how hard it is to resist the drive to remove it all. So a few months to go before I can start to deal with that.

As for my face. Well, as I stated before, I had a lot of it taken off a long time ago. That helps a little. But not enough!
So the past few weekends, I've started plucking my entire face and neck with tweezers. I tried the epilator on my face but the hair
was waaaay to thick and tough, it just would not pull it out, but it would pull on it enough to really, really hurt.
Well, I got used to using the thing on my underarms. That's super tender in there. So I decided that I would pluck my entire face and neck, 100%. Note a single hair would escape. I'm "training" the follicles for future epilation. I'll have to do this a bunch of times but over time, the hair s will come back much finer and will be much easier coming out. Eventually, I'll be able to use the epilator on my face and neck. Constantly doing this over a long time combined with my HRT program should cause that hair to eventually become very fine and light.
And when I get the money to have it taken off forever, that ought to go much faster and easier than it would if I had been doing nothing at all about it. I'll have to do some laser (still plenty of dark hair left) and electrolysis because there's also plenty of white hairs that the laser will not work on.

Last night I finished cleaning my face off. Let me tell you, I feel and look pretty banged up. It's going to take a few days for my skin to calm down from the beating it took all weekend. My whole face is super tender and looks pretty rough. Of course what I did to it was pretty brutal.
I saw a commercial last night, some woman was hawking this little doo-dad thing for trimming your eyebrows. They show her pucking her eyebrows and making a big dramatic scene over the pain of doing so. The narrator comments "Plucking your eyebrows hurts! OUCH!" as she rips out an eyebrow hair that you would thing was rooted all the way to her big toe. I laughed.. Please.. Give me a break.
Just for fun, I plucked a few of the big fat rope sized hairs from my eyebrows, just to see what all the drama was about.
Pffft.. That was nothing. Didn't even feel it. Compared to plucking 2.5 acres worth of facial and neck hair, eyebrows are a stroll through the daisies.

Bottom line, getting rid of the body & facial hair is not easy. Pain is involved. Much pain. And expense.
I wish there was a magical cure to get rid of it with a pill or something but there just isn't.
You can get it down to a degree where it's not as bad as it was but it's hard work and painful. And it takes a long time.
I've been reading on some other forums about hair reduction and removal. Most TS women go the route of
man made chemicals like Spiro. and other such AA's but in the end, they still have to end up having laser/electrolysis too.
I'm going to try this route for a year or two before I decide to try the chemicals or not.