by Jacob Clark
And our mailbox starts filling with mailers we never asked for, never wanted, and don’t even know how they knew we’d turned old.
Junk mail from companies specializing in arthritis treatment, dentures, walkers and wheelchairs, and all kinds of other stuff to remind us we’re not the spring chickens we once were.
One of the biggest things men have to deal with as we grow older is an enlarged prostate.
It’s a major pain.
For the first time in our lives, we have to make a decision before we go to bed. Do we really want to quench our thirst with that last glass of water, knowing we’ll be up at least twice during the night to urinate?
Or do we forego the water and go to bed with a dry mouth and thirst pangs, just to try to get a good night’s sleep?
If you’re over fifty and still able to sleep through the night, count yourself lucky. Then look up to the sky and thank your long-dead Grandfather Stanley, for blessing you with good genes.
Lastly, cross your fingers and hope your luck holds.
Because you’re very unusual.
Most men over fifty aren’t so lucky. Most men over fifty have to get up once, twice, three times during the night to urinate.
Most men over fifty haven’t had a good night’s sleep in years.
They stumble out of bed, head to the bathroom, whip that sucker out, and then curse under their breath because they don’t get the healthy stream of urine they need to empty their swollen and aching bladder.
Instead they get a trickle or a drip.
It’s caused by an enlarged prostate. You probably already know that.
But here are some things you may not know.
A lot of men (you may be one of them) just presume that an enlarged prostate and problems with urination (either too frequent or not frequent enough) is an unavoidable part of getting older. Those men may think that since their father had the same problem, and their grandfather before him, that he must suffer as well.
Pay his dues like the other males in his family, so to speak.
But that’s not the case. An enlarged prostate can be treated.
That’s why you should consult your physician.
Let’s say you’re one of those stubborn men who refuse to go to the doctor unless you actually see blood or lose consciousness.
Hopefully you’re not. But there are an awful lot of men out there who are that way.
Or… let’s say you’re one of those men who don’t have health insurance and have to budget for your doctor’s visits. You save up your complaints until you have several of them and then go see your doctor about all of them at once.
Hopefully you’re not one of these men either, but there are an awful lot of them out there too.
All is not lost for you two groups of men.
You don’t have to see a doctor to treat your enlarged prostate. Of course, that’s always the best option. But if you choose not to for whatever reason, there are plenty of non-prescription and natural remedies on the market.
Here’s a partial list, although there are many more:
- Saw Palmetto
- Beta Sitosteral
- Pygeum
- Rye Grass Pollen
- Stinging Nettle
- Foods high in zinc and vitamin C
We are NOT recommending for or against any of these products. What works for one may not work for another. You should also know that the American Urological Association does not recommend herbal therapy for an enlarged prostate. They’d prefer you see your physician. So would we. But we’re going to put this information out there anyway for you hard-heads. If you want to try any of these, you can find them at your local health or natural food store.
As with all things you put into your body, though, you must do your homework and practice due diligence.
Okay, some of you who aren’t the fastest gunslinger in the old west might be asking why we’re talking about treating an enlarged prostate, when the real reason you’re here is because you have a problem with ED.
It’s because the two are related.
A lot of men who sought treatment for their enlarged prostate, or who were able to lessen its effects by altering their diets or adding natural supplements, noticed a reduction in their problems getting and keeping an erection.
That’s why we’re talking about this.
From Jacob:
My doctor and good friend Paul was the one who told me there was a connection between my enlarged prostate and my erectile dysfunction. I hadn’t a clue.
Paul isn’t like a normal doctor.
One of the things I like about him, (besides that he’s a lousy bowler and I consistently beat him by twenty pins or better) is that he’s always hesitant to prescribe medication when other things might work.
He suggested I try Saw Palmetto to ease my prostate issues, and it seemed to help me. When I told him so he said we’d consider the problem solved unless it came back.
Then a little later, when I told him I was having problems getting erections, the very first thing he asked me was “Is your prostate bothering you again?”
It seems that men with prostate problems often develop ED, although it doesn’t work the other way around.
Simply put, if you’re having trouble urinating, or are urinating frequently, AND you’re having ED issues, you can frequently ease the ED problem by treating your prostate.
I should note here that frequent urination can also be an indicator of diabetes, which can also cause ED or make it worse.
Your best bet is to see your physician if you’re having problems with urination (either going too little or going too often). If your doctor is on the ball, he’ll test you for diabetes, and will ask if you’ve had problems with intimacy.
As I said, it’s all kind of tied in together.
Paul is a doctor who’d prefer his patients forego prescription drugs when natural treatments work better. He told me on the golf course last weekend about a long-time patient (he didn’t mention names, that would be unethical) who came to him in a panic. The patient insisted on getting referred for lap-band surgery to lose forty nagging pounds.
Paul refused his request and sent him to a dietician instead.
“You don’t need surgery,” he told the man. “You just need to eat better and smarter.”
Many physicians would have leapt at the chance to refer this patient to a friend who did lap-band surgeries. But Paul’s not that way. He’s on the side of his patients, not his surgical buddies or pharmacological reps.
He printed me out a list of natural and herbal remedies for enlarged prostate.
“Try these first. They’re available at your natural foods store, and some won’t work for you at all. Others might work well. If none of them relieve your prostate problems, then we’ll consider prescribing you something.”
It turned out that for me, the Saw Palmetto was all I needed. Your results may vary.
The point is this… if you’re having urination issues anyway, you need to look into it, whether you’re having erection issues or not. If you’re having erection issues also, then you have twice as many reasons to get your prostate checked.
Quit making excuses and just do it.
Chapter 17: While we’re talking natural remedies…
Try these to help with your ED
There’s an old saying that goes something like “You are what you eat.” Come on, you know you’ve heard it. Jacob even had a t-shirt emblazoned with the saying back in the 1970s, before he finally developed a sense of fashion.
He wore it with his bell bottoms and poncho and Greek sandals.
He also had a sky blue leisure suit, but that was for special occasions.
Here’s a surprising thing about that old saying. It’s largely true.
You really are what you eat.
The human body, you see, is a product of what you put into it. Some of it is absorbed through sunlight. But not much. Most of it is derived by things that go into our mouth and are swallowed.
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We, therefore, have a greater say-so than anybody on the state of our body at any given time. We are the masters and mistresses of our own universe.
Well, maybe not. But we’re certainly the masters and mistresses of our own design.
Consider this: we have a choice whether to be healthy.
Someone who is extremely health-conscious and wants to try to live forever will eat only healthy foods. Foods that are rich in proteins and vitamins. Their diet will be mostly vegetarian, but they’ll make room for a limited amount of lean meats and eggs. They’ll never, ever, put sugar into their bodies, or caffeine, or fat, or things like carbohydrates which will turn into sugar and then fat.
And they’ll likely have a very miserable, albeit very healthy, life.
On the other hand, someone who doesn’t care very much whether they drop dead at age fifty will gorge on junk food. They’ll be a two-fisted eater, with a big greasy cheeseburger in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other.
They’ll eat a one pound bag of M&Ms each and every day of their lives and will wash it down with sugared soda and beer. No water, ever. Just sugared soda and beer. They’ll stay up all night being a keyboard warrior on their computer or watch old movies on television, swigging a bottle of whiskey and complaining they can’t sleep because of indigestion.
They’ll likely live a leisurely and relatively happy existence.
But they won’t live very long.
The vast majority of us aren’t like the ultra-fit healthy guy or the out-of shape eating machine.
We’re somewhere in the middle.
We try to live a relatively healthy lifestyle. We make an effort to get off the couch and get some exercise occasionally. We even try to lose those few extra pounds, although we’re just as likely to do it to keep our doctors off our backs than to gain any health benefits from it.
And we, as free-thinking adults, are the ones who decide which foods and beverages we place into our bodies.
Recognizing that, we’re not going to bore you with a long list of the foods you should eat more of. To find those out, you merely have to pick up one of the popular magazines. You’ve seen them at the supermarket checkout. Their covers are constantly touting headlines like 10 Foods You Should Be Eating, or Eat Healthier. Here’s How.
The point is, we literally are what we eat. It’s our choice, and no one else’s.
But this isn’t a diet book, nor is it a healthy lifestyle book.
This is a book to help you combat your erectile dysfunction.
And while those three things (healthy lifestyle, diet and battling ED) go hand in hand to some degree, we’re focusing on your bedroom activities.
So we’re not giving you a list of foods to make you lose weight or live ten extra years.
We’re giving you a list of foods which may help your ED.
And we’re betting you didn’t know there was such a list, did you?
Well there is. There’s nothing scientific about it, really. Although there have been many studies conducted to determine the relation between the types of foods we eat and male impotence, there’s never been a list published (to our knowledge) by the scientific or medical communities to recommend certain foods to combat ED.
Until now.
As far as we know, we’re the first.
Ta-dah!
To be honest, we didn’t assemble this list for you, our readers. We assembled it for Jacob, to help bring back his erections. But it seemed to work for him. To what degree, we’ll never know, since we were trying so many other things at the same time.
We’ll never know to what degree eating cashews helped give him that erection, and how much was the penis pump we were also using that night. The point is we did a lot of research over the past months. And we’ve compiled a list of foods and herbal things which studies have shown had a positive impact on a man’s ability to get and keep an erection.
Here is that list.
- oysters
- beef
- crab
- lobster
- cashews
- chickpeas
- breakfast cereals (the ones which say “fortified”)
- chicken
- Swiss cheese
- oatmeal
- cottage cheese
- almonds
- kidney beans
Here’s a second list of herbal remedies. Some of these may not be available in your area, and some can only be found at health food stores or on-line.
And some of them didn’t seem to have any effect on Jacob at all.
Again, it seems to go back to that “every man is different” mantra. What works on John might not work at all on Joe.
But here’s the list if you want to try any of them.
- Asian ginseng
- Arginine
- DHEA
- Korean Red ginseng
- Pomegranate juice
- Yohimbe
- Goat weed (Icariin)
- Ginko Biloba
From Jacob:
Paul, my doctor, was a bit leery when I told him I wanted to try goat weed and some of the other stuff.
He told me to only use things I obtained from a legitimate source, so I’ll pass that advice onto you, our readers.
In other words, if you can find these things on the shelf at a health food store or for sale from a reputable on-line source, great.
Don’t buy them from a guy named Rico, from the back of his beat up van, in a dark alley somewhere.
And don’t buy them from a strange-looking internet site you probably shouldn’t trust either. Instead of getting goat weed you might be getting dandelion leaves.
And if you want dandelion leaves, we’ve got a whole bunch in our front yard I can’t seem to get rid of. Help yourself to as many as you want.
The point is, our body is our temple. Treat it as such. Feel free to try these things, but in limited quantities until you find out whether you’re allergic to them or whether they’re of any benefit to you.
I tried to sample all of the herbals. Some of them I just couldn’t find. I also tried to include at least one of the food items in every meal.
It really helped that I happen to love seafood and shellfish, which make up a good portion of the items on the food list.
I never ate a lot of chicken, and I’m ashamed to say most of the time I did eat it, it was fried.
Michelle, on the other hand, loves chicken, and since we started this endeavor has been experimenting with new recipes.
There must be a thousand different ways to make chicken. And at least a couple of hundred are not only tasty, but relatively healthy as well. She made a baked chicken dish with sliced vegetables and lime juice a week ago that still makes my mouth water. It was friendly to my diet and to my heart. Whether it made my dick hard, I don’t know for sure. But we did make love for well over an hour that night.
Here’s my advice on this list of foods.
If you see something on the list you like, try to eat more of it. If you see something on the list you’ve never tried, try it. As we always told our kids when they were young (and still tell our grandkids), if you never try new things, you’ll never find new things you love.
Bear in mind that some people are allergic to shell fish, so if you’ve never tried them, go easy at first.
And if you just don’t like something on the list, go on to something else.
From Michelle:
As we’ve said from the beginning, it’s hard for us to point the finger at any one thing and say, “That’s it! That’s the thing that cured Jacob’s ED!” because we’re doing lots of things at the same time.
I will say that getting him hard is a lot easier now that we’re eating more of these foods.
Most of the things on this list have the added benefit of being relatively healthy, and many of them are relatively low calorie was well. So it might be the combination: that these things are known to help with ED, that they’re helping Jacob (and me too) lose weigh
t, and they’re giving Jacob (and me too) more energy that is helping with our ED problem.
Erectile Dysfunction Tool Box Thus Far: 19 Items
1. Frequent penis stimulation
2. Pin stimulation to penis head
3. Eat well. Diet is everything
4. Enlist your doctor’s help
5. A good selection of written erotica
6. Play. Experiment. Find new things to love
7. Water is our friend. Drink lots of it.
8. Limit caffeine
9. Ice can be nice
10. Try warming oils as a stimulant
11. Porn as a visual mood setter
12. ED Medications as a backup, not as a go-to
13. Learn to save some for a rainy day
14. Change the mechanics of how you make love
15. Whack your wiener for her. She’ll enjoy it
and it’ll help with the ED
16. Lose those extra pounds. It’ll help too
17. If you smoke, stop no matter how hard it is
18. Check your prostate
19. Look hard at the foods you’re eating
Chapter 18: Avoid the blame game
Stress is the biggest mood killer of all
Since Jacob was diagnosed with erectile dysfunction we’ve been careful not to consider it his problem.
It was “our” problem from the beginning. We accepted it as such and decided to attack it as a team.
We decided we were going to work together to kick ED’s ass, and we’ve been able to do that.
And after all, it just makes sense. After all, why consider it just the man’s problem when it adversely affects both of us?
We both love sex. We always have. The thought of living the rest of our lives without it was inconceivable to us and something we just weren’t willing to accept.
You both love sex as well. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading these words right now.
So we beg of you… since you love sex and want to get it back, don’t fall into a vicious trap we call “the blame game.”