Transcription
Today, I'm going to share some really important information on how to get rid of your belly fat the easiest way possible, and primarily the exercise you need to focus on. I've talked about the contribution of exercise to belly fat loss being about 15%, and diet being 85%; but the question is, what type of exercise would be the best exercise to help you lose this belly fat? So I do want to share some new information on this topic that I stumbled on in a research paper that involved 54 different studies.
Number one, they're operating off this information on calories; in their mind, they think that body fat equals calories in versus calories out. So the lower amount of calories they intake, the greater the body fat. This is known as the energy balance equation, which has been proven false so many times. So I have a question for you: if you lower your dietary calories, what happens to the rate at which you burn those calories? Well, unfortunately, it adapts; it adjusts to your calories. So as soon as you start lowering your calories—let's say, for example, you lower your calories by 20%—well, guess what happens to your metabolic rate? It, too, lowers by about 20%.
Now, I'm not saying that calories don't matter, because obviously, if you cut down your calories low enough, you will eventually lose weight. In fact, if you don't eat, you're going to lose weight. But the question is, is it sustainable? Can you do it for how long? Eventually, you're going to need to eat. And let's say you do lose your weight and hit your goal; then what? Do you keep doing the same thing over and over again? How do you maintain this weight? And the other question is, are all calories fattening? The answer is no. You have to look at calories from the viewpoint of how your hormones influence these calories.
The next problem is something called the set point. Let's say you lose weight, right, and you go on a diet and you lose the weight, and for some reason you can't seem to get below a certain weight—let's say it's 155 pounds—no matter what, your body will not go below that, regardless of what you do: effort being put out, exercise, dieting. You tend to lose weight, but not below a certain point; that is a person's individual set point. And unfortunately, too much dieting can raise that set point up to the point where every time you start another diet, you become further and further away from your goal.
And then we have the problem of exercise. What is the best exercise that will maximize and be the best strategy to leverage the maximum fat loss from your midsection? If you end up doing the wrong exercise, it can be devastating; you're going into the gym week after week, just spinning your wheels, not really getting anywhere. So before we get into the first exercise that we need to get you into, the most important thing that you need to know is that we have to first switch your body to burn fat, okay, as your primary fuel source. There are two fuel sources: one is sugar, the other is fat. And so many people end up mistakingly just burning sugar fuel, and their body is running off the calories of the meal that they just ate, and so they never have a chance to tap into their actual fat. We want the body to run on fat, not just when you're sleeping, but between your meals as well. And whether you burn sugar or fat really depends on one hormone, and that is called insulin. If insulin goes up, you will not burn fat; you're only going to burn sugar. If it goes down, your body will then burn fat.
You have to realize that the fat on your body is a survival mechanism, and it's very unnatural for your body to actually burn fat in the first place. It doesn't like burning off this fat; it likes to retain fat, especially in your midsection. But you can leverage certain pieces of knowledge to get your body in fat burning by simply understanding the hormone influence over certain calories. So if we take the type of calories you have: carbohydrate calories, you have protein calories, and you have fat calories. So out of all three of those types of calories, there's really only one type of calorie that increases insulin. Believe it or not, the fat calories do not influence insulin of any significant degree. But on the flip side, it doesn't mean that you can just start eating unlimited amounts of fat and lose the weight; that's not going to happen. If you lower the very specific type of calorie—cold carbohydrates—your body will then be forced to burn fat fuel, and from that fat fuel you will also develop a more available type of energy called ketones. Okay, so ketones are the byproduct of fat, the energy that your body can use as fuel.
So to get your body fat burning, we need to lower insulin by: number one, lowering your carbohydrates; and number two, and this is actually more important, okay, lower the number of meals that you eat; okay, eat less frequently. This is called intermittent fasting. So I had a friend who did the ketogenic diet, right, and uh, he said it doesn't work. And I said, "What are you doing?" Well, I went on low carb, right, I'm eating all this fat, and I'm eating all these keto fat bombs, which are these cookies made out of fat, and I'm eating them all day, and I'm actually gaining weight. So obviously, you missed the other key component, which is intermittent fasting. It's necessary because of this very important information that a lot of people don't understand. So if you've checked out, I want you to check back in right now, because this is very, very, very important.
In addition to the carbohydrate increasing insulin, eating in general will increase insulin. So that little snack that you had, eating between meals, is very, very, very bad. So to make this successful, you must not only lower your carbs, you must eat less frequently. This is called intermittent fasting. You want to do them together. If you do that, you'll get in the fat burning, and between the meals and at night you will be burning fat fuel. So you'll be eating your own fat between the meals. And what's really cool about that is that your appetite goes away; you will not be hungry between the meals, which will make it very easy to do long term, plus you won't have cravings. Versus the other way, it's going to be torture, because you're going to be hungry; you're going to want to eat every hour and a half; you're going to want a snack; it's disastrous.
Now, there's one more thing that you need to know, and this is another really, really important piece of information: when you start adapting into this fat burning or ketones, it takes about two days. Well, if you eat a tiny amount of carbohydrate calories, guess what can happen? That piece of bread or half a glass of wine can literally pause this whole program and stop fat burning for two freaking days. So this could be very, very depressing, especially if you're doing mostly good, but you just have a little bit of certain things too frequent, like every other day. And so the second most important thing you need to know is consistency, okay, staying very, very consistent with this program. This means doing it 100%. If you do this consistently, your body is going to get in this very interesting state called the fat-adapted state, where your body is very, very efficiently now a fat-burning machine. This is very important because if you get into this state—which, by the way, does take some time; it can take up to a month to get into the state—it's going to correct something called insulin resistance, which most people have, and it is the real root cause behind stubborn weight, especially in your midsection. So you're going to actually correct a bad metabolism or a slow metabolism by getting into this fat-adapted state. But to do that, you have to be consistent. Correcting insulin resistance is going to be huge, because now things are going to get easier and easier. So then when we add the exercise, which is the next point, it's finally going to be something that really works for you.
As a side note, since we're talking about insulin resistance, there's a couple other things that you can do very simply: just add one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to your water and drink that two or even three times a day. Put one tablespoon, and then drink that with a straw. Apple cider vinegar greatly improves this insulin resistance. That one little tiny change can actually create a big effect on not just your weight, but if you have any liver fat, it can help reduce fat off your liver; it can help balance your blood sugars.
Number three, let's talk about the exercise, and this is based on the study, which I'm going to put down below, but it's not really just one study; it's just a kind of like a review of 54 different studies on this one topic, which we're going to call walking. Walking actually can help you burn more fat off your midsection than doing this higher-intense exercise. But I need to explain the details of this. I'm not saying not to do high-intense exercise, but you're going to get more benefit out of doing walking than the higher-intensity type exercise, even though I do recommend doing high-intensity interval training, okay, with the walking. But the high-intensity interval training tends to improve certain hormones; it tends to spike growth hormone, testosterone; it's essential for growing muscle. But as far as fat burning, you're going to be more successful from the walking.
Now, when you walk, you're doing a type of exercise that is lower intensity, okay, and the first 30 minutes you're going to burn up kind of the stored sugar in your body; that's called glycogen. And then after 30 minutes, you are going to be burning pure fat. So obviously, we want you to walk at least an hour, maybe even more than that, up to two hours per day. Now, I'm just talking about going for a walk; I'm not even counting all the other steps that you're walking through the day, which could add up to a lot. But typically, walking only really burns like 200 to 300 calories per hour, and that doesn't seem like a lot. But when you are walking, you are reducing cortisol, which is stress; you're clearing out cortisol and adrenaline, which is a huge barrier to losing weight. Walking greatly, significantly improves insulin resistance, and I highly recommend that you get a pedometer to measure how many steps that you walk in a day, because you want to increase those steps to around 8,000 to 10,000 steps per day.
Here's a number of ideas that you can do to actually increase more walking through the day: number one, take your dog on a walk; go on a walk with a friend; usually that can help motivate you and push you to walk more. When you walk, try to speed up a little bit more, so you're not walking too slowly. If you have a chance to take the stairs or walk up a hill, take advantage of that. When you walk, try to find something in nature that you can actually, you know, look at and get your attention out, and look at things that will accelerate the process, because you're improving what's called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is all about reducing stress, versus just kind of getting on a treadmill and watching some screen or your cell phone, which you're not having a chance to get more space by looking around you in your environment. Make a game out of it; make it fun; don't get too serious about it. Start recording your numbers, and each time try to build on that and getting a little bit more. If it's raining outside, you know, walk in your house. What I do is I can kind of walk downstairs, upstairs, walk downstairs, upstairs, walk around the rooms, come around. I've done that in the winter when it was snowing, and because I go, I couldn't go outside. It's not a bad idea to also walk after you eat, with each meal, especially if you feel bloated or you have digestive problems; walking can greatly improve that.
Now, I want to tell you a recent experience that I just went through that I think you'll find very interesting. I decided to do what's called stem cell therapy, okay, and stem cell therapy is where they take some of your fat, okay, and then they siphon it down, pull the stem cells out, put it into a vial, inject it back into your body to help circulate and heal certain things. And I did it mainly for old injuries and arthritis that I have in my spine. So I've been looking at this for a long time, and I decided to bite the bullet and get it done. But they have to do liposuction, and when they evaluated me, I didn't have enough fat, so I had to gain more fat around my midsection so they can lipo it out and have enough fat. I needed five pounds more fat in my midsection. Now that might not seem like a lot, but it's a lot. In order to gain five pounds of fat, I had to gain more weight than that, right, because you don't just gain fat, you gain some muscle and fat. So I basically went from 183 pounds to 197 pounds. Now the question is, how did I gain this fat? Number one, I ate more carbs, but I didn't eat like the breads and pasta and cereal and crackers and stuff like that, okay, because that creates a bit more inflammation. I had things like certain fruits, like apples with peanut butter between the meals, especially; I had things like blueberries, and I'm talking a lot of blueberries. I even ate things like potatoes, but I had the purple potatoes, from the Peruvian potatoes, that had more antioxidants, and I also had some red potatoes. And I ate more calories for sure, and I also ate three meals plus snacks, and I gained a good amount of fat in my midsection. So I live on a farm, and there's nothing flat; there's all sorts of hills, and I'm very used to walking everywhere all day long. And what I noticed when I started to try to gain weight, I wasn't gaining any weight because I was walking all over, burning all these calories. So what I basically had to do is slow down, not walk around so much, and that was very hard to do, but it was a really key thing to help me gain weight. So after the procedure, I'm back on my original program; I'm doing two meals a day, okay; I'm not doing potatoes anymore; I'm not doing any more fruit, especially the apples, and then we'll create a video on the stem cell therapy and the results of that in about a month, because it does take some time for it to work.
Now that you have these principles, the next thing you need to know is the details of exactly what to eat, and for that information you should check this video out right here.