[vidhushi]

Hi everybody,
What would be the effects of taking 500mg PM only on my body?
I really don't want big breasts... small, mostly discrete ones will do.
And I want the other effects like reduced body hair, feminine feelings, etc.

[flamesabers]

Hello kinetikblue.

Is there a particular brand of pm you're thinking of using? If you're using anything like the pm I take, 500 mg will have a negligible effect for breast growth or other feminizing developments. I don't understand the desire to micromanage your breast growth. I mean, genetic girls don't have a say on their final size of their breasts. Why should it be any different for genetic males? The way I see it, trying to grow breasts using herbs is a difficult task by itself. Trying to attain and keep a certain size is all the more challenging I think.

I suggest searching these boards to see if anyone has succeeded with achieving similar goals to yours by taking 500 mg of pm.

[Pansy-Mae]

Hi everybody,
What would be the effects of taking 500mg PM only on my body?
I really don't want big breasts... small, mostly discrete ones will do.
And I want the other effects like reduced body hair, feminine feelings, etc.

Hi and welcome.
I wish it were as simple as you you seem to think.
IMO, at 500mg a day you will wait more or less forever for anything noticeable to happen. Even for females the normal dose of PM is 2 x500mg a day and they do have certain starting advantages!
500 - 1000mg is normally reckoned to be the maintenance does to keep what you've grown, when you get to the size you want, but it difficult to maintain what you haven't already grown!
Your best bet is to 'go for it' and then cut back to a maintenance dose. Your body isn't conditioned to grow boobs, so you have to force the breast growth mechanism into action with a relatively high dose ( typically around 2000mg a day for as long as several months) to kick start the process.

The other effects you mention are unpredictable anyway, but I think that again the higher the dose the greater likelihood there is of experiencing them.

[aleah]

I don't imagine you could get a serious feminizing effect without also using some kind of anti-androgen like Saw Palmetto or Pygeum. Since your body will still be full of DHT.

You would probably see some results after a long time but even then, maybe not at that dosage.

If you want to control how much of an effect you get, you are better off following an SP/PM routine with higher dosages and just stopping or reducing PM once you reach your satisfactory size. Also from most accounts from people even on medical HRT, depending on your age, you will most likely not get more than a B cup at best which is fairly discrete (if your worrying about being outed while in male mode) with loose clothing.

[TibetanPrincess]

I don't imagine you could get a serious feminizing effect without also using some kind of anti-androgen like Saw Palmetto or Pygeum. Since your body will still be full of DHT.

You would probably see some results after a long time but even then, maybe not at that dosage.

If you want to control how much of an effect you get, you are better off following an SP/PM routine with higher dosages and just stopping or reducing PM once you reach your satisfactory size. Also from most accounts from people even on medical HRT, depending on your age, you will most likely not get more than a B cup at best which is fairly discrete (if your worrying about being outed while in male mode) with loose clothing.

Probably a full A cup within 1.5 years and it would be temporary. Def agree with Aleah, you need some type of anti androgens unless you have no gonad function

[chrishoney]

Sorry to disagree, but using PM alone can have serious feminizing effects, WITHOUT the use of antiandrogens. Take a look at my pics on the picture page in this section. I stopped using any kind of SP or Pygeum back in 2010. There are other regular contributors to this section that also don't use SP or any antiandrogen. It has been postulated that age has an effect, and I think this likely also, such that younger men may need SP while older men doing NBE do not.

However, the long held misconception (even in the transgender community) that you MUST take an antiandrogen started because the first artificial hormones (primarily premarin and depo provera, two VERY nasty and ineffective drugs) given to transitioning MtF individuals were relatively weak compared to bioidentical hormones available today. The main estrogen in premarin is estrone which is many times weaker than estradiol. If you are taking weak estrogens to cause feminization, it stands to reason it will help greatly to take an antiandrogen. Also, those individuals who have decided to transition are known to want near instantaneous results, and waiting 6 months to a year for their testes to stop producing testosterone is usually unacceptable to them.

I think a similar argument holds for the use of FG versus PM. FG is a WEAK phytoestrogen, while PM has been shown to have similar estrogenic effects as estradiol. check out: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=estrogenic+effects+of+pueraria+mirifica&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C39&as_sdtp=

and http://journals.lww.com/menopausejournal...id.22.aspx). I would argue that with a stronger phytoestrogen, less or no antiandrogen is required.

In addition, as Isabelle has pointed out, based on her considerable herbal knowledge and research, PM has an antiandrogen in it, which may explain why us older folks have used it without SP to great effect.

Another route to consider, as another poster suggested, is to promote the action of aromatase which converts testosterone to estradiol. There is no back conversion of estradiol to testosterone, and once converted the T is unavailable to be converted into DHT. Forskolin, the active ingredient in coleus forskohlii is known to up-regulate the gene for aromatase. There's lots of info on coleus forskohlii on body building and weight loss forums, as well as www.scholar.google.com.

[aleah]

Thats very interesting chrishoney, I've known PM is very powerful phytoestrogen and very similar pharmacologically to estradiol. And SP and Pygeum are heardly comparable to medical grade antiandrogens either.

But I think for us younger MtF it's different, especially those of us who have not manifested all primary masculinization characteristics yet in our late teens or early twenties like myself. However, some people do manifest them all at very young age and then thats hard to reverse. But anyone who is young and not fully manifest (which is subjective based on genetics) could benefit greatly from slowing down or stopping any further masculinization which might be harder to reverse.

[dargona]

Since my PM break last November-March, I started back up at first taking 500mg just to maintain what I had left, and then by June I started taking 1000mg here and there. It's been a slow year for me, and I've lost weight as well (I was ~170lbs in the photos, now I am near 155lb). I will just say this. For taking 500-1000mg and being at the weight I am now and still having considerable breast mass is a wonderful feeling for me. I feel like I am almost comfortably back in the range of a small B, either 36 or 38.

I don't have the crazy burning/itching I had a year ago, and definitely not the pace or rapid growth, but I still feel like it's working. I'm sure it also has a lot to do with your mind of course, and I regularly massage. I also picked up a noogleberry -- but I need to become more diligent with my routine (or having a routine in the first place!)