Struggling To Lose Belly Fat EVEN When Dieting?😩

So a common question that I often get is, "How come I can't lose my belly fat even when I'm dieting consistently?" Now, this can be a tricky thing because your brain sort of says, "Well, I'm doing the diet thing, I'm eating what I believe is right for fat loss, but for some reason I'm not losing my belly. What the fuck is going on?" And of course it can get frustrating, it can demotivate you, it can knock you off the rails. And often cause you to sabotage, because you get to this point where you're like, "What's the fucking point? I keep putting in all this effort. I'm eating all the things that I think I'm supposed to. I'm on a calorie-restricted diet, but yet I still can't lose weight. I can't lose my belly. What the hell is going on?" Now, often it's because there's a lot more going on than just the fact that we need to reduce calories in order to lose weight. Because ultimately, weight loss is not about calories. Like, we're often conditioned to think it is. Oh, just eat eat less and move more. But ultimately, fat loss is a hormonal thing within the body. But in order for our hormones to obviously do their job effectively and us to stay healthy, we need to make sure that we are acting in accordance with the goals that we want to achieve, of course, but we need to make sure that we're supporting our body and we're actually healthy enough to lose weight. Because if the body is not healthy enough, it won't allow us to lose weight. It won't liberate the fat from our cells. Because the body is not healthy enough to do that. And your body, essentially your physiology, only cares about your survival, not how you look. But anyway, let's get into this. So why might you not be able to lose belly fat even when dieting? So there are 3 main reasons that I tend to see. The first is stress. Now, I mean all stress within your lifestyle. So we think of stress quite often as, oh, I've had a bad day at work, or my partner's pissing me off, and we sort of think about the psychological effect of stress, like, "I'm feeling stressed out," but we're actually also looking at, well, if you're eating too much bad food, if you're maybe exercising too much or not enough, if you're not getting enough sleep and recovery, and so on. All these different things lead to stress. We could even be talking about chemical contaminants around the home. They also lead to increased stress upon the body. So, what we need to be aware of is if our body or our physiology is excessively stressed, We cannot burn fat, particularly around the belly, because what tends to happen when we're stressed out is cortisol rises. Now, cortisol is our stress hormone, which encourages the storage of belly fat. So if cortisol's high or stress is high, that tends to encourage the body to store belly fat. So that's one reason why. Now, then we come along and introduce a calorie-restricted diet in order to lose weight. Well, a calorie restriction is technically a form of starvation, which is another stressor. So quite often for people, they will struggle to lose belly fat with a calorie-restricted diet because it's another form of stress on top of the stress their body already perceives. So obviously not an ideal thing. So what you often need to do is actually increase your calorie intake, but eat better quality foods, and that will often negate the, the additional stress that that calorie restriction was having on the, on the body. So, we have to be careful because sometimes the diet is an additional form of stress, and then sometimes even our exercise program, which is a form of stress but should be positive stress, if we are outperforming our current ability to recover and replenish ourselves, then again, that's gonna be a form of stress rather than creating an environment or a stimulus for positive adaptation. So, we need to be careful. Stress is number 1. Or the number one reason why people often can't lose belly fat. Now, the next thing is toxicity. What we have to remember is our body will shuttle toxins into our fat stores in order to keep them out of the nervous system. So if we are exposed to various toxic chemicals and things throughout our environment, maybe it's our soaps, our detergents, the different things we use to clean our home and so on, but also the foods and things that we eat, often are contaminated with things like pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, and so on. So we've got all these different chemicals and toxins coming into the body that often we are not healthy enough to currently detox from, or currently not healthy enough to detox from. So what the body will do is shuttle them into our fat stores. So then we come along and we try to force our body to lose weight, and our physiology goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. In order for you to stay healthy, we need to keep these toxins at bay. We need to keep them stuck in your fat stores. So quite often it won't, again, again, sorry, it won't liberate the fat from your fat cells because the body is too toxic. So how do we fix that? Is of course we need to eat cleaner, we need to get plenty of sleep. We don't necessarily need detoxes and things like that. We need a good foundation, which is why I always talk about the metabolic matrix. So often the third reason why is because our metabolic matrix, that foundation that we need, is off. So we've got stress, we've got toxicity, then we've got the fact that we're not actually living in accordance with the principles of health. So it's one thing to try and live in accordance with the principles of weight loss, but they need to be within a foundation of health principles. So we need to make sure that we're eating right so that our body has the adequate raw resources that it needs to replenish itself, to repair, regenerate, rejuvenate, and so on. We then need to make sure that the type of exercise that we're doing or the type of movement that we're doing is again adequate for the goal of achieving health. Sometimes that's going to be hard, explosive, heavy training. Other times it's going to be more moderate, gentle training. Sometimes it might even be more like yoga or meditation and so on. But we need to kind of meet ourselves where we're at and work or move at the level that's currently required for our body to, to get healthy. And then of course we need plenty of rest, repair, rejuvenation. Time to repair from the stress and the training and the toxicity and so on. So we need to get that foundation right, but then the only way for us to consistently act in alignment with that foundation of our meals correct, our movement correct, and our melatonin correct is to make sure that we have the right mindset. We need to think right in order to consistently act right. And of course, this means that we need to often shift our mindset away from, I need to lose weight, I need to lose weight, Oh my God, I can't lose belly fat, and instead think, okay, well, what do I need to do to get healthy? Where in my lifestyle am I currently not showing up for myself as I should? So that, which is then obviously limiting my ability to lose fat. When we start showing up for ourselves in the way that we need to as an adult, and we start treating ourselves properly and actually give ourselves the self-care that we need, quite often fat loss just happens as a natural byproduct of us actually learning how to take care of ourselves properly. Now, of course, if you want more details or you want more specific answers that are more specific to you and your current scenario or situation, let me know in the comments, or of course, reach out to me on my email or on Messenger, and I will get back to you with an answer as soon as I can. As always, people, thank you for watching. Any questions, let me know in the comments, and if not, I will chat to you guys in my next video. Take it easy.