Welcome to Part 2 of this special series on keeping your penis — and your marriage — healthy and happy.
In this follow-up episode, we the practical side of sexual health: testosterone, nutrition, porn use, sleep, and yes… penis size. (Spoiler: your wife does care about your size, but it might not be in the area that you think.)
You’ll learn:
- The truth about testosterone and how to boost it naturally
- The best foods for stronger erections
- How porn impacts sexual performance and confidence
- What’s actually normal when it comes to size
- What your penis does while you sleep
We hope you benefit as we throw a little humor in with the science and practical wisdom to help you stay healthy, confident, and connected for years to come.
💡 Want help creating a more fulfilling sex life with your spouse? Check out our coaching program: getyourmarriageon.com/program
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors or inaccuracies. For the most accurate and complete experience, we recommend listening to the full podcast episode.
Dan: Welcome back to part two of our penetrating deep dive into one of God’s most fascinating creations, the penis. In part one of this episode, we learned that erections aren’t just about what’s happening below the belt. They start in your brain, your big head, if you would, and depend on everything from your stress levels to your heart health, to how playful you are in bed.
We talked about dopamine, serotonin, nitric oxide, Viagra, and a whole bunch of other molecules and their play, and why. What’s good for your heart is also good for your penis. Now, in part two, we’re turning our attention to testosterone, food, and lifestyle. Basically the practical stuff that keeps your equipment ready for launch.
We’ll [00:01:00] also look at what normal is when it comes to size and what most women say, what, what kind of the size they prefer. And towards the end, I’ll share one simple habit that boosts your erections, and you can literally do it in your sleep.
Ready? Let’s get started.
We’ve talked about the positive roles of key molecules, such as oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, and nitric oxide.
There is one more key molecule I want to mention, and that’s testosterone. Testosterone promotes sexual interest and desire primarily by reinforcing the feel-good feelings that come with sexual desire. Testosterone has a direct impact on firm erections. By keeping the tissues of the penis flexible and healthy.
Having healthy testosterone levels is also key to healthy adult life and impacts muscles, bones, mood, and many other factors. So what are healthy levels of testosterone? For most adult men, that’s roughly 300 to a [00:02:00] thousand nanograms per deciliter, how they measure it. But this varies by age and individual factors.
If you’re experiencing low libido, fatigue, difficulty with erection, mood changes, and just overall lack of motivation, life, it’s worth getting your levels checked with a blood test under the direction of your physician. Now, there isn’t a food or supplement that will directly give your body testosterone as it’s a molecule.
Your body manufactures from other building blocks rather than taking it in from food, sleep, diet, and exercise. All play into helping your body create and maintain healthy levels of testosterone production. Now, if you’ve done all those things, sleep, die, exercise, and you still wonder about your testosterone levels, go see a doctor that specializes in this field.
One fact is that fat cells tend to break down testosterone into estrogen. So if you’re overweight, the healthiest way to regain more bioavailable testosterone is to [00:03:00] focus on shedding excess fat. In fact, if you want your penis to look bigger, losing weight will expose more of your manhood in attractive ways.
It’s not technically growing it, but when you lose the fat pad around the base, you’re basically excavating breed treasure. Plus, you’ll feel better and have more energy for treasure hunting. The food we eat as fuel for a body also has a direct impact on our pocket rocket. If you’re wondering what foods you can eat for better erections, walk into your grocery store’s, produce aisle and behold, nature’s pharmacy for firm erections.
Vegetables and fruits of all kinds of varieties are your penises best friend. So your mom was right. Eat your veggies, but maybe not for all the reasons she thought. It is because whole foods found in vegetables are high in nitrates. You know how I mentioned before that nitric oxide is what tells the body to pump blood into the chambers inside the penis?
To get super hard and erect nitric oxide in our body is [00:04:00] a product of a factory that takes in nitrates on one end of the assembly line, producing. Erection promoting no nitric oxide out the other end of the factory. But I found this process of how our body makes it particularly fascinating. This factory goes through three phases to convert the nitrates in food into the no rocket fuel
and what I’m about to explain might give you a new way of thinking about oral. When you eat food high in nitrates, it goes into your bloodstream and ends up in your saliva, but our bodies aren’t fully capable of breaking it all the way down into, no on its own, but can break it down into a nitrite. So the saliva concentrates it 20 times more, and we have bacteria in the back of our mouths that basically eat nitrite and then spit out NO or this bioavailable blocks that our factor needs to finish creating nitric oxide.
Bottom line. Taking the time to chew your spinach and make lots of saliva, [00:05:00] it’ll all help your body have better erections. So what’s the best source of nitrates and foods? You’ll find them in pretty much every vegetable,
but the best ones are leafy green vegetables like lettuce, spinach, and arugula. Berries are good. So are beets, peas, potatoes and tomatoes also contain nitrates too. So foods high nitrates are helpful, but it’s only part of the puzzle.
There’s also foods high in flavanoids. That are also shown to help with strong erections. Flavonoids help prevent problems that interfere with ENO production and can protect the body from a high fat meal even. For instance, chocolate is known to have high levels of flavonoids and is shown not to only reduce cardiac disease and stroke, but help your body pump more blood through healthy blood vessels and healthy penises.
A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that flavonoid rich foods improved vascular function, and your penis is pretty [00:06:00] much a vascular organ on steroids. Dark chocolate with at least 70% cocoa is your best bet here. Many couples use alcohol to feel less inhibited.
But here’s the irony. While it might lower your social anxiety and maybe bring down some inhibitions, it’s also depressing your nervous system’s ability to respond. A glass of wine probably fine, but too much and you’re working against yourself. Tobacco use is also known to damage the microscopic blood vessels in your penis, making it so that your cock can’t crow when you want it to.
Some people listening to this episode might say, Hey, Dan, what about, you know, uh, French pine tree bark extract?
Or what about horny goat weed, or this other type of herb or, supplement? Will that help me have stronger erections? From what I understand, the research on those types of supplements or foods. They’re inconclusive because it takes quite a bit of, rigorous [00:07:00] testing and clinical trials to know for sure if certain foods can help or not help.
So if you have the money for it and you want to go ahead and experiment, go ahead and try it. But from my experience, supplements work because you’re giving your body something that it’s a little bit low on. I believe supplements could help. They’ll especially help if you’re not getting enough of a certain type of molecule in your body that you need.
But remember, diet, sleep, exercise. Stress management, those things have just as big, if not a bigger impact on if the horny goat weed, herb itself is gonna give you more, horniness or better erections.
Okay. Not only the food you put in your body, but what you put into your brain matters as well. Many studies document how pornography use impacts men’s ability to maintain strong erections in partnered intimate sexual moments. For example, a 2016 study in [00:08:00] the journal Behavioral Sciences found that men who consume pornography frequently were significantly more likely to report erectile dysfunction in partnered settings.
Other research from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego documented cases of young men with porn induced ed, who recovered function within weeks of abstaining from pornography. Porn use can skew one’s self-image as well In a study surveying men who think their penis is too small, they found that their penis is actually not too small.
It’s within the normal range, but they also found that these men consume a lot of porn. Now the men who get jobs in porn usually are the rare 1% of guys with a larger than average penis. And most men don’t look at other men’s penises on a regular basis. So if the only penises you are seeing are the rare, exceptionally large ones, you’d of course think that you’re not measuring up.
That’s like saying. the only type of [00:09:00] basketball you’ve ever watched is seven foot tall professional, NBA players dunk basketballs over and over again, and you’re getting frustrated that you can’t dunk your own basketball at a neighborhood pickup game because you’re a normal average height, and then you think something’s wrong with you.
This is just my opinion, but the idea that men are overly concerned about their penis size is part of modern culture. Greek and Roman sculptors and artists were not gratuitous in depictions of large penises, but instead showed men with muscles and other parts of the body that represented masculinity.
In preparing for this episode, I mentioned to my wife that I’ll be talking about penis size and how a lot of men are concerned about their size. My wife looked at me with such a puzzled look. She’s like, really? You think people really worry about their size? And I’m like, yeah, I think they do. She’s like, that is so weird.
I would’ve never thought men really cared that much about how big they are.
Anyway, she really pushed me on this, like, really? Do you think your listeners of your podcast are the type [00:10:00] that actually really care if they’re big enough and she got me there, and maybe, maybe not, but we do get questions about this in our Facebook group time to time. So I know I’m not the only one that’s thought about this before.
So let’s see what the research says about penis size, shall we?
You might be wondering, am I normal? Is how big is normal? Now, there’s a few studies done. One semi reliable one is a 2015 study. Published in the British Journal of Urology International where researchers measured over 15,000 men. The average size of a penis is between five and six inches, and it’s common for penises not to be perfectly straight when erect, by the way, and some curvature is fine and normal too.
There’s another fascinating study published in 2015 by Dr. Nicole Proi. She’s a neuroscientist, and what she did, she created three, 3D printed models of penises. Then she recruited 75 women to participate in her [00:11:00] study. The women were asked to select the preferred penis size in two scenarios.
What’s a preferred penis size for a long-term sexual partner and a short-term sexual partner? It turns out that woman preferred penis sizes that are only slightly like tiny, bit larger than the average male penis for long-term marriages. These findings suggest that sexual preferences, they’re not universal, meaning not all women want men with much bigger than average penises, and the context of the relationship matters much, much more.
I can imagine a participant holding a blue 3D printed plastic phallus and wondering, I wonder how good of a cook he is and what kind of a father will he be and will he be there with me when I have a bad day? Most women don’t get that excited about seeing an erect penis, even if yours is gorgeous.
There’s a reason why dick picks make so many jokes, especially among women, right? But that doesn’t stop men from wondering if there’s anything they can do to make [00:12:00] theirs bigger. It turns out there’s a big business out there selling you pills or tricks, claiming to help you grow a few inches or increase your girth.
But the reality is you can’t make your penis grow any longer, bigger than you can make your feet grow into a bigger shoe size. There isn’t a food you can eat that will make your fingers grow or your ears bigger. So why would that be any different for your penis?
Perhaps these companies are just preying on insecure men who think, uh, it’s the reason why their penis is too small, is why they’re not getting the love they like. Anyway, don’t fall for that guys. Okay.
There are companies that will sell you pumps that essentially stretch your penis by pulling in more blood.
The idea is that you use the pump once or twice a day for a few minutes, such as while showering, and after a few weeks you’ll notice yourself feeling fuller or bigger. This works by pulling in more fluid into your private part, but it’s not actually causing your penis to grow. That being said, there are surgeries and [00:13:00] medical procedures done to increase penis size, and if you look hard enough, I’m sure you’ll find a doctor willing to offer it to you if you really want it.
But in my opinion, the only size that really matters is the size of your heart. Women care far more about how caring and invested you are, your willingness to share life’s challenges together as a team, and your capacity for real intimacy and honesty, far, far more than the size of your penis.
Okay. There’s one last idea I wanna share with you that I think will really help you maintain strong and firm erections. In fact, it’s so easy to do, you can even do it in your sleep. I’m talking about sleep. Your sleep hygiene has a big impact on your ability to get big sleep. Promotes healthy testosterone production nerve development.
Body repair, blood circulation, and so on, especially for your penis. Lack of sleep has a direct impact on your desire for sex and your ability to reach orgasm. And here’s something most guys don’t [00:14:00] realize. While you’re sleeping, your penis is doing calisthenics. Healthy men get three to five erections per night during the REM phase of sleep.
Which lasts like 25 to 35 minutes, usually while you sleep. It’s like your penis is going to the gym while you’re dreaming about. Well, whatever it is that you’re dreaming about, this nightly workout oxygenates the tissue and keeps everything in work in order. Morning wood isn’t random. It’s the end of your penises night shift according to sleep.org.
Adults need seven to nine hours of sleep regularly. Turn off screens like TVs, phones, and so on. An hour before retiring. Avoid eating a big meal, drinking a lot, or exercising right before bed. Create a consistent sleep schedule. Invest in a good mattress. That’s not only good for sex, but good for sleep too.
If you have sleep apnea, go get help for it. Keep your bedroom as dark as possible and leave your phone out of your room so that the notifications don’t [00:15:00] disrupt or interrupt your sleep. In summary, if you want stronger erections, here’s my playbook. Number one, learn the skill of calming the heck down.
This is the ability to relax and calm down your inner world while in close proximity to your partner, the better you’re able to make sex, playful, fun, relaxing, and easy, the more you can activate your parasympathetic side of your nervous system, and this promotes arousal and great erections.
Number two, pay attention to what foods you eat. The more vegetables and whole foods you eat, the better your body’s. No, that nitric oxide supply also cut out foods that interfere with no production. The more, no, you have the firmer and stronger your actions will be. Number three, exercise. What’s good for your heart is good for your penis.
It doesn’t matter too much if you’re into lifting weights or running long distances or playing sports, movement and exercise. It’s all good for your penis ’cause it helps your whole body stay healthy and in shape. [00:16:00] Number four, lose weight if you need to. The less excess weight you carry, the more effectively testosterone in your body works in your favor.
It also makes your penis look bigger and you’ll feel better and have more energy for meaningful activities like sex. Number five, quit the porn habit if you want intimate, partnered sexual experiences with big erections over the long haul. Number six, reduce alcohol use or tobacco use. Number seven, get enough sleep.
Rest allows your body to rejuvenate. It triggers the body to keep a healthy balance of the many systems that operate in order to keep your body and especially your penis in tip top shape. I hope you enjoyed this episode. It’s been a long time coming, and if your spouse would like more help with erections and make sex more fun and free, why not check out our coaching program?
All the details are on our website at Get Your Marriage on.com and thank you for listening. Please share this podcast with all your married friends. I promise they will. Thank you for life. Now it’s your turn to [00:17:00] go get your marriage on.
