Which reproductive hormones move on substantial weight loss, and in what order?

My laboratory results are from the same laboratory each time, drawn fasting, which I gather matters.

I would like help reading this properly rather than being told what conclusion to reach.

I have the full report including the method section, so I can quote specifics if that helps.

What can I legitimately conclude from this figure?

Start with what is being measured and when. Most hormone assays are exquisitely sensitive to sampling time, fasting state and recent sleep, and those three explain a great many surprising results.

Cortisol has a pronounced diurnal rhythm with the peak shortly after waking; a random afternoon sample is close to uninterpretable without knowing the draw time.

Headline results, principal programmes

Sex-hormone-binding globulin rises as insulin resistance falls, which lowers free hormone fractions without any change in production. A free measure and a total measure can therefore move in opposite directions.

Reference intervals are method-specific and laboratory-specific, which is why a result should be read against the interval printed on its own report rather than against a remembered number.

Compare against the reporting laboratory's own interval, not a remembered one.

The short version: real, measurable changes in the incretin and appetite-regulating hormones, and much weaker evidence for anything downstream of that.

Growth-hormone secretion is pulsatile enough that IGF-1 is used as the integrated proxy, and IGF-1 itself is affected by nutritional status.

On the detail: testosterone in males is both diurnal and pulsatile, and the conventional advice is an early-morning fasting sample repeated on a second occasion before anything is concluded.

Diurnal variation for cortisol, testosterone and thyroid-stimulating hormone is characterised well enough that sampling time is part of the result rather than a detail about it.

Research-use compounds are not approved for human use, and self-experimentation with anything acting on an endocrine axis is a different risk category again.

One abnormal value on a wide panel is usually statistics. Two on a repeat is a finding.

In practice, the relevant separation is between a direct receptor effect and a consequence of weight change, because energy balance moves several endocrine axes on its own.

Ghrelin, peptide YY and glucagon-like peptide-1 itself all shift with sustained energy restriction, and those shifts partly oppose continued weight loss. That counter-regulation is a well-described phenomenon and is not specific to any drug.

Leptin tracks fat mass closely and falls with weight loss, which is one of the mechanisms behind the counter-regulatory drive that makes maintenance harder than loss.

Mass spectrometry is the reference method for steroid quantification and immunoassays are known to over-read at the low end for several analytes.

Free and total measures can diverge through the binding protein. Read both.

Mechanically, pulsatile hormones cannot be characterised from a single sample, and several of the ones people ask about here are strongly pulsatile.

Assay methods differ: immunoassay and mass-spectrometry results for the same steroid can differ enough to matter, particularly at low concentrations.

The caveat is that endocrine results need a clinician who can see the whole panel and the person attached to it. This is background only.

Weight change moves several of these axes on its own, so attribution needs care.

Before interpreting a panel, check whether anything on it is affected by the time of day it was drawn. Several are, substantially.

Thyroid-stimulating hormone has a diurnal variation of a few tenths and a wide reference interval, so small movements within the interval are not findings.

The counter-regulatory hormonal response to weight loss is well documented in the physiological literature and persists for a long time after the loss itself.

Record the draw time with the result, or the result is worth much less than you paid for it.