How To Get Rid of Menopause Belly Fat the Fastest & Simplest Way

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I'm JJ Virginia, PhD dropout. Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times Best selling author. I'm a Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven most of all by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers and sharing the information that I uncovered with as many people as I can. And that's where you come in. That's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to powerful aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. Don't miss an episode. Subscribe now@subscribetojj.com to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. Want to listen to this show? Ad free? Join our VIP podcast option for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, you can enjoy this podcast completely ad free and and there's even a seven day free trial. Here's how to join. Head over to subscribetoj.com, it'll take you right to Apple Podcasts, where you click the Try Free button and start your ad free experience today. Hey jj, Virgin here. Okay, real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me, travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things and suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean on your laptop or on your phone. Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of year reset could be a real goal this time. Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code Virgin. When the holidays start to feel a.

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Menopause belly fat doesn't stand a chance against the step by step strategies I'm going to tell you about in this video. So let's talk about the easiest, most effective ways to you can get rid of this fast. So first of all, what is menopause belly fat? Why is it so bad? Because the reality is not all body fat is created equal. There's a couple different types. There's subcutaneous fat. That's what we know. It's the pinch and inch fat. Then there's the hidden fat. This is the visceral adipose tissue. And there's also intramuscular fat. I'm really going to talk about visceral adipose tissue though, because that's that fat fat around your belly that you're like, what is going on here? Where did this come from? And this is the worst fat of all because it is strongly linked with a higher risk of all sorts of serious health conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease and stroke. It's basically an indicator of insulin resistance and inflammation. It's this metabolically active fat that really influences insulin. And by the way, it also has a bunch of receptors for cortisol too. So when you have a bunch of fat in your internal organs, you will start to become insulin resistant. It it then messes up your fat burning signaling and overall takes down your metabolism. So we got to get a handle on it. Now first, let's talk about why it happens. And if you noticed that as you started to go into perimenopause, this started to show up and you thought maybe you were seeing things, you're not crazy. This is clearly because one of the big risk factors is this low estrogen. When estrogen starts to decline, not only are we losing muscle, which as we know that muscle is really important for insulin sensitivity and that you need estrogen, it really helps build muscle. But also lower estrogen means higher insulin and higher inflammation. So there's one big problem. You also heard about insulin resistance. Two hormones really can drive you to gain more fat around your waist. Insulin and cortisol. And again, there are actually cortisol receptors around in your visceral adipose tissue. So it makes it even easier for you to store more fat here. And when cortisol's up, blood sugar's up. And when blood sugar's up, then insulin's got to come up. So you can see all these things play together. And when estrogen drops, it makes it harder. Estrogen acts as a counterbalance for cortisol, so if estrogen drops, it's easier for cortisol to shoot up. So that triad of low estrogen, elevated insulin, elevated cortisol is like a, you know, it's a triple threat for putting on visceral adipose tissue. Then you add fuel to the fire by adding in a little bit of wine at night, maybe having some ultra processed foods, something high in fructose, and then maybe you're doing that at 10 o' clock at night. That's like all that stuff is just compounding the problem. So how do you know if you have it? You probably are like, I know I have it, but I really am a big believer in measuring things so that we can track it. So let's talk about how you can really see it. First off, if you do a DEXA scan, and if you haven't done one, please, please, please, please go do a DEXA scan. I think this is something that we should really be doing in our teens to start with, to see our bone mineral density. But once we start heading into perimenopause, at least annually, get that DEXA done. And bone mineral density is like the least important to me in this because if we're focusing on muscle mass, you know, bone mineral density is a lagging indicator of not having enough. But the big thing you're going to see from a DEXA scan is you're going to see not just your skeletal muscle mass, and that's super important, but you're going to see your body fat, but more importantly where that body fat's located. And this is how you can really see that visceral adipose tissue. So it's going to tell you how much you have. You basically want to make sure that you have 10% or less. So your total body fat, let's say that you have 30 pounds of body fat, then you'd want to have 3 pounds or less of visceral adipose tissue. Here's the reality though. You want your visceral adipose tissue to be as close to zero as possible. And yes, you can get it there. Now at home you can use a biompedance scale and they're going to give you a guesstimate of that visceral adipose tissue. But truthfully, at home the best thing for you to do is a waist measurement and to monitor your waist and so munch your waist once a week. I love this Bluetooth tape measure that I found. I will put the information in the show notes on it because basically you can take your waist and your hip measurements and we'll report to your phone. So once a week do this. And this is a great way to really monitor what's going on. Now that you know that how much you have, let's talk about how to release it. And the reality is no amount of sit ups are going to help you here. You cannot spot reduce it, but you can can target going after it. And here's what you're going to do. First of all, move. All right, you knew I was going to say this. And activity itself is going to increase your overall calorie spend. So that's nice. Although we know that a bigger indicated, bigger way to really lose fat is going to always be diet first. But I'm going to talk you through what I want you to focus on because there are some things that really target visceral adipose tissue. So first of all, moving more throughout the day, but really making sure that you're getting your steps in. So this was a crazy study that looked at taking 12,000 steps a day. Now remember, 8,000, sort of your floor for how many steps you want to get in a day. Okay, eight. Think of 8,000 as your floor. More is better, More is better. So goal of 12,000 would be fabulous. So they did a 2019 study that was published in the BMC Public Health and they looked at how walking 12,000 steps a day could affect your body shape and your metabolic health. And they looked at this in obese college students and side note on this, I remember when an obese college student was going to be an anomaly. And now you look at 40% of the population, the adult population is obese, like this, something is wrong. Clearly they divided these participants into three groups. So that one group was just walking 12,000 steps a day. Another group added in three days a week. They added in some intensity into the walking. So one group, 12,000 steps every day, the other group, three days a week, add some intensity. And then there was a third group that like, don't change anything. And then they used a tracking device, a smartwatch. And they did this for eight weeks. So first off, there was no significant difference in the daily steps between those two walking groups. But here's where it gets fun and interesting. The group that included that intensity, the brisk walking, saw notable improvements in their hip size and their visceral fat. They also had better levels of good cholesterol, lower fasting blood sugar and triglycerides. And that is all indicators of insulin sensitivity. And the group that was walking only didn't have those changes. So what do we, what do we do with this information? You're wondering. First of all, let's say 8,000 is our floor. More is better. And what I'd love you to do is start to add some intensity into that. How can you do that? Well, I live in Florida, so I mean, I can up my speed, but what I do here, since I don't have hills, is I throw on a rucking vest. And I love this so much for us because it's such a great thing too for bone mineral density. So how about you're doing your walking every day because it's like flossing your teeth. It's non negotiable, right? And then a couple times a week you throw on a ruckin vest. You start with £10 and you build up from there. All right, now I'm gonna share another study. And this was from the Journal of Sport and Health science. It was March 2024. And this is why I always start before I tell people what I want them to do at the gym. I always start with like, let's get some walking going. Because what this study found was that prolonged daily sitting time was associated. I know this is not a shocker. With higher total tr, trunk total and trunk fat percentages. So truncal fat, visceral adipose tissue, while sufficient physical activity was associated with lower total body fat and trunk fat percentages. And here's what the real issue was. It was the combination of prolonged Sitting and no physical activity that was associated with the highest total and trunk body fat percentages. So the important takeaway here is that don't think that you can go to the gym 30 minutes a day and then sit for the rest of the day and make this all work. And that is why when I'm doing exercise prescription, the first thing I do is say, let's make sure you're getting in your steps every day, then let's add some intensity to the steps. And then we're going to talk resistance training and hiit. But I want to focus on HIIT here, high intensity interval training, because what we know about high intensity interval training, or HIIT sessions is that they target visceral adipose tissue. Here was a 2018 meta analysis that was published in Sports Medicine. It was aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of HIIT and reducing total body fat along with abdominal visceral adipose tissue. It looked at adults who were either normal weight or they were overweight or obese. What they did was looked at 39 different studies with 617 participants that the average age was about 40 years and 30, 52% were female. Here's what they found. So amazing. HIIT significantly lowered total abdominal and visceral fat. And the sweet spot was HIIT training somewhere in the 70 to 90% of maximal heart rate. And it significantly went after visceral adipose tissue. So I'm gonna give you a couple ways I love to do HIIT for this. I think that doing just 10 bouts, this is 20 minutes of, one minute on, one minute off. So you get, get on whatever you like. It could be a StairMaster treadmill, an elliptical, a bike. Doesn't matter. One minute easy, one minute hard, one minute easy, one minute hard. And when I say hard, it's hard. Hard as you can go for that minute. It's not a sprint, but that's about 90%. Another thing that you could do is do more like a Tabata style where you do 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy, 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy. So doesn't matter which way you do this, you just gotta do it. And once you've gotten your walking and your hiit. The other thing that can be helpful here, of course, is resistance training. Why? Because resistance training is going to add muscle, and muscle's the fastest way to start restoring that insulin sensitivity. And remember, we've got issues with insulin sensitivity if we've got more of that visceral adipose tissue. The other shout out that I like for both HIIT and resistance training, is they can also help improve cortisol. So remember those things that we had to worry about? Low estrogen, insulin resistance, high insulin, high cortisol. So these all can contribute there. All right, let's flip over to food. And when I think about food, I'm always going to say, eat protein first. You kind of, if you've been following me around at all, you go, she's going to say protein first. Well, there's a reason. There was a 2003 clinical trial that was published in the Journal of Nutrition. It looked at how different diets, one higher in protein and lower in carbs compared to a more traditional high carb diet. They looked at those for women trying to lose weight. And they had 24 women. They were age 45 to 56. That's like, you know, the most challenging time, right? And they were all overweight. So half of the women followed a diet that had 68 grams of protein daily. It's kind of the average of what women do. And the other half followed a diet that was 125 grams of protein daily. Now, both the diets were matched for calories and matched for fat. Here's what happened. So same amount of calories, same amount of fat. Just the difference was protein and carbs. Right? After 10 weeks, the group that was on that higher protein diet lost slightly more weight. So they lost 7.53kg and the other group 6.96kg. So it was like just a little bit more. But that's not the cool part. The weight loss by the higher protein group was mainly fat, while the other group lost some lean muscle. Okay, that is like a news flash. That's super important. So by increasing, basically they double the protein, they were able to hold on to their muscle and just lose fat. And the low protein group lost muscle and fat. Now, both of them had better cholesterol levels, but that higher protein group had big decreases in triglycerides, whereas the other one didn't. So what does this suggest? That increasing your protein intake while cutting back on carbs could be better for losing this visceral adipose tissue. Not really a news flash so much. But this is why I want you to swap out some of your carbs and get that protein. Think 1 gram per pound of target body weight. Okay, eat protein first. Here's what's cool. When you eat protein first, not only is it going to help here with that visceral adipose tissue, but we also know that protein's more thermic. So it's going to help burn More calories, burn more calories than if you're eating carbs or fat. You've got better satiety and you've got better satisfaction. You'll get rid of some of those cravings, especially the cravings for fructose or ultra processed foods or alcohol. Here's the reality with those. So what do we know about fructose? Fructose can actually start to perturb insulin sensitivity as well and can help you store more fat around your gut. And a lot of ultra processed foods, what are they? They're damaged fats and fructose. So we want to watch the ultra processed foods which we know have a low thermic effect and are built to make you want more and overeat. In fact, what we see with people who eat a higher ultra processed food diet, they tend to eat about 500 more calories per day. Now the other one is alcohol. We know alcohol causes more visceral adipose tissue too. So just be aware of all of these and swap them. Swap out the ultra processed foods, the higher fructose things like agave. Right. Swap those things out for polyphenol rich, high fiber foods that are going to heal your microbiome. Why am I picking on ultra processed food so much? Well, ultra processed food again is associated with eating more. Right. And also increasing your fat. In fact, don't take my word for it. There's a randomized controlled trial in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition that talked about ultra processed food. So this study looked at the contribution of ultra processed foods in visceral fat deposition and other adiposity markers. So they had 1485 Spanish men and women, they were aged 55 to 75 and they did body comp measurements and they also did a fruit food frequency questionnaire. Now I will tell you, those are like kind of lame. They did this at the beginning, six months and 12 months. Most people, if you ask them what they yesterday, they can't really remember or they had selective memory, but it's the best we got. So here's what they found from this. So they categorized the food by the degree of processing and they also looked at fat fat. They looked at what's called Android to gynoid fat. So really, are you more apple or more pear shaped? And then total body fat. And what they found was that at baseline there was an average intake of 8% at ultra processed food at baseline. And that when they increase their ultra processed food by 10%, they had more visceral adipose tissue and more overall fat. Then again of Course, we also know, as I mentioned earlier, that when you eat ultra processed food, you tend to eat more. In fact, what the research shows is that we tend to eat about 500 calories more a day. And it ultra processed food has a lower thermic effect. So that's problematic. Now one more piece to this puzzle is hydration. And hydration's interesting because even being mildly dehydrated, like 1% hydration, which we know, we can't tell if we're dehydrated. Like by the time you're thirsty, you're dehydrated. Little bits of dehydration actually raise cortisol. Remember, cortisol is one of those things that makes you store more fat around your waistline and can slow your metabolism down a bit. Turns out we have something that I learned from Dr. Rick Johnson called a fructose switch. Which means if you're mildly dehydrated, your body frees up glycogen, that's carbohydrates that have been stored in your liver, frees them up, converts them to fructose, and then stores them as fat so that you will have fat there and you'll be able to use it in times of severe dehydration to release water. Because when you burn fat, you release water. It's called the fructose switch. So mild dehydration, not much can do this. So make sure you're staying well hydrated. And that's another big benefit of a bioimpedance scale is it's looking at total body water. It will tell you if you're dehydrated. So I talked about tracking with that. The other thing that I want you to do is just track your overall food. And if you are not dropping that body fat, consider doing a little caloric restriction and possibly some intermittent fasting. And here's how I like to do this, is first thing I have you do is track what you're eating, making sure you're optimizing your protein, you're getting in those non starchy vegetables. Then I start going, all right, let's eat. Start eating one to two hours after waking up in the morning, stop eating two to four hours before bed, ideally three hours or more, and start there, kick out the snacks, eat your breakfast, lunch and dinner. And then big thing of course is cutting that late night eating. It really messes with your blood sugar, right? So that's the first thing you might find that that's enough, especially with upping your protein. But if you're not, then Seeing that change in your visceral adipose tissue, consider doing a 25% caloric restriction five days a week. It's a cycling caloric restriction. I Learned this from Dr. Bill Campbell. So you take your average of what you're eating because you've now been tracking for a week or two, and take the average, don't take one day, take an average over the week and cut it five days a week by 25%. And that might be as simple as going, you know, I'm just going to push my breakfast to three hours after I wake up and drop my dinner to a little bit earlier and just have like two meals. That could be an easy way to pull it off, right? And just do that. Super easy. Now, next thing I have to talk about sleep and stress because cortisol is such a big player. First of all, one poor night of sleep. So ideal sleep is somewhere between seven and nine hours. I'm right there at an eight and a half. And one poor night of sleep for you. And that means not getting good quality sleep because it's not just how long you're in bed, it's how well you're sleeping. But just a little bit of poor sleep causes insulin resistance. In fact, we know that sleep restriction and sleep deprivation causes insulin resistance. Now of course, higher insulin means it's easier for you to store fat around your waistline. And by the way, one four night sleep, you're also hungrier. So it's a bad combination. Also, we gotta look at your overall stress because chronic stress means chronically elevated cortisol, which of course is going to elevate blood sugar leading to insulin resistance, but it also elevates cortisol, which is going to lead to more visceral adipose tissue. Now, likely you can't get rid of the source of chronic stress. If you could, that's the easiest. The more realistic thing is what do you need to do to be able to handle that level of stress? Having been around a lot of high performers in my lifetime, it's not that they don't have the stress, it's that they've learned how to tolerate higher and higher levels of stress. And this is why I love exercise, because that's what exercise teaches you to do. That's what lifting heavy things, that's what doing high intensity interval training teaches your body to do. How to handle hard things and recover. Right? So really important, because we've got to be able to handle cortisol and we've got to become more insulin sensitive to combat this visceral adipose tissue. Now I'm going to give you a little bonus point one, and that's cold exposure. Cold exposure is super cool because what it can do is basically take that white fat beige it, which makes it easier to burn. I'm not going to get too into the weeds on white fat, beige fat, brown fat, but know that brown fat is this fat that's very easy to burn. And you can take your white fat when you get cold tends to target right into the visceral adipose tissue and make it easier to burn. So I do a cold exposure a couple days a week in the morning. I don't do it after I work out because I don't want to block muscle protein synthesis. But a couple days a week I do 10 minute hot sauna and then I hate it. I get my cold plunge and I do it for generally two to four minutes at about 50 degrees. Because after talking to Dr. Stacy Sims, I realized I didn't have to make it super freezing cold like my husband does. And so I make it 50 degrees, 2 to 4 minutes. One other thing that can be super helpful here is looking at doing bio identical hormone replacement therapy because remember the role of estrogen. Estrogen is going to help us build muscle. We always think testosterone, but for women estrogen is huge for building muscle. Estrogen huge as an anti inflammatory. So it's anabolic, it's an anti inflammatory. Right? And when your estrogen drops, your metabolic rate's going to drop a little too. So it can make a huge difference to do bioidentical hormone replacement therapy with a doctor well trained in menopause. And we will put some resources for that in the show notes as well. Because hormone balance is so crucial for losing menopause belly fat. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook and my website, jjvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast@subscribetoj.com so you don't miss a single episode. And hey, if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode. Want to listen to the show ad free? Join our VIP podcast option for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 cents a year. You can enjoy this podcast completely ad free and there's even a seven day free trial. Here's how to join head over to subscribetoj.com it'll take you right to Apple Podcasts where you click the Try Free button and start your ad free experience today. Hey JJ here. And just a reminder that the well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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