if you've been struggling with belly fat that K won't budge I've got the ultimate strategy to blast through it mure 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 adapost tissue that fat not that stuff that you can pinch this is different visceral adapost tissue is a type of body fat that's stored within the abdominal cavity it's located near several vit 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 a 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 Reno Bluetooth tape measure 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 and inches is less uh to compared 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 want to make sure your your waist hip is less than one for a woman it's less than 8 so that's how you're going to be able to monitor this at home now why is that that the worst that it's because it is strongly correlated linked with a higher risk of bunch of different 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 osy signaling the fat cell signaling and Metabolism now here's what's great news it's actually easier to lose than subcutaneous fat 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 likes the chronometer 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 anywhere from 10 to 25% 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 are going to do 25% less next up remember I said it was chloric 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 our 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 Ultra process GLS or higher carbs they are more problematic for visceral adapost tissue and insulin resistance in fact ultrapress foods are associated with eating more overall and more viscera toost tissue there was an randomized control trial that looked at the contribution of ultra-processed foods in visceral fat deposition and it was called the pretty Med Plus trial and there were 1485 Spanish men and women ages 55 to 75 and what they did is they did body comp measurements and a food frequency questionnaire at the beginning 6 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 bat fat Android to gynoid Fat ratio and total fat they did this all by dexa scans and what they found was that a 10% increase in Ultra processed foods resulted in more visceral adapost to issue and more overall F so even if they were eating same amount of calories if they were eating more in Ultra processed food they had more visceral Outpost tissue and more overall fat now the other kicker is old processed foods have actually been shown to increase how much you eat by as much as 500 calories a day 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 g of protein daily and the other half followed a diet with 125 g 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 kg compared to 6.96 kg for the other group however the weight loss body higher protein group was mainly fat while the other group lost a little bit more lean muscle now both fruits areu and 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 up is activity first thing I want you to think about because you know when you think about metabolism you've got your Bal 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 cuz 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 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 of it was told okay to walk 12,000 steps a day but 3 days a week and go fast so they use smart watches to track their steps for the first8 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 and the amount of steps however this is where things get cooled the group that was told to do the brisk walking 3 days a week had notable improvements in their hip size and visceral fat they also had 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 8 to 12,000 steps a day as soon as we got that nail 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 them a little brisker some less time so 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 a lower total in trunk fat percentages and here's the kicker the higher body fat associated with six hours a day or more sitting may not be upset by achieving more than 150 minutes a week of physical activity there was a 2018 meta analysis that was published in sports medicine that looked at the effectiveness of hit in reducing total ABD and visceral fat in adults who were either normal weight or overweight obese and they looked at 39 different cities and 617 participants average age was about 40 years 52% 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% or more of peak heart rate was actually better at reducing total body fat but lower intensities like 70 to 90% was better for abdominal and visceral at post tissue now you might be thinking oh but intensity it's going to raise my cortisol and here's the thing yes chronic stress chronically elevated cortisol can make you have more belly fat hit training does the opposite cuz 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 SP it does hold everything in Tighter and boosts 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% of population is metabolically healthy when you're insulin resistant it's basically impairing your body's ability use insulin effectively to control your blood sugar what that means is now you have higher insulin levels and higher insulin levels tell you Body store fat 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 adapost tissue so sleeping getting that quality 7 to 9 hours a night of sleep is critical for losing belly fat hormone balance is also critical if you are going through if you're in Pur menopause you may have noticed that you've started to gain some belly fat because estrogen 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 phace run to a menopause specialist and see if hormone replacement therapy is right for you 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 cuz it's stored in the liver as glycogens free up to glucose and turned into fructose and store it 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 move more get those 8 to 12,000 steps in add high-intensity interval training and that resistance training get your 7 to n hours of quality sleep in 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 do not automatically signed up for struggle in middle age I'm sharing how the right nutrition can help you fill 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 for