Clearing Up Some Triac Misconceptions (Part 1)

Role of Triac While Off a Diet

Are you looking for a very effective fat burner allowing you to rapidly loss body fat with no diet and no side effect? In that case, Triac is not for you. Triac is no wonder drug. Chemically assisted fat loss is a trade off: you give up some fat while increasing the risk for potential metabolic disturbances. Let’s clarify this concept as well as the real role and action as well as the optimal doses of Triac while off a diet.

What is Triac?

First of all, I would like to make it clear that I am not involved in the sales of Triac. I do not get a commission on sales either. I am neither in favor nor against it. I do not care about the issue of whether it is legal or not to sell Triac. What I see is that at least for now, Triac is easily available to you and you are trying to make up your mind about it. Therefore, here is some hopefully useful information.

First of all, realize that as far as thyroid extracts are concerned, Triac is the only molecule freely available for now on. I have heard that another one will be launched soon but it will rather be an addition to Triac rather than a replacement or a substitution of it. All this to say that if you want to use a thyroid hormone, Triac is your only easy choice. If all the thyroid hormones were freely available, Triac would not be my first pick. But this is a moot issue. It is just like with anabolics. Testosterone is nobody’s first pick, yet most bodybuilders are very happy while on it.

Triac is advertised as a thyroid prohormone for simplicity’s sake. In fact, it is not a precursor but rather a metabolite of thyroid hormones. In other words, it is not a product which results in more thyroid hormones as would be expected with a pro-hormone. Rather, it is an end product of thyroid hormones which participates in the negative feedback for the thyroid hormone production and will therefore results in less thyroid hormone.

So we are dealing with a very important distinction here and not a mere detail. Taking Triac will result in a smaller thyroid gland, a lessened thyroid output and lower levels of the classical thyroid hormones T3 and T4. Saying this usually frightens listeners. I do not know why. Taking anabolic steroids produces exactly the same effects on the testes and on natural testosterone level. Even creatine supplementation will reduce your natural creatine production to nothing! Who cares about this? Nobody! So why should people worry so much when the thyroid gland is mentioned?

Triac is no amphetamine

It is probably because of all the horror stories we hear about women or fitness contestants who have used various thyroid medications to get leaner and instead became irreversibly obese when they stopped using them. We are talking about a marginal number of women here. Thyroid hormones are usually not the main culprits either. Many of those women had severe problems with self-image and eating disorders in the first place. They may have begun training in an attempt to hide those problems. Then, one day, they stumbled upon a “miraculous” drug called amphetamine (or one of the other “speed” type drugs like Ionamin, Tenuate, etc.). It looks like amphetamines are able to “solve” all the problems a woman and a man could face in life. No more food binging, a stabilization of the body weight to low levels, a constant state of happiness. One also feels very energetic and bright.

This ideal state lasts as long as the drug works. Unfortunately, the effects slowly wane. One could increase the dosages but this strategy is usually very costly and doctors are not willing to prescribe those drugs for an extended period of time. The second solution is usually to stop the medication. Most people fail to do so successfully. Many will keep on using amphetamines as they are addicted. Those who succeed in stopping are in for a terrible experience. They start eating like crazy, they feel tired all day and all night long, they cannot train anymore, they cannot work either and they get fat, very fat. The depressing effects due to the drug withdrawal worsen as a result.

Most are not willing to admit the real reasons for those changes to their friends because they are too ashamed of the amphetamine image and therefore blame the thyroid medications.

The natural thyroid disturbances

Whenever Triac is mentioned, people get scared that it is going to disturb their thyroid gland. This assumes that their thyroid gland was healthy in the first place and that it was naturally producing enough thyroid hormones. Very often, this is not the case. Their thyroid gland is too “slow” despite a low circulating thyroid hormone level. It is especially true in women. This is expected as scientists have discovered that lean body mass was a major determinant of the size of the thyroid gland in the long run. As women carry far less lean mass than men do, it is normal that their thyroid output should be far smaller. In fact, disproportionately too small.

Here are the main symptoms of a “lazy” thyroid: Your body temperature is low and you complain of feeling cold while the others do not. You are tired, overweight and a bit depressed. More often than not, a shortage of thyroid hormones is to blame. As those people start to use thyroid extracts, they feel much better and start to lose weight slowly. Thyroid hormones possess a repartitioning property. They waste away dietary calories in the form of energy and heat while a lack of them reduces temperature and available energy while favoring storage of calories as fat. There is one problem with this replacement therapy, though. People are always talking about stopping it. They feel it does them good but they worry about their thyroid gland.

What they have to realize is that their thyroid gland was disturbed in the first place and that replacement is for life. Of course, as those people stop taking the thyroid extracts, they recover their former unwell state which they had forgotten about. They start complaining and blame the thyroid extracts for creating this “new” disturbance. It is obvious that their thyroid gland has trouble recovering because it has always malfunctioned. But adverse effects due to only a careful use of thyroid extracts are not that numerous. It is all the underlying problems which are uncovered when thyroid medications are discontinued.

If your doctor is not willing to prescribe thyroid hormones despite a constant state of low T3 output on top of all the temperature and energy problems described above, Triac can be used as replacement. You can also threaten your MD that if he is not willing to prescribe thyroid meds to you, you are going to use megadoses of this freely available Triac.

Triac as replacement therapy

For those wanting to use Triac as replacement, let me repeat that is not ideal but has the big advantage of being easy to get. Try one pill for a few days and see what happens. Monitor your morning body temperature. It should go up and ideally reach 36.5° to 37° C (97.9° to 98.6° F). Do not aim for above 37° C (98.6° F) for replacement. In some users, temperature will decrease. Do not base your conclusion on only one measure, especially in women with all their ovarian hormone fluctuations. Rather, do an average for a week. Of course, do not forget to do so at least a week before using Triac to get a baseline. With the new thermometers, you have no excuse for not monitoring your temperature regularly.

If it truly goes down — which is expected in some people — stop using Triac as it is not for you. It means that the suppressing actions of Triac have predominated over its peripheral effects. On the other hand, if your temperature elevation is still too small after a week, try two pills. Ideally you should not go above two.

Off season, one can also use Triac in an attempt to speed up muscle growth while overeating a bit during a steroid cycle. In that case, Triac can be used in order to minimize the potential fat gains. This strategy is similar to the one described above as you do not want to use too much Triac as it can cause muscle shrinkage whenever abused.

The following is a recap of the dose response you can expect from Triac compared to its thyroid inhibiting properties. The study was performed Professor Mechelany and published in “les Annales d’Endocrinologie.” The study was performed on people in whom the thyroid output was normal. The original Triac called Triacana (350 micrograms per pill) was used here for three weeks at each dosage. TSH reflects the size of the thyroid gland, and therefore its activity (i.e.: the higher the TSH values, the bigger the thyroid gland should be and the more it is supposed to be active in people with normal thyroid). The peripheral effects of Triac were monitored with heart rate and body weight losses.

Dose of Triac	TSH	Changes in body weight (kg.)	Heart rate
0	38.6	0	76
3	11.5	-1.5	88
6	2.4	-2.1	89
9	0.38	-3.4	94
12	0.14	-3.8	110

Some obvious conclusions

One can see that past 3 Triacana a day (which is the equivalent of one American Triac), TSH suppression is clearly visible. You can weaken this suppressive action of Triac by using it only once a day (preferably in the morning) rather than in the classical 3 times recommended with Triacana. Peripheral effects are obvious but are still mild with a moderate elevation of heart rate and a small weight loss. This dose is the upper ideal limit for replacement. You slowly lose fat while not putting too much strain on your heart. Your thyroid gland is weakened but still alive.

By doubling the dosage (taking two by the American standard), you also double the weight loss and experience another mild heart rate elevation. On the other hand, your thyroid activity is down to almost nothing. This is a dosage you can maintain in case you want to trim down your body before your summer vacation to look better on the beach. This high dose is not meant to be maintained for more than two months at a time.

Taking 9 Triacana a day looks like the maximal dosage. Weight loss reaches around than 2.5 pounds a week (though all of this is not fat, please take into account that no low calorie diet was followed either). Heart rate is elevated but if you are not too old and if you are healthy this should be OK at least for a while. This is a dosage that can be maintained for a maximum of 60 – 90 days if you are in a hurry to shed fat. Your TSH has almost reached rock bottom which may be a problem as you stop using Triac. We will see next month how to safely proceed to boost TSH while keeping body fat low and therefore avoiding the fat rebound.

Using 12 Triacana a day looks like too much. Fat loss is not significantly enhanced compared to 9 Triacana a day, yet heart rate is boosted to alarming levels. TSH level has reached rock bottom which will make it even harder to jump start your thyroid as you stop Triac. It may looks like an attractive dosage for the proponents of the more-is-better theory, but this is also a dangerous zone.

Triac while on a diet

I know that many of you are also interested to hear about Triac manipulation while on a diet. This is what I will discuss next month. We will see that as you reduce your food intake, your natural Triac production will increase. This not good. The Triac elevation is one of the reasons why your thyroid gland will produce less thyroid hormones during caloric restriction. In fact, a Triac inhibitor while on a diet would allow you to get leaner more easily.

At that point, the endogenous (natural) Triac is different from the exogenous Triac (the pills). We are dealing with the same molecule but in one case, we are passive before its elevation and have to suffer its noxious actions while in the other case, we are active and deliberately manipulating the whole fat loss machinery. I will also tell you next month how to stop Triac while continuing to shed fat.