Belly Fat Despite Eating Healthy? Fix THIS

What if you clean and you exercise and yet you still can get rid of that stubborn belly fat? Well, here's the part that's often missing from the conversation. Eating clean and exercising are necessary, but they're not always sufficient for losing abdominal fat. If your internal biology is working against you, you can do all the right things, but that might still not be enough to fully shrink your belly fat. So, in this video, I want to explain why that happens, and more importantly, what you can do to fix it. And if you follow the steps I outlined in this video, you will shrink your belly fat because belly fat and especially visceral fat. It's not just stored energy. It's a hormonally active and inflammatory tissue. And this tissue responds to very specific signals. You just have to know what those signals are and how to correct them. So let's start with one of the most overlooked drivers of belly fat and that is mitochondrial efficiency. And mitochondria are tiny structures inside your cells. So, if you think back to your middle school or high school biology, you'll remember that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. And mitochondria are very important for your overall health, but it's especially important for your belly fat. So, these mitochondria act like tiny engines, and their job is to take fuel and turn it into usable energy. And if your mitochondria are strong and healthy, your body can burn fat when it needs to. But if your mitochondria is weak or if you don't have enough mitochondria, well then in that case fat processing becomes very inefficient and fat is more likely to build up in the wrong places and visceral fat is especially sensitive to this. If you compare it to subcutaneous fat or this is the fat that's just under the skin. Visceral fat has less mitochondrial capacity and what that means is it doesn't have as many mitochondria and those mitochondria are less flexible and as a result visceral fat generates more cellular stress and more inflammatory signaling even when the total amount of fat is not that high. So when you get to the state with excess visceral fat, you can eat clean and healthy, which don't get me wrong, all those things will help and it's a prerequisite to losing visceral fat, but the progress will be slow because of these inappropriate signals coming from visceral fat. So how do you actually improve your mitochondrial function? Well, the strongest signal to boost your mitochondrial health and in the process reduce your belly fat quicker is it's not just exercise, but it's a very specific type of exercise that involves steady aerobic movement. And most forms of aerobic exercise will do the trick, but if you want to get there faster, you'll need to add intensity. So if you look at this study, this was a systematic review of over 350 studies. They looked at how effective are different modes of aerobic exercise when it comes to building your mitochondrial content. So they look at three types of training. Um endurance training, which was defined as low to moderate intensity, and then highintensity interval training or HIT. And then at the highest end of intensity, they look at sprint interval training. What's interesting is all three aerobic exercise modalities produce similar increases in your mitochondrial content. So 23% increase for endurance training and then both high intensity and sprint interval training showed a 27% increase. But the key difference was after you adjust for training frequency and time spent on exercise. Sprint interval training required about two times less exercise time than HIT and almost four times less time than endurance training to achieve comparable results. So if you want to save time, prioritize intensity and that will help you build that mitochondrial health and it will help you shrink that belly fat faster. But here's an important side note. If you haven't exercised consistently or if you've been sedentary, you do not want to jump straight into highintensity training. You need to work your way up. So the first step would be simply moving your body at an easy pace. So walking or light cycling for just 20 to 30 minutes two to three times per week. And at this stage the goal is not aerobic fitness. It's teaching your joints and your tendons and your heart and your nervous system to tolerate movement again. Now after 4 to 6 weeks of this, you can start layering in gentle intensity. So this is where you can start implementing something like the Japanese interval walking training or the Norwegian 4x4 protocol. And by the way, if you're not familiar with these, I made a separate video on that and I'm going to post a link to that in the description below. Now, what if you're doing the optimal exercise for your mitochondria and you're eating well and you track your calories and you're in a consistent calorie deficit, but your belly fat is still there. Well, this is where you'll may need to look into your hormones, specifically sex hormones, which is going to be different for men and women. So, let's start with women. And with women, estrogen plays a major protective role against visceral fat. When estrogen levels are higher, fat is more likely to stay under the skin and not deep around the organs, which is where visceral fat lives. And estrogen also helps your fat cells stay less inflamed and more metabolically stable. But as estrogen declines during parmenopause and menopause, well, that protection starts to fade and fat storage shifts inward toward the abdomen. So visceral fat becomes easier to accumulate and much more difficult to lose. So, what we often see in these situations is your nutrition is the same and your exercise hasn't changed, but these internal hormonal signals change, and that makes all the difference. So, if you're in this situation, well, then you should talk to your doctor to see if you would benefit from hormone replacement therapy. There's studies that show that HRT was associated with a significantly reduced visceral fat, BMI, and android fat mass, which is the fat stored around the midsection, so your abdomen and your chest and your upper arms. And then there was the post-menopausal estrogen progesterine intervention trial. That was a randomized placebo control trial that showed that women randomly assigned to receive hormone replacement average 1 kg or 2.2 lb less weight gain and 1.2 cm or half an inch less increase in waist circumference compared to placebo after 3 years. Now, over the past couple of decades, a lot of medical professionals were hesitant to prescribe hormone replacement therapy. And a lot of people didn't want to start hormone replacement therapy. Probably because back in 2002, the Women's Health Initiative study results were communicated in a way that made HRT sound broadly dangerous, even though the absolute risk were tiny and the findings were based on older formulations of hormone therapy that we just don't use today. And that message stuck and it led to a lot of fear that never really matched the data. But since then, the follow-up analyses and newer studies have shown a very different picture, especially when hormone replacement is started earlier and with newer formulations. That's why it's so encouraging to see the FDA starting the process of removing the broad blackbox warnings for HRT because the overall risk profile is far more nuanced and for the vast majority of women, the benefits will outweigh the risk. But that is a good discussion to have with your doctor. Now, proper hormone balance is also very important for men and it mainly has to do with testosterone. Now, testosterone levels usually peak around the second and third decade for most men and then they start slowly declining at about 1 to 2% per year starting in mid-30s and then to a point where one in five men in their 60s have low testosterone. Now, the good news for men is there's a lot of things you can do to boost your testosterone levels naturally without any kind of medications or supplements. And I actually made a separate video on that and I'm going to post a link to that in the description below. But for some men, you can do all the right things and still have low testosterone. So, this is where getting your levels measured and potentially starting testosterone replacement can definitely help. And we have longitudinal data like this study that showed that lower levels of baseline total testosterone independently predicted a larger increase in visceral fat even after adjusting for BMI and baseline fat and insulin and diabetes status. And then we have intervention studies like this randomized control trial that showed that 52 weeks of transermal testosterone prevented visceral fat accumulation. though it was decreased relative to placebo and it increased fat-free mass and skeletal muscle. And then there was a cross-sectional study that showed that men treated with testosterone did not show the usual age dependent increases in BMI and body fat. Okay, next let's talk about a very important part of the puzzle that's often overlooked and that is proper sleep. Because poor sleep can undo a lot of work you're doing with diet and exercise and hormones. Sleep is not just passive recovery. It's an active and necessary process to maintain proper metabolism. When you sleep well, your body resets insulin sensitivity, your appetite hormones, and stress signals. And as you know, stress is another huge factor that leads to more abdominal fat. But if you don't get enough quality sleep, and the key word here is quality, all those systems start drifting in the wrong direction. And we actually have direct causal evidence that shows just how harmful sleep loss can be for our visceral fat accumulation. So there was a small but a randomized crossover trial where they took 12 healthy adults with normal weight and they were metabolically healthy and they put them through two sleep protocols. In one phase they slept 9 hours a night and that was the control group. In the other phase they were sleep restricted to about 4 hours a night for 14 days. And here's what happened. When researchers looked at total body fat there was no meaningful difference between the two groups. But the group that had their sleep restricted had a significant increase in their visceral fat. And here's the part that really stood out. After 2 weeks of short sleep, the participants were allowed a recovery period, 3 days of normal sleep. But despite that recovery, visceral fat still continued to increase. And that gives us an important signal. You can gain visceral fat without gaining obvious total body fat. And then sleep loss preferentially drives fat into the abdomen and into the visceral space specifically. And the third point is short recovery windows do not immediately undo all the metabolic damage of days of poor sleep. So getting limited sleep during the week and then catching up on the weekends may not be enough to fix the damage. And genetic studies show the same pattern. So if you look at data from mandelian randomization analyses, it shows that people who are wired to sleep longer tend to carry less visceral fat. So for every extra hour of sleep, someone is genetically programmed to get visceral fat is about 1/10enth of a kilogram lower. And then we also have this association data that links shorter sleep to greater visceral fat mass in US adults. So why does this happen? Well, when you don't get enough sleep or if you get poor quality sleep, that usually translates to you consuming about 300 more calories during the day. And that happens because just one night of sleep deprivation causes a 22% increase in a hunger hormone called ghrein. And on top of that, sleep loss leads to a decrease of hormones that normally counteract your hunger hormones. So, you get less leptin and less peptide Y that normally regulates your satiety and our fullness. And all that excess energy that you consume after a bad night of sleep is preferentially shuttled toward your abdominal and visceral fat. And to tie it with hormones, short sleep lowers testosterone levels in men. And in women, it worsens insulin resistance and amplifies estrogen decline. So this is how you can end up with a perfect setup for stubborn belly fat. So what does good sleep actually mean? Well, I'm going to make a dedicated video just on sleep in the future. But briefly, for most people, fixing your sleep means trying to get at least seven to nine hours of sleep per night and then having consistent bed and wake up times and limiting bright lights or phone or computer screens at least 1 to 2 hours before bed and then getting sunlight first thing in the morning. Now, this is not a comprehensive list of all the things you can do to help with your belly fat, but these are probably the most high yield things you can do to see results very quickly. All right, I hope this was helpful. Stay healthy and I'll see you the next