Excess belly fat not only increases your waistline but also makes you predisposed to several chronic health conditions. The specific type of belly fat, called visceral fat, is one of the most stubborn types and can lead to diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and several other health conditions. This means that losing fat not only helps you get in shape but also reduces the risk of some severe and potentially life-threatening disorders.
That said, losing belly fat can be a challenging endeavor. Adjusting your diet and leveling up your fitness regimen are the primary steps to get started. But since these measures do not help you lose fat rapidly, you may need to consider additional steps and treatments to accelerate the process.
In this blog post, we will look into what causes belly fat accumulation and effective methods to reduce this fat buildup.
What Causes Belly Fat to Build Up?
Several factors contribute to the accumulation of belly fat. We will discuss the most significant of those below.
Poor diet
A poor diet slows metabolic processes and reduces your body’s ability to burn fat, leading to significant weight gain. Foods like cakes, candies, and carbonated beverages are the most notorious ones in this regard. Other foods belonging to this category include high-carb, low-protein diets.
Moreover, you must be watchful of your trans-fat intake. Foods with high content of Trans fats – such as baked products and fast foods – can cause inflammation in the GI tract, leading to obesity.
Lack of Physical Activity
As a rule of thumb, you must burn more calories than you consume if you want to lose weight. This necessitates an active lifestyle, without which you will not be able to achieve the desired calorie deficit. As a result, you will end up having excess visceral as well as subcutaneous fat.
Genetics
Your genes can contribute to your body’s inability to keep the fat from developing around your belly. According to a recent French study, people with some specific genes are more susceptible to developing a Pot Belly than others.
Stress
While occasional stress is nothing to worry about, long-term stress can lead to several health complications, including increased belly fat and obesity. This is because stress leads to a higher cortisol release, which slows several body functions to gather energy to help you focus on the stress-causing matter. With long-term stress, cortisol levels remain higher, hindering primary body functions, including immune responses and fat burning. This entire process leads to excess fat in the belly, causing obesity.
Lack of Sleep
Lack of sleep is often associated with increased calorie intake, which leads to excess belly fat. Inadequate sleep also redirects dietary fats to the visceral section. Both these factors increase belly fat, increasing your waistline.
Fortunately, you can get rid of extra belly fat with a healthy diet, proper exercise, medications, and various clinical procedures.
Natural and Safe Ways to Lose Belly Fat
Natural ways to reduce belly fat require long-term commitment, but they bring a healthy change to the body. The significant catch for you is that your lifestyle becomes more streamlined, and your routine becomes more wellness-centric.
Here are some natural ways to lose belly fat.
Healthy Diet
The key to losing belly fat through diet is reducing calorie intake. This doesn’t mean a drastic reduction in the amount of food you eat at mealtimes. Instead, it involves replacing calories-rich foods and refined carbs with healthier alternatives, such as:
Foods with plenty of soluble fiber
Foods with healthy fats
Protein-rich foods, such as fish, meat, eggs, whey proteins, beans, and dairy
Foods that do not contain fructose in excessive amounts
Natural fruit extracts instead of sugary beverages
Regular Exercise
According to doctors and researchers, including physical activity in your daily routine is effective, or even crucial, in reducing your belly fat and burning calories. Top exercises that you can perform to burn off your fat in the belly and other body areas include the following:
– Cardio exercises
– High-interval intensity training
– Abdominal workouts
– Weightlifting
– Stress Management
As mentioned above, long-term stress can be one of the reasons for that stubborn belly fat buildup. With effective stress management, not only can you stop belly fat accumulation progression but also start getting rid of the existing buildup.
A study approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) helped a group of overweight women control their stress and provided them with nutritional training. This allowed the participants to lower their stress levels and avoid emotional eating. As a result, they were able to reduce belly fat over time.
Adequate Sleep
Good quality sleep for the recommended duration is essential to losing excess belly fat and possibly getting the perfect body shape.
Getting a good night’s sleep encourages better food choices. It helps you avoid midnight snacking and reduces the temptation for processed and junk foods. Moreover, it allows you to benefit from your resting metabolism. This improves calorie consumption and boosts fat burning.
Drink Plenty of Water
According to research, drinking water in adequate amounts may stimulate your metabolic functions. This is because drinking water boosts thermogenesis, the process of heat production to keep body fluids’ temperature aligned with the body temperature. This results in a more activated metabolic system and accelerated fat burning.
Other ways drinking water helps reduce belly fat include the following:
It controls your appetite.
It reduces your calorie intake.
It keeps your body energized during exercise.
It promotes convenient fat removal.
It helps reduce stress.
Clinical Treatments for Belly Fat
Clinical treatments are more effective in reducing abdominal fat when combined with a healthy diet and regular exercise. Below are some of the most common treatments that your doctor may prescribe to reduce belly fat.
Medications
If you want to reduce abdominal fat but have obesity-related health problems hindering you from following a strict weight loss plan, you can benefit from certain prescription medications. A medical expert usually prescribes these medications after thoroughly analyzing your body weight, overall health, and weight loss goals. However, no weight loss medication can help achieve desired goals if you are unwilling to incorporate a weight loss plan into your routine.
Some most common medications for weight management and fat loss include:
Hormone Therapy
Women are generally subject to higher hormonal fluctuations during menopause. One of the impacts of these fluctuations is lower estrogen levels, leading to poor body fat distribution and a heightened risk of extra belly fat. However, estrogen replacement therapy can improve fat redistribution to prevent it from accumulating in the belly area.
Final Thoughts
Getting rid of excess abdominal fat is essential not only to achieve your desired appearance but also to steer clear of several chronic health conditions. It can be a long process, but it is indeed worth it.
Sticking to a healthy lifestyle by eating healthy foods, exercising regularly, drinking plenty of water, and getting a good night’s sleep are the fundamental steps to start your fat loss journey. You can get help from clinical and surgical procedures for quick results, but those options should be considered long after adapting to a healthy lifestyle.
In the end, it is always necessary to remain in touch with your health physician to discuss your progress and get guidance. They can help you adjust your approach toward overall wellness and lead you to get in the pink of health.
How to lose fat by getting your hormone balance
When it comes to losing weight, you’d think that eating a healthy diet and exercising would have it covered, right? So why are those stubborn pounds still there, despite all your best efforts to eat well and stay fit?
The truth is that while what you eat and how often you exercise are crucial, this is not the whole story. You also need to keep your hormone levels balanced. Obesity is primarily a hormonal problem, and hormones are alterable, unlike behavior. The only way to lose weight is to reverse the hormonal dysfunction.
In this blog post, we will explain how you can lose fat by keeping your hormones in balance.
How Do Hormones Affect Weight?
Your hormones act as chemical messengers and are responsible for controlling the functions of the body. So, when hormone levels act up, it can have far-reaching effects on your well-being and weight. To discover what is going on with your hormones, you need to understand the complete picture. It is essential to carry out a complete hormone map of the body, using blood tests to determine whether there is an imbalance and which specific hormones are out of line.
So let’s look at all the essential hormones that can lead to obesity and increased fat mass.
Insulin
The standard prescription for weight loss is ‘eat less, move more.’ However, virtually every person who has used this calorie reduction method for weight loss has failed. The common root cause of obesity and diabetes is insulin resistance.
Insulin is a key hormone responsible for controlling the regulation of blood sugar in the body. The trouble with today’s Western diet is that it is overloaded with sugar, grains, and plant oils. If you consume a western diet excessively, your cells will not respond well to insulin, i.e., unable to use glucose from the blood. As a result, the glucose level in the blood rises, and this condition is called insulin resistance.
The excess glucose gets stored as fat and causes other symptoms, including lethargy, difficulty concentrating, high blood pressure, and high insulin.
Restoring the Balance
The best way to treat insulin resistance is to maintain a high fat, moderate protein, and low carb (HFLC) diet. HFLC diet, together with intermittent fasting, will break the cycle of insulin resistance.
Cortisol
It’s no coincidence that you will find it hard to lose weight when you’re stressed out. Anxiety severely affects the level of cortisol hormone produced in a fight or flight situation. Cortisol releases extra energy to help you cope with the stressful state, and if this energy isn’t burnt through exercise, it can leave you hungry, causing overeating. If you are in a perpetual state of stress, the cortisol ‘switch’ stays on, thus contributing to your weight gain.
Restoring the balance
Work on the stress levels, and your body will thank you for it. It’s essential to make time for exercise and relaxation. Some of the most overweight clients have trouble sleeping, and lack of sleep not only increases both cortisol and insulin. We believe that sleep is probably more important than exercise.
Thyroid
When you’re struggling to lose weight, the first thing to get checked is your thyroid function. The thyroid produces two important hormones, thyroxine (T3) and triiodothyronine (T4), to regulate the metabolic process or the speed at which you burn food to make energy. If your thyroid is underactive (hypothyroidism), it will make your metabolism sluggish and cause weight gain.
Other symptoms to watch out for include dry and brittle hair, constipation, general fatigue, low energy, depression, and cold hands or feet. A thyroid diagnostic machine is used to find out if hypothyroidism is the cause of your weight gain.
Restoring the balance
One of the best ways to overcome an underactive thyroid is through healthy eating. You should cut out all sugars, carbs, and processed foods and instead stick to a diet full of natural foods, such as fresh meats, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and eggs. This ‘paleo’ diet gives the best combination of moderate carbohydrates, fats, and proteins to trigger an ideal hormonal response in your body. Also, you must restore both T3 and T4 to restore optimum thyroid function.
Testosterone
Testosterone controls the traits associated with masculinity and also influences your weight. As testosterone decreases, the body becomes less efficient in fat metabolism and stores excess energy as fat. Other symptoms of low testosterone levels include reduced muscle mass, poor memory, low libido, low energy, depression, erectile dysfunction, and infertility.
Restoring the balance
BHRT can help reverse this problem and redress the balance between testosterone and estrogen levels.
Oestrogen
Oestrogen (estrogen) is a woman’s best friend that helps with reproduction, memory, bone health, and more. Insulin is the principal regulator of fat metabolism, primarily through the lipoprotein lipase enzyme (LPL). This enzyme sticks out from the membranes of different cells and pulls fat out of the bloodstream into the cells. If LPL is on a muscle cell – the fat is pulled in to be used for fuel. But if LPL is on a fat cell, it makes a cell fatter.
Why do men and women get fat differently?
The difference is due to the distribution of the Lipoprotein Lipase (LPL) enzyme and the role of sex hormones on LPL. In men, LPL activity is higher in the fat tissues above the waist; therefore, the potbelly (apple-shaped) is common in men.
In women, LPL activity is higher below the waist, so women fatten around the hips and bottom (pear-shaped). After menopause, the LPL activity in women’s abdominal fat catches up to that of men, due to which they put on excess fat above the waist.
Restoring the balance
It is essential to balance the sex hormones, including estrogen, in menopause. By balancing the estrogen/progesterone levels, you can control the fat.
Leptin
Leptin is another hormone that can cause weight gain. It is produced by fat cells to signal your brain that you are full after a meal. Eating a diet high in processed fatty foods floods your body with leptin, which becomes resistant and stops sending those ‘fullness’ signals to the brain. Leptin resistance can be one of the culprits behind the constant need to eat experienced by many patients.
Restoring the balance
The good news is that you have the power to reverse the effects of too much insulin and leptin with a high-fat, low-carb (HFLC) diet. Cutting out sugar and processed food from your diet and avoiding grains and refined carbohydrates can help correct the problem.
What have we learned?
There’s no doubt that hormones play a vital role in all aspects of your well-being. The deficiency or excessiveness of any hormone can have a huge knock-on effect, especially when it comes to putting on weight and increasing fat mass.
Therefore, if you want to stay in good shape, you need to keep the hormones in harmony. For this reason, you need to maintain a healthy diet or opt for a carefully administered, natural hormone replacement regime.
Our Clinic offers a variety of fat loss programs that can help you lose weight. For this purpose, call us and book your appointment.
Have questions or need to book an appointment? We’re here to help!