My #1 Best Secret to Losing Menopause Belly Fat for GOOD

We're going to be talking about the number one absolute best secret to losing menopause body fat. And it's not what you think. So you want to stay tuned in this whole episode so you can hear the different things that cause the problem to begin with, what we can do to change it, what we need to be looking at. And then I'm going to be sharing my number one best secret, which is a lot simpler than you think. We make it harder than it needs to be, but it can be a lot simpler. Before we dive into this topic, I want to make sure you don't miss another episode of this. So if you're watching this on YouTube, please hit the subscribe button so you don't miss another. Another show. And if you're listening on the podcast, I do release one, usually two episodes a week now. Usually two episodes a week. And I want to make sure you get access to all those interviews and all of the solo episodes. So make sure you hit the subscribe button, the follow button, so you don't miss another episode. All right, so let's dive in. We're going to start first with what actually causes this menopausal belly fatter, as I call it, the midlife fat thickening. What exactly is going on? What's causing it? Where did it come from? I'm going to break this down. There's really three categories that this is coming from. Number one is just your hormonal changes. This is normal stuff that happens. Decrease in estrogen, decrease in progesterone, the decline in estrogen levels. This is really something during menopause. It's a pretty significant variable because this helps regulate fat distribution and its reduction leads to fat being stored more and more in that abdominal area. Yep, that abdominal area more than the hips and thighs, where a lot of us complained about that when we were younger. So we started seeing that in that midsection. Another thing that changes is changes in our leptin and ghrelin. So menopause can alter the production of leptin, which is an appetite suppressant, and ghrelin, which is actually your hunger hormone, which leads to increased appetite and weight gain. Yep. So those two things, those are things that happen as we age. And then there's just the age related factors like loss of muscle mass. Now, let me talk about this for a minute. So we tend to think the rumor is that our metabolism slows down as we age. It's not that our metabolism, metabolism slows down. What happens is we lose muscle mass. So as women age, we naturally Lose this muscle mass, which then slows down our metabolism. So the less muscle you have, the less calories your body burns at rest and the less efficiently your metabolism is going to work. So this reduction in muscle mass, that means your fewer calories are burned, which leads to fat accumulation. So this is not an automatic, hey, your metabolism slows down because you age. It's because we're losing muscle mass. So we get that accumulation. And then there's genetics. I mean, gosh darn those genetics. And I'll tell you, I have the list of genetics in my family because genetic predisposition, this plays a role as well as where fat is stored. So if you've got the mother, the grandmother that had that belly fat area, chances are you are going to tend to get that area as well too. Now, genetics do not have to be everything, but they are a starting point we need to be aware of. If you've got something in your family like that, we need to be looking at that. And then there's the lifestyle factors. This really catches up with us in those menopausal years. So physical inactivity, reduced physical activity is common issue during menopause, contributing to weight gain, fat accumulation around that belly also. So if you've been sedentary a lot of your life and you're thinking, what's going on right now, that's compounding. So this is catching up with us with age. And then you know these things. But I'm going to bring them up anyway just to make sure. Diet. So how we're eating, our poor choices, such as super high calorie, low nutrient food calories are not created equal. All calories are not created created equal. Let me break this down just for one second here. So yes, textbook wise, it takes about 3,500 calories to lose or gain a pound of fat. So you have a deficit of 3,500 calories over what you're eating. You could lose a pound of fat. If you have an increase of 3,500 calories over what you're normally eating, you could gain a pound of fat. But that being said, all calories are not created equal. And it's very hard to know exactly how many calories are in a food. So for instance, when you look at your food and you say, I'm eating an apple, well, we don't know how ripe the apple is, how big it is. So that we don't know. We're also grossly underestimating how many calories we're burning and how many we're consuming and we're grossly overestimating how many we're burning. This is on a regular basis we're doing this. There's a lot of variables that play into this. But we are putting ourselves into crazy moods trying to count calories when it's pretty inefficient that way. Also, if you look at calorie counting, all foods are not created equal. If you eat a few hundred calories of M&Ms, that is not the same as eating a few hundred calories of protein. That protein would go to lean muscle mass. It would go to controlling your hunger, your appetite. Where that those M and ms, that's just complete empty calories. That might give you an initial energy buzz because of the sugar. But we're going to create other issues with our blood sugar, with how we're using that, and then a lot of that will get stored as fat. So that is a huge lifestyle factor. Are we eating too many calories then also our sleep patterns. This catches up with us. No longer are those days where we could just stay out drinking and just have a little bit sleep and function. You notice that that changes as is also just that insomnia and poor sleep quality starts becoming more and more common during menopause and that leads to weight gain if you're not getting adequate sleep. So that's really important. Okay, so what do we do on a basic level first? And I promise I'm going to get to like the number one thing, but I wanted to lay this out for you first so you can, you can understand where I'm going. So what are the basic things first? Well, number one, and if you're doing this, more power to you. But I think a lot of people are actually not doing it. They think they're doing it, but they're not. Number one, are you eating unprocessed natural food? Now I don't really care if you choose to do keto or carnivore or paleo or whatever you want to label it. But my question is, are you eating primarily unprocessed natural world food? Meaning these are foods that once grew. These are foods that fuel us, These are foods that are good for us. So proteins, these are vegetables, these are low glycemic fruits, these are nuts and seeds and avocado and olive oil, but healthy foods. We want unprocessed natural foods because processed food foods will lead and contribute to weight gain and they're very low on nutritional value. So they're also going to contribute to brain frog fog and other issues. Another thing, are you avoiding inflammatory foods? Maybe you got away with these when you were younger, but in menopause and in these years with the midlife thickening happening, we got to be really hyper aware of this. Now, you might not like me for saying this, but it's the truth. There are certain foods like grains, dairy and sugar that create a lot of inflammation in our bodies. Now, you might be the person that you say, I really have no inflammation, I don't have any issues. More power to you. But if you're listening to this and you're saying, you know what, no matter what I'm doing isn't working, I'm in pain, I've got inflammation, I just don't feel well, I'm not focused. Well, I have that foggy head and you are eating grains, dairy and sugar, then I would highly suggest eliminating those right now to see how you feel. These are highly processed foods and they are not adding any benefit to our diet. If that's working for you and you feel amazing, you don't have to listen to me here, but if you're struggling, I highly suggest taking out grains, dairy and sugar. In fact, the second book I wrote, which was called Aging in Reverse, I go really deep on this. In fact, that whole book is grains, dairy and sugar free. And I break down the science as to why and what you want to look for and why some things, like maybe even raw dairy would do better in your system if you really want dairy than regular dairy. So whole other topic there. But avoiding inflammatory foods like grains, dairy and sugar are going to help you with avoiding this excess weight problem. Next thing, make sure you are breaking down and digesting your food. I love to say it's not just what we're eating, it's what we are digesting. We need to make sure we're actually digesting what we're eating. And many of us are not. We lose enzymes after the age of 35 and we stop breaking down our food. We also lose our supply of hydrochloric acid. Our body's not going to make it like it used to as we get older. So adding things like digestive enzymes, hydrochloric acid is going to help us break down food. The other thing is to release overall weight. Now, this might sound more basic as I say it than it really is, and I get that. I'm going to get to that a little bit more later. But you want to release overall weight. When you say, I just want to spot reduce, that doesn't really work that way. You can't just say I want to lose weight in this one area and have that work. Now you can create muscle in a certain area and you can lose overall fat in an area and make it look more shapely and more defined. But we cannot control the area of our body we're losing weight from. So you want to lose overall weight. And one of the things I love to tell my fat loss clients is look at it as releasing weight, releasing weight versus just losing weight. And I say that because when you say I'm going to lose weight, that leaves it up to being found again. So change that language to I'm releasing the weight because that keeps makes sure it stays off. Okay. Next thing I'm going to get into is a little bit more advanced than that basic stuff, but the basic stuff is important. Now the more advanced stuff. A lot of people don't like when I share this, but I'm going to share it because it's the absolute truth. And this is to be our own health detective. We've got to be in detective, we've got to be in fine tuning mode and we got to really look at what else could this be? Because just going to the doctor and getting a routine lab and having a five minute appointment and then looking at lab values is not necessarily enough, especially if what is on the labs is not matching how you feel. We've got to go deeper and be a detective. And I just want to share just a little, just a brief example of this and a story and why this became so important to me and why I stand for this in women so strongly now. So, gosh, about a year and a half, maybe two years ago now, about two years ago now, I was having a blood sugar dysregulation and it made zero sense to me. It made no sense that my A1C was higher, that my blood sugar was creeping up my fasting blood sugar. So I started wearing a glucose monitor. Now glucose monitors can have their nuances and be, you know, high or low on values. But I was checking with a finger prick to calibrate it as well and I started having this really ridiculous blood sugar issue. And just to give you ridiculous example, sometimes when we eat, you know, your blood sugar fluctuates. It goes up to 130, 140, 150, and then it comes back down under a hundred. You know, when you're, when you're fasted, that's healthy blood sugar. Mine was going up to about 250 after eating things that you would not predict would do that, like A small piece of fruit, low glycemic fruit, having a small sweet potato with protein and fat. I was still getting a huge blood sugar spike and it was lingering and couldn't figure out what was going on. And so just like many of you would do, I went to the endocrinologist. I said, okay, I've got type 2 diabetes in my family. This is unusual for me. And the first answer was, go on metformin. Well, that didn't sit right with me because I just know I want to look at root cause. This is something that I've been trained to do. It's something that I teach, I preach, I live by. I wanted to know what's causing my blood sugar. I'm not going to just take. It's my genetics. I'm not going to just take that. It's the way that I eat, because it's not the way that I eat. So I went strict keto at the time, like, really trying to go strict on the no carbs. And for those of you that don't know, keto is pretty much very, very, very low carb, getting your body in ketosis. And it was not adjusting my blood sugar. So I needed to go a lot deeper. And this is where I started really asking, seeing specialists, talking to friends, going a lot deeper. And I learned in my case, it was my gut biome. I actually had a lot of dysfunction going on. I had some leaky guts, which is not necessarily because of your diet, by the way. This could be passed down in birth from your mom, believe it or not. There's a lot of reasons for gut dysbiosis and leaky gut, but I had leaky gut and I had lots of bad things that had gotten in. And this was creating havoc on my pancreas and my blood sugar. So that's not what this video or this, this podcast is about right now for you. I want to. That's a whole nother story there and how we went down the rabbit hole there. But my point with that, with that was what I give myself kudos for was being a health detective and going deeper and understanding. And once I clean that up, my blood sugar, completely regulated. Like, completely regulated. Didn't need metformin, didn't need any of that. So I say this because you've got to be a health detective. You've got to look at different things. Like, could it be your gut? Could that be contributing to fat storage? Could it be that gut is responsible for a lot of things. It's responsible for your microbial Composition. The types of bacteria in your gut influences how your body responds and stores fats. It's responsible for energy extraction. It helps break down food into smaller components that are absorbed into your blood stream. We have to look at that inflammatory chemicals. Some gut bacteria produce things that create other. An additional inflammation in your bloodstream, creating pain, weight gain, insulin resistance, all types of things, and also insulin sensitivity. So gut is a huge thing to look at. It helps us regulate our appetite or hormonal influence, food cravings, all types of things. So gut is something you really want to look at in being a health detective and then looking to treat it the right way, whether it's fully natural with herbs and eating fermented foods and taking probiotics, staying hydrated, or going down a more traditional route. But that is one thing to be a detective around. Another thing to be a detective around is your thyroid. You've got to look at if your thyroid is impacting your belly fat. The thyroid gland plays a crucial role in regulating your metabolism, which directly impacts your body weight and fat distribution. When you've got low thyroid, for example, you've got low thyroid, you could feel very tired. You could be looking and having cravings for things. You could have a very, very slow heart rate. And not in a good way, not because you're an athlete, but a very slow heart rate. You could be really slowing down your metabolism. So having low thyroid levels could be another thing impacting things in midlife. And thyroid levels do commonly go down in menopausal years. This is not uncommon. So really looking at those levels and checking all of the markers on your thyroid, not just your tsh, which a lot of doctors do, but really going deep. What's your T3, what's your T4? Really understanding thyroid, asking the questions and going, could this be the thing? The other thing to be a detective on is optimizing your hormones. Now, hormones play a crucial role in body fat and regulating this. This is so important. And hormones are not just the sex hormones. There's. There's all different hormones. So I'm going to talk about some of the main ones. One is insulin. Insulin is a hormone produced by your pancreas that helps regulate your blood sugar. And this is important because it's going to facilitate the uptake of glucose in your cells for energy. So how is your insulin operating? Because that has a huge role on belly fat. So high levels of insulin, which can be due to insulin resistance, can lead to increased. Yep. Fat storage, particularly. And guess where the abdominal area. Yep. So insulin resistance is commonly associated with type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. We need to take this seriously, by the way. Dementia, Alzheimer's is sometimes referred to in the health world as type 3 diabetes. It's all part of metabolic syndrome. Now here's the thing. We don't want to wait with metabolic syndrome until you are a type 2 diabetic or until there is problems in your brain. You want to get on this early. When you first see your A1C trickling up, when you first see your fasting glucose trickling up, when you first see see issues with insulin. We've got to look at this early because when someone's diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, there's 10 years prior to that that there were things going on that you could have offset this. So insulin is critical to be looking at. That's another thing to be a detective around the next one. Cortisol. Now, cortisol is something that is produced, it's a stress hormone produced by the adrenal glands and it helps your body respond to stress by increasing your blood sugar level and suppressing non essential functions. So what this is for biologically, you're in the jungle in times years ago and an animal is chasing you. We need that cortisol spike, right? Because we need that to spike so it can increase our blood sugar and go, wake up, focus, run, you're in danger, go. And now we're going to suppress non essential functions. The problem is in modern world right now, my gosh, we are spiking our cortisol because we got a text message we didn't like, because we forgot something, because we stub our toe, whatever. We're spiking our cortisol all day long and this is creating an issue. So this is not how we want to use our spikes. Cortisol, this is not a good thing. We don't want that elevated cortisol all day long because that does impact belly fat. Chronic stress leads to elevated cortisol levels which promote fat storage. And guess where. Yep, the abdominal area. Because cortisol is going to increase your appetite, it's going to increase your cravings for high calorie foods. That's why you get stressed. You all been there, you know you've been there, you're stressed, got a text. I don't know, I'm so annoyed I'm triggered. Whatever. You walk into your pantry and you're not looking for a piece of celery or a bite of a chicken breast, are you? You're looking for that chocolate bar. You're looking for the ice cream, you're looking for the chips because that's what happens with this chronic cortisol raise. So we got to watch that. Another hormone, we've got to watch estrogen. So estrogen is a primary female sex hormone which you know is involved in regulating your menstrual cycle. So this is important. And fat distribution, this during menopause those levels decline. Okay. Which what happens when they decline? It leads to a redistribution of fat from the hips and thighs to your guess where, midsection abdominal area. This shift contributes to increased belly fat that we all see in menopausal women, that midlife thickening, that is this low estrogen. So we've got to be aware of that testosterone role. Even though this is a primarily a sex hormone, that is the role of it. It also is present in women in smaller amounts and it's involved in muscle mass maintenance. Now this is going to get important a little bit later, but we've got to maintain muscle to avoid having this slowed down metabolism and excess fat put on. So when you have belly fat and low levels of testosterone, which occur in women and men, by the way, it's going to be increased overall body fat that this leads to. So when you have higher testosterone levels, you are going to be promoting lower levels of body fat. So this is an important one to look at too. The other ones, leptin and ghrelin, we mentioned that earlier. But leptin is produced by fat cells and leptin helps regulate energy and balance by inhibiting your hunger. Now obviously that's going to be important because if you're hungry and you're having cravings, we are going to want to eat more. And then we're not in a calorie, we're in a calorie surplus and we're not necessarily eating the best foods, which also leads to weight gain. Also ghrelin, which changes, that's known as the hunger hormone that's produced in the stomach and stimulates your appetite. So elevated ghrelin levels also will increase your food intake. So all important things to be detective around and be talking to your doctor about. We got to be looking at all of this and see what's going on here. The other hormone we mentioned earlier, but that is your thyroid. This is your thyroid. So your thyroid hormone really can regulate metabolism and energy expenditure. And if we are low, which is hypothyroidism, if we're low on the thyroid level, we are going to slow down our metabolism, which if you slow down your metabolism, we're leading to Weight gain and increased belly fat. So this is something we need to be checking and be looking at all this. Okay, all that being said, I just dumped a lot of information on you on being a health detective. What's my number one secret, though? What's the number one thing? Because you. We could talk about thyroid, we could talk about being a health detective. All that's so critical, important. But this is something you can do right now without involving a doctor. Without involving. You could do this at home. Heck, you could do this at home right now. You could stop listening to this video and start doing this. The number one best secret. We have got to. We absolutely have to build muscle. Don't tune me out yet because this is important, ladies. Muscle building is so critical for us as we age. Okay, A lot of reasons, I'm going to go through them with you. But here's the thing. There's this whole myth that we slow down our metabolism as we age. It's not that our metabolism is just by itself slowing down. In fact, research shows that it will not slow down. If you are a fully healthy, muscular woman. What happens is we lose muscle. We do lose muscle as we age and as we're losing muscle at when we age, we are going to have a slowed metabolism. Why does that happen? Because the lower your muscle, the less calories you burn at rest, the less your metabolism is going to work on point. So we've got to maintain and even grow muscle to help with our metabolism. The other reason is it's going to combat sarcopenia. Now, sarcopenia is age related loss of muscle mass and strength. And this is a significant concern. So even if you're not lifting weights and you had some muscle, you are going to be losing it if we do not start lifting and exercising to combat this. And why is this a concern? Not just for body weight, you're going to have a higher risk of falls, a risk of loss of independence. We don't want that. Heck, we don't want that. And after age 60, this really starts to go down. This accelerates huge. The only way to slow this down, the only way to slow it down is to start strength training. Another reason if, if you don't care about that, which I'd be surprised if you didn't care about that, if you didn't care about that. Bone health. So this is critical. Lifting weights, strength training, working out is crucial for maintaining your bone density. So this is more critical for you if you're at higher risk for osteoporosis. So if you are postmenopausal or if you have this in your family. But the one thing that will absolutely stimulate bone growth and help prevent bone loss is weight bearing exercises. So this is going to reduce your risk of fractures and falls, and it's going to prevent future loss of bone. So this is important. Next, reason we want to build muscle, metabolic health. So when you build muscle, you are increasing the resting metabolic rate, which means you're working out, you're adding muscle, you're doing strength training, you're doing progressive load training. You're doing this just when you're at rest, when you're sleeping, when you're sitting, when you're watching tv, just when you're at rest, you are increasing your resting metabolic rate, which means you will literally burn more calories at rest because you have more muscle on your body. What? Why would you not want to do that? So this decreases your risk of metabolic disease, such as type 2 diabetes, obesity. Muscle tissue burns more calories at rest. This makes it a lot easier to maintain that weight you're after. Next, reason we want strength training is the cardiovascular health. So when you add strength training, you're going to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. Now, this is personal to me. My dad died at age 49 of a heart attack. 49 of a heart attack. Now, my dad did not drink, he did not smoke, he did have clogged arteries. He wouldn't have known it, though, by looking at him. He. He had a little bit of a belly, a little bit of belly, which I know now was visceral fat, but he didn't look overweight. But he did not lift weights. He did not. And he died of a heart attack. And so when you are engaging in regular strength exercise, you have a significant lower rate of risk of death from a heart disease. So this is important. Okay, I know we covered a lot there, but just to sort of. Just to sort of recap all of these things, because there was a lot of information there. And I just want to make sure you're taking away the key points. Number one, we got to make sure we're doing the basics. Are you eating unprocessed, natural, real food? Are you moving your body? Are you staying hydrated? We got to be more on point with those things. Less room for error there. We got to be more on point with those things. That's number one. Number two, are you being a health detective, are you looking at your hormones? Are you looking at your thyroid levels? Are you looking at your gut health? Are you looking at all of these things and asking the hard questions. Ask the questions. Don't be afraid to ask your doctor to go deeper. Don't just accept, this is your number. Here's a prescription. Go deeper. What caused that number? Where is this coming from? Because I can promise you this, even though prescriptions have a great place for a lot of reasons, it's not going to fix the problem. It's just going to fix the symptom that presented. We've got to understand what caused the high blood sugar. We've got to understand what caused the high cholesterol. We've got to understand what caused the high cortisol, the high blood pressure. We've got to understand these things so we can go back and treat those. To be a health detective next, focus on adding muscle. That is my biggest secret. You could do this from home. I'm not even kidding. I would love for you to go to a gym and lift weights and do strength training, but you could do things from home. Heck, you could do air squats to start. You can do lunges to start. You could hold a plank. You can work to hold a plank. You could start lifting weights, lightweights with your arms. You've got to start somewhere. And then we've got to do the progressive overload. So we've got to go up in progression to help with bone loss. Yes, but we got to start somewhere. So don't let it be a reason that you haven't done it all these years. You're not going to do it now. Start now and get this going. I hope you found this helpful. If you did, please talk to me. If you're watching this on YouTube, comment below. Let me know that you enjoyed this, that you want more of this. Make sure you subscribe. If you're listening on the podcast and this was helpful for you, please let me know. Take a screenshot of this, put it on your stories. Tag me. Let me know what you loved about the episode. This helps me create more good content for you. If I know that you like more of this. If I don't have the feedback, I don't know if you like it or not. So let me know if you want more like this. And if you are loving the podcast, I would love a great review from you. If you're loving it, I would love that from you. It helps me reach new people. It helps me get better guests. It helps me be able to help more people in midlife. As always, thanks for tuning in and I'll see you in the next episode.