if you want to lose belly fat guess what you don't have to go on a diet what these four strategies I'm sharing can make a big impact especially if you do all of them and I'm betting number four will surprise you but first beyond the aesthetic part why is belly fat such a big problem so first of all we've got Two basic kinds of fat we got subcutaneous fat you hear that pinch an edge and then we have this visceral fat or the vat fat and that's really what I'm talking about here so visceral adipose
tissue that fat is surrounding all those internal organs it's deep in the abdominal category cavity and so it's like things like the liver the pancreas the intestines and so it's accumulating here and that is what gives you that apple shape now again subcutaneous you know this stuff you can pinch it right remember the old pinch an inch and people have more subcutaneous they might have like more around their thighs more around their hips they're more pear-shaped but you haven't heard the apple and the pear in a while now the reason that vat fat is so
bad is because of what it does to your overall health first of all bad for your metabolism bad metabolic impact because visceral adipose tissue is actually more metabolically active and it releases more of these inflammatory cytokines and free fatty acids into the bloodstream so when this happens these substances can interfere with insulin signaling actually promote insulin resistance and contribute to the development of a whole bunch of bad stuff like type 2 diabetes high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease so I hope you're thinking I really don't want the fat and I want to get rid of
the bat fat so what are the things that cause fat fat well one of them I always used to say okay if this is bigger this is my stressed belly because elevated cortisol levels stress can do a number on fat fat in fact studies show that excess cortisol can promote the storage of fat in the abdominal region here's what goes on first of all cortisol high stress stimulates the breakdown of muscle protein which we never want to have happen then you've got these amino acids released then they're converted to Sugar by the liver then your
blood sugar is elevated which of course triggers an insulin release then that insulin release promotes the storage of that sugar as fat here now cortisol is one insulin is another driver for fat fat and insulin resistance can contribute to that fat in a variety of different ways first of all the cells become less responsive to insulin when that happens what does the body do it produces more insulin and when you have higher insulin levels that then promotes fat storage and especially fat in the abdominal area when your body starts to become resistant to insulin it
makes it way harder to burn off stored fat then this means that your body is going to have more fat accumulate the other one besides cortisol all and insulin is inflammation because chronic inflammation is another driver of that fat so when you have ongoing inflammation in your body and here's a challenge more fat more inflammation more inflammation more fat but when you have more inflammation it's harder for your body to do a good balance strike a good balance between storing fat and breaking it down this can actually cause more fat cells to grow in your
abdominal area plus inflammation makes it hard for your body to use stored fat for energy guess what that means even more fat accumulating around your waist now when there's too much inflammation and too much belly fat it can make it even harder for your body than use insulin properly so you can see how this whole thing becomes a super vicious cycle with inflammation and insulin resistance keep adding more fat here so what's happening we got cortisol we've got insulin and inflammation as these big players now what do you do about it so first of all
before you do anything about it you really want to know know how big of a problem it is and there's a couple different ways to look at it the very very very best way you can do it is to go get something called a dexa body scan we used to do these only for bone mineral density now they have the software so they can see a couple different key things on your body they can see your body fat and everything else your fat free masks but more specifically in your body fat they can see where
the fat is and you might go I know where it is you don't really know tell you luck the other key thing you're going to find out here is in your fat free Mass how much is skeletal muscle how balanced is that skeletal muscle do you have enough of that skeletal muscle because remember if you're losing weight but you're losing skeletal muscle you're making yourself worse not better now there's another piece to that if you're losing weight without losing your waist you're also making yourself worse so one of the simplest tools that you can use
to really help you monitor visceral adipose tissue it's an easy one it's a tape measure and what you want to do is measure your waist and compare it to your height and you want to make sure again if you are trying to lose weight you want to hold on to your muscle or better yet increase it and lose body fat okay super duper important so once you know where it is how much you have next step is what do you do about it so I'm going to give you four areas to focus on besides dieting
now here's the thing okay I'm saying you don't have to diet but of course if your diet's upgraded it's going to work way better so I'm going to give you one thing to increase in your diet that's going to help here now spoiler alert these are going to work best all these strategies when you do this with an eat protein first eat by the clock eat by the plate approach and that's something I've been talking about in all of my videos because if you were sitting over here and you're living on an ultra processed food
diet slugging down a bunch of sodas there's really only so much that these interventions can do they'll still do something but come on help yourself out eat protein first eat by the plate eat by the clock okay here we go number one exercise okay I'm cheating a bit here because I'm going to talk about four different things in exercise I'm giving it the big umbrella first one high intensity interval training in fact there are so many studies showing that high intensity interval training is so key for burning off visceral adipose tissue so before I explain
how it does it I'm going to first tell you what high intensity interval training is so you've probably heard of zone two or steady state training that kind of in your fat burning Zone where you're just able to carry on a conversation but a little breathy that's not what this is what this is let's say that you're used to going out for a jog steady state what you want to do instead for high intensity interval training is go out move for about three minutes and then go all out for 10 to 30 seconds up to
a minute but here's the thing don't pace yourself ideally you want to go as hard as possible to a point where you go I cannot do another one like sprinting I've been sprinting on a self-propelled treadmill holy smokes so I try to burn myself out somewhere 30 seconds or less and then I walk it off until I get my breath close to back again and then I do it again and I walk it off and generally what you'll see is depending on how hard you're going and how fit you are because the fitter you are
the faster you recover you might have to do let's say if you did 30 seconds hard it might take you a minute to a minute and have to recover two to three times as long totally fine fitter you are the faster you'll recover but the hard harder you go the longer it'll take two so you really want to push on this and by the way here's the thing that you got to know it doesn't get easier because you just keep pushing yourself more so you know I had someone tell me oh my gosh now I
can do that hit cycle four minutes hard I go that you're not doing it hard enough because you should really within 30 seconds I cannot do another step and then you walk it off why am I making you do this well this is a huge metabolic cost to your body because it creates this big auction debt and then you have to pay back and how do you pay it back with increased metabolism post exercise right it's big for improving since insulin sensitivity because when you're working at that level you are depleting the carbohydrate stores in
your muscles when you do that now when you eat carbs they have a place to go that isn't in your fat stores yay right and it also post exercise makes your body better at breaking down fat so I want you to do this two to three times a week when you're not doing this I want you to do resistance training resistance training is Mission critical the first place we start to lose our insulin sensitivity is in our muscles and if you are not using your muscles you are losing your muscles starting at age 40 we
lose up to one percent of our muscle mass a year two to four percent of our strength and up to six percent of our power and starts to double at age 60 and I say not on my watch so you got to be doing resistance training that means lifting heavy things for you how heavy depends how much you can lift you want to be working to a point somewhere and by the way it's pretty broad range but somewhere between eight repetitions and 30 repetitions multiple sets but by the time you get towards the end you
should feel like you have to stop that you're really getting to your max that you're getting to that point of failure so I'll go into the gym three times a week I will do big compound movements like squats like push-ups like pull-ups like overhead presses chest presses deadlifts and I will get to the point on the last couple sets where I really feel like I cannot do another one that's what you want to get to that is going to help your body do muscle go into muscle protein synthesis repair rebuild that activity is going to
more muscle is going to boost your basal metabolic rate the work your body has to do after the exercise is going to improve your metabolic rate and again you're building muscle that is your sugar sponge that gives carbs a place to land and you're improving insulin sensitivity so three times a week you're doing resistance training for big body parts your upper body pushing your upper body pulling your your hips and thighs your hinging and my core if I'm doing those types of things is involved in everything it's involved in a squat it's involved in a
push-up right the next one and this is such a big important one is walking after meals especially your evening meal when you tend to be less insulin sensitive this is going to help Drive Sugar into the muscles rather than have that Sugar stored as fat so it's going to lower the blood sugar response to the meal so if you can just say you know what I'm going to do 20 minutes walking after an evening meal huge bonus the other thing that I want you to do is just move more all throughout the day so that
really works into the final part which is something called neat we tend to look at this and go okay I've got to get my workout in my workouts are going to account for maybe five percent of your overall calorie burn non-exercise activity thermogenesis concentrating we're from five to fifteen percent of the calories we burn throughout the day what is this this means you're standing instead of sitting I got a walking treadmill put it over I have a standing desk and then I decide to take it a step further because my I can stand or sit
at my desk I keep it raised I have a treadmill underneath so that when I'm doing conference calls I can get on the treadmill and walk so that I can just get more movement in because it's really easy to just kind of sink in a chair and not move all day so set your little alarm on your watch use an aura ring or an Apple Watch that will just kind of ping you and go it would be great I actually had a friend who created this pavlock that was going to shock you to get up
like every 30 to 60 minutes to do something to remind you to get up and move because it matters so that is all number one I admit it was a little bit of a cheat because I squeezed four things in there but it's all under that umbrella of exercise because that is how important exercise is and it was number one for a reason now the next one and this is Mission critical and I'll share it with this story so a couple years ago during the pandemic I started going to Dr Joe dispenza's meditation Retreats perfect
thing to do during the pandemic all the other stuff was shut down I'm like I can finally focus on this and I made a commitment to do meditation for six months mainly because I was so rotten at it and I was like all right I'm just going to give this a give this a go and see what happens do a little experiment and what I likened it to is taking my nervous system to the gym and the reality is you would never go to the gym for a week and go I'm done right that's it
check it off and that's what you know when I went to the first Meditation Retreat I'm like cool I'm gonna do this it'll be a week I'm done I realize as I got into this I go this is not oh I need to really actually do this and I really was bad at it to be completely honest I went with a group of friends they're all like out there I am sitting there like in my head the whole time so I committed to it I went to his week-long event in April I went again in
in June I went again in September by September I was like you can't really tell if you're doing it right or not but I was like I think I feel better and my team was like you know we've been tracking you since you've been starting this meditation and we don't definitely notice the difference keep going but one thing that happened and I had the opportunity to sit with Dr Joe in September now April May June July August so this was not even totally six months yet it was right around that that Mark but I was
now committed but this funny thing happened I lost five pounds now I don't change things like I eat the same exercise today my track stuff you know sleeping the same blah blah blah and I was sitting at dinner with Dr John I go so funny I lost five pounds he goes yeah it's the new thing diet Dr Joe says hey you got to become nobody nowhere no thing but the reality was my body finally got got out of flight and fight now if you're in flight or fight mode all the time your body is breaking
down muscle you already heard what can happen that Sugar's going up right and I always had this little bit of belly fat and I was like what the heck come on right and boom gone no it's gone because I went and did a dexa so I could see it so remember you gotta help your body be more resilient and hit trainings One Way train your sympathetic nervous system to handle stress better but meditation fabulous and I will tell you when I went to Dr Joan I'm like okay oh my gosh I'm so busy how am
I gonna fit 20 to 30 to 45 minutes of meditation into my already totally slam day and what I've discovered is that I am way more productive when I do this so I actually gain time back now the other thing and I'm completely like adamant about this is sleep I actually do not know how to help you build muscle burn fat if you're not sleeping well just one poor night of sleep and you are more insulin resistant your gray Lynn is higher your hunger career and always say it's not for salmon and Brussels sprouts let's
be real because we know that poor sleep is going to affect your appetite regulation your hormone regulation it messes up everything so I really group stress and sleep together because it's all what do we need to do for your nervous system right so your nervous system can relax and your blood sugar can be stable in fact one of the things I used to do when I saw people one-on-one is I'd always check their fasting blood sugar because I knew that if our diet was dialed in everything looked good in terms of triglycerides and fasting blood
sugar and hemoglobin anyone see insulin and triglycerides but their fasting blood sugar was elevated it was a stress response so I don't know how to fix this if you're not addressing stress I hope I made that clear enough next one this is a little diet one however it's not really a diet cause I'm telling you to add okay I want you to add protein increase protein into your diet super duper important in fact I have a protein calculator that you can check out that will tell you exactly how much you need based on your age
your sex your activity level your goals Etc but basically what I have people do is point seven to one gram per pound of Target body weight that's 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of Target body weight where do you want to be now why am I having people do this well we know that when you increase your protein it's more thermic Burns more calories right 20 to 30 percent more than fat 10 to 20 more than carbs you're more satiated not hungry and your blood sugar is more stable so super duper important in fact there's
just some great research multiple studies showing that if you increase your protein and by the way this silly standard American diet the standard awful diet has protein at somewhere at the 10 to 12 percent range which is an obesogenic diet okay when you've got higher carbs higher fat low protein that is a recipe for fat gain especially around your waist when you elevate your calories from protein up to 20 to 25 percent studies show that you lose weight because you kick out some of the other food and you've got a more thermic food that you
just put in its place so my minimum for for an adult for someone you know really adult 16 plus is 100 grams minimum a day and 30 grams per meal minimum especially focusing on what I call your bumper meals that first first meal of the day and the last meal of the day and what you need to do to really ensure that you're getting what you need is track it that makes all the difference in fact I am one of those people yes I track it and I travel with the food scale and we were
just added Dr Joe dispenza event and they had a buffet so I was just able to make sure I got exactly what I needed easy final one I have a love hate relationship here but boy it can make a difference and that is getting cold I live in Florida I used to live in Southern California I do not like being cold to me cold as if it's under 70 degrees in fact it's funny here in Florida because it gets down to 65 and people literally have their down puffy jackets on and mittens it's just ridiculous
and I'm one of them yeah do not like being cold however I do cold baths I have a I have actually gotten a cold plunge now you don't have to buy a cold plunge you can actually do this with a cold shower so if you're already going hey I don't have to do it I don't have a nice bath yes you do here's why you want want to do it cold can help you beige your white fat it can help you make more Brown fat why on Earth do I want to have more Brown fat
and it turns out that one of the keys to being a really good fat burner is the kind of fat you have so you have different kinds of fat you have white fat that's what most of the fat is large fat right and too much white fats very unhealthy because it's very inflammatory right leads to obesity insulin resistance heart disease blah blah blah now the other type of fat are beige and brown fats Brown fats are smaller and they have a lot of mitochondria in them that's why they have that color the reason that we
want to have brown fats is these Brown fats are very metabolically active they burn fat to provide Heat and also to help support sugar and fat regulation so these Brown fats are what help you shiver and babies have a lot of these Brown fats that's what helps keeps them warm now it turns out that you can beige your white fat and when you do that you produce these very metabolically active thermogenic fat cells you turn them into good fat cells and I actually created a whole video talking about how you can Brown your fat cells
and all of these strategic ways that you can Brown your body fat like a marshmallow over an open flame okay well that's a little weird fish oil and how you can flavor your meals and how red wine and chocolate may be of service so check out the next video foreign [Music]
