If you’ve been struggling with belly fat that just won’t budge, I’ve got the ultimate strategy to blast through it. I’m going to share some key tactics for even better results. But here’s the kicker. You’ve got to nail this first strategy I’m going to share or nothing else is going to work. So first off, before we get into it, we’re talking about visceral adipose tissue, VAT fat.

Not that stuff that you can pinch. This is different. Visceral adipose tissue is a type of body fat that’s stored within the abdominal cavity. It’s located near several vital organs like your liver, your stomach, and your intestines. And you can’t pinch it, but you can test it both on a DEXA, that’s where you go and get an image of your body and you can see not just your body fat, but where that body fat is.

But you can also track it at home. And this is where a tape measure comes into play. There’s a tape measure called a Renpho Bluetooth Tape Measure. It costs like 30. And it’s great because it’s going to go straight into an app on your phone. And you’re going to want to do two different measurements.

You’re going to want to do a waist that you compare to your height, and you want to make sure that your waist is at least half of the size of your height, right? So your waist in inches is less, uh, to compare to your height. And then you’re going to do a waist to hip measurement. Waist narrowest point right around your belly button.

Hip widest point with your feet together. And for a man, you wanna make sure your, your waist to hip is less than 1 For a woman, it’s less than 0.8. So that’s how you’re gonna be able to monitor this at home. Now, why is VAT that the worst fat? It’s because it is strongly correlated, linked with a high risk of a bunch of d.

Really bad health conditions, things like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke, because it is linked to insulin resistance and inflammation. It’s very metabolically active and it really influences insulin. And remember, insulin resistance also happens when there’s excessive fat around these organs, because it disrupts the normal adempocyte signaling, the fat cell signaling and metabolism.

Now here’s what’s great news. It’s actually easier to lose weight. than subcutaneous fat.  So let’s talk about how to lose it.  Caloric restriction plus where those calories are coming from. They both are going to matter. So let’s talk about caloric restriction first. This is strategy number one. In order for you to know how much to restrict your calories, the first thing you need to know is how many calories do you need to maintain your weight?

The best way to do this is to do a macro audit. So all you do to start is use an app. I like the Cronometer app. We’ll link to that in the show notes. And what you do is keep everything the same and track what you’re eating. And I mean, track, you have to weigh it, right? Otherwise you’re guessing. And the research shows that we underestimate what we eat by anywhere from 10 to 25 percent.

You’re going to weigh and measure everything you do for a week, keeping everything the same, and see how many calories you use on average. You’re taking the average of the week to maintain your weight. Then you’re going to do 25 percent less. So let’s say that you need 2,000 calories a day to maintain your weight.

You are going to go to 1,500 calories a day, five days of the week, two days of the week, go back to normal. What the studies show is that when you cycle, you don’t have to cycle like this, but it actually is good for kind of a long term compliance. I learned this trick from Dr. Bill Campbell, and it’s really great too, because that means weekdays, you’re doing caloric restriction.

Weekends, you’re not going crazy. You’re just Eating a little bit more. You’re eating what your baseline is.  Next up, remember I said it was caloric restriction and then where the calories come from? What you eat matters because you’re not losing weight to get healthy. You’re actually getting metabolically healthy to lose weight but really to lose fat and hold on to or build muscle and you have to help get yourself past insulin resistance.

in order to do that. Here’s the reality. If you’re eating a diet that’s higher in what are called ultraprocessed foods or higher carbs, they are more problematic for visceral adipose tissue and insulin resistance. In fact, ultraprocessed foods are associated with eating more overall and more visceral adipose tissue.

There was a randomized control trial in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition that looked at the contribution of ultraprocessed foods in visceral fat deposition Other adiposity indicators. It was a prospective analysis. It was called the PREDIMED plus trial and there were 1485 Spanish men and women, ages 55 to 75.

And what they did is they did body count measurements and a food frequency questionnaire at the beginning, six months in and 12 months in. And what they did was they categorized the food by the degree of processing. And then they also looked at that fat. Android to gynoid fat ratio and total fat and they did this all by DEXA scans.

And what they found was that a 10 percent increase in ultraprocessed foods resulted in more visceral adipose tissue and more overall fat. So even if they were eating same amount of calories, if they were eating more in ultraprocessed food, they had more visceral adipose tissue and more overall fat. Now, the other kicker is ultraprocessed foods have actually been shown to increase.

How much you eat by as much as 500 calories a day. And we also know that all processed foods have lower thermic effect. All right, what about carbs overall? There was a 2003 clinical trial that was published in the Journal of Nutrition that looked into how different diets, they looked at one higher in protein and lower in carbs compared to more traditional higher carb diet.

Worked for women trying to lose weight. So there were 24 women. They were aged 45 to 56 who were overweight. Now half of these women followed a diet with 68 grams of protein daily, and the other half followed a diet with 125 grams of protein daily. And both of the diets had the same amount of calories and the same amount of fat.

So after 10 weeks, the group on the higher protein diet lost slightly more weight, about 7. 53 kilograms compared to 6. 96 kilograms for the other group. However, the weight lost by the higher protein group was mainly fat, while the other group lost a little bit more lean muscle. Now, both for some problems in the cholesterol levels, but only the higher protein group had significant decreases in triglycerides and a marker for heart health called the ratio of triglycerides to HDL cholesterol.

So what does this mean? That increasing protein intake while cutting back on carbs could help improve your metabolic health. So the takeaway here is swap out some of your carbs for protein. And that’s why I say eat protein first. You’re going to have a better thermic effect from the food. You’re going to have better satiety.

And you’re going to have better satisfaction. You’ll tend to have less cravings. The next step is activity. First thing I want you to think about, because, you know, when you think about metabolism, you’ve got your bagel metabolic rate, you’ve got the thermic effect of food, and then you have activity. And when we think of activity, most people think of exercise.

But before we even talk about exercise, I want you to think about activity first, because this is the thing that you’re going to make the biggest difference with. And this can impact how many calories you spend throughout the day pretty significantly. So there was a cool study where they looked at three groups.

It was 2019. It was published in the BMC Public Health Journal. And what they looked at was how 12, 000 steps a day could affect your body shape and metabolic health. And they did it with obese college students. So again, three groups. One group was the control group. They did nothing. One group was told to walk 12, 000 steps a day and another group was told, okay, walk 12, 000 steps a day, but three days a week and go faster.

So they use smartwatches to track their steps for the first eight weeks, right? What the results showed is that those two groups that were told to do the 12, 000 steps, they did 12, 000 steps. There was no real difference between those two groups in the amount of steps. This is where things get cool. The group that was told to do the brisk walking three days a week had notable improvements in their hip size and visceral fat.

They also have better levels of good cholesterol, lower fasting blood sugar and triglyceride, which means that they got better metabolic health by adding in that intensity. I want you to start cracking your daily activity. And the first thing I always have people do is before we start to even talk exercise, let’s make sure you’re getting in your eight to 12, 000 steps a day.

As soon as we got that nailed, let’s add in some intensity. Because adding in that intensity can help reduce risk factors. It can improve body composition and it can also help reduce risk factors for heart disease. And it’s you’re doing the same amount of steps. And here’s the better thing. When you do a little brisker, it’s less time.

So a study from the Journal of Sport and Health Science in March, 2024 found that prolonged daily sitting time was associated with Higher total and trunk fat percentages, while sufficient physical activity was associated with lower total and trunk fat percentages. The combination of prolonged sitting and lack of physical activity was associated with the highest total and trunk body fat percentages.

And here’s the kicker, the higher body fat associated with six hours a day or more sitting may not be offset by achieving more than 150 minutes a week of physical activity. I want you to get in two high intensity interval training sessions a week. There was a 2018 meta analysis that was published in Sports Medicine that looked at the effectiveness of HIIT in reducing total abdominal and visceral fat in adults who were either normal weight or overweight obese.

And they looked at 39 different studies and 617 participants Average age was about 40 years. 52 percent of them were female. And what they found was that high intensity interval training significantly lowered total abdominal and visceral fat. Now, the higher intensity hit, that means 90 percent or more of peak heart rate, was actually better at reducing total body fat.

But lower intensities, like 70 percent to 90%, was better for abdominal and visceral adipose tissue. Now, you might be thinking, oh, but intensity, it’s going to raise my cortisol. And here’s the thing. Yeah. Chronic stress, chronically elevated cortisol can make you have more belly fat. HIIT training does the opposite because it actually teaches your body how to get stressed and recover, get stressed and recover.

You want the short term stressors that teach your body how to handle stress. Now, the other exercise I want you to do is resistance training. Now, not because resistance training is going to do any spot reduction. I do want you to think of resistance training as what I call your metabolic spanks. It does hold everything in tighter and boost your metabolism because muscle protein turnover is expensive.

It’s costly. It uses a lot of calories. And because muscle is the first place we can start to improve that insulin sensitivity. And remember, being insulin resistant, which supposedly now less than 7 percent in population is metabolically healthy. When you’re insulin resistant, it’s basically impairing your body’s ability to use insulin effectively to control your blood sugar.

What that means is now you have higher insulin levels and higher insulin levels tell your body to store fat, especially around the visceral adipose tissues. Plus those elevated insulin levels can affect it. Other hormones that regulate fat metabolism like cortisol, and that contributes to more visceral fat accumulation, and insulin resistance is also associated with low grade inflammation, which can lead to more fat deposition.

Speaking of insulin resistance, let’s talk about sleep, because just one poor night of sleep causes insulin resistance. Causes increased appetite and causes increased fat deposition overall and more visceral adipose tissue. So sleeping, getting that quality seven to nine hours a night of sleep is critical for losing belly fat.

Hormone balance is also critical. If you are going through, if you’re carrying menopause, you may have noticed that you’ve started to gain some belly fat. Because estrogen is needed to build muscle. To burn fat and keep your metabolism humming. In fact, your estrogen drops, your metabolism drops. So if you’re in that phase, run to a menopause specialist and see if hormone replacement therapy is right for you.

And also, look at what else you can do to support those hormones. Phytoestrogens can support here, like flax and sesame. Soy, if it works for you. You can use adaptogens that help keep your hormone receptor sensitive, like ginseng. There was a 2017 review article published in the Journal of Ginsengs. that found that ginsenocides, which are the key substances found in ginseng, interact with different pathways inside cells that influence hormone receptors, such as estrogen and testosterone.

And these pathways help control how cells react to hormones and include specific processes essential for cell survival and health. One more thing that you may not have thought of in terms of dropping belly fat is drinking water. And here’s why it matters. Turns out even mild dehydration causes your body to free up glucose in the liver, because it’s stored in the liver as glycogen, it’s freed up to glucose and turned into fructose and stored as fat.

Your body does that in an effort to store some fat so that if you’re dehydrated you can then burn that fat to free up water. So mild dehydration can make you store more fat, and specifically around the belly. Caloric restriction. 25 percent of your maintenance, five days a week, maintenance calories, two days a week.

Get away those ultra processed foods and swap some carbohydrates for protein. Move more, get those eight to 12, 000 steps in, add high intensity interval training, two days a week, and that resistance training. Get to sleep. Get your seven to nine hours of quality sleep in. Balance your hormones. But biggest thing of all is do not stress over all of it.

By the way, that’s probably the hardest advice of all, right? You might feel like this is an uphill battle if you’re over the age of 40, but you’re not automatically signed up for struggle in middle age. I’m sharing how the right nutrition can help you build muscle and burn fat a lot more easily in this next video, and which supplements you should use daily to keep moving towards your goals.
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