How Do I Burn Belly Fat?

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How Do I Burn Belly Fat? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Today's question comes from Lisa Enchez from Instagram and she asks, how do I burn belly fat? Well, I'll be right back with that answer.

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First of all, you need to identify why you're gaining belly fat in the first place. And there are a couple of reasons this could be happening. Number one, it could be stress. Number two, insulin resistance. Number three, menopause or hormone imbalances. Let's dive into stress first. Now, stress can do it because stress raises cortisol and cortisol makes you better at storing fat, especially around your waistline. And of course, we also know that stress can make you crave sugar, which just exacerbates the problem. And by the way, poor quality sleep is a definite stressor too. That can create this. All right, the next one, insulin resistance. Insulin resistance can make you store belly fat because higher fasting insulin levels actually turn off fat burning and also create inflammation. By the way, inflammation is its own risk for factor for weight gain. So how do you know if you're insulin resistance? Well, insulin resistance has a couple clear signs. Some of them are elevated cholesterol or triglycerides, high fasting blood sugar. And one of them's really easy for you to check is your waist circumference. If it's greater than 34 inches if you're a woman, or greater than 40 inches if you're a man, that puts you at a musk much higher risk of insulin resistance. And by the way, when you're doing that measurement, do not hold it in. Do it right around your belly button and let it all, let it all out. Alrighty, next one, menopause. So menopause or by the way, men, this happens for you too. It's called andropause. And this is where you've got this imbalance or lowering of sex hormones which can also lead to belly fat. And that's really stubborn stuff. But there is hope and here's what it is. First of all, this is all, all of these are exacerbated by a high sugar impact diet. So what I tell people is this the first thing you're going to want to do is lower your sugar impact. Now, I walk through this in my sugar impact diet book. So let me just walk you through the basics of that. What is sugar impact in the first place? Well, well, this is where you look at this differently because it's not about eating no sugar. It's about knowing which to choose and which to lose. And you're going to do that based on four things. I rate foods, high, medium and low sugar impact based on their nutrient levels, how much fiber they have. Those are the good guys. Versus how much they raise your blood sugar or insulin and how much fructose they have. Those are the ones that are going to adversely affect your belly fat. So the first thing that I have you do is figure out how many of these medium and high sugar foods are really sneaking into your diet. Then we start to swap them out. We start to swap higher sugar impact foods for lower sugar impact foods. So examples would be if you've been eating dried fruit, like let's say you're eating raisins, call those little candy bombs you switch on over to grapes, and better yet, you switch on over to blueberries. So simple things, you're just swapping them out. You're making lower sugar impact choices. So we taper you down for a week or so and then we take you lower to really lower that sugar impact to help you become more insulin sensitive and help you burn off that belly fat. And then you check in to see how you do. So you can really figure out how many carbs should you have in your diet. How do you feel when you're eating different levels of, of sugar impact? So that's the first part is we've got to get that dialed in. Because even if you're managing your stress, even if you've got your hormones dialed, if you're eating a high sugar impact diet, over time you will create a problem. It will create belly fat. So that's the first thing is we want to make sure that we're fixing that diet. But then the second thing is you got to go to work on that root cause. Now, good news, sugar impact diet can help with insulin resistance for stress. You gotta figure out where the heck is this stress coming from. Now, sometimes it's not always possible to fix this situation. Maybe it's from your kids or your partner or your boss, right? But you can put in strategies to help you cope. Tapping meditation, working out, hanging out with your dog, whatever it is that you need to do. And if it's menopause or andropause, I have some great blogs and podcasts on on that. So go ahead and go back through my podcast library, check out my blogs@jjvirgin.com and get that dialed in as well. Bottom line is putting the right diet strategy in place, lowering your sugar impact so you balance your blood sugar and become insulin sensitive again with the appropriate lifestyle strategies based on the root cause. It's going to help you get that belly fat gone. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetoj.com.

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