Transcription
If you have stubborn belly fat, especially around your lower stomach, and you feel like you're eating healthy, trying to exercise, and it's still not going away, well, your problem may not be food. It's not all protein and macros and calories.
I sat down with Dr. Ashley Frawley, and she told me something that most people and most doctors are completely missing. I think people know to take this seriously, but I don't think they understand just how serious it is. You could just be cutting your life short. Not only do we have belly fat, we have visceral fat, the dangerous fat that's wrapped around our organs, killing you twice as fast as heart disease. So, if you have more than 1 lb of visceral fat, you are in danger. You're going to die faster than you should.
In this video, we are covering three main things. One, the different types of belly fat and how to tell which one you have, so you can address it correctly. Two, how visceral fat builds up and how to actually test for it at home. And lastly, simple things you can start doing today at home for free to lower cortisol and finally start losing belly fat again. If you enjoy this kind of content, then don't be silly, subscribe to Lilly, and let's get into it.
Dr. Ashley Frawley, some people they associate belly fat with just they need to eat even less and exercise even more, but is that always the case? Is everyone's belly fat the same as far as like, yep, as long as you just cut your calories and exercise more, then you're good to go?
No, not necessarily. And I used to subscribe to the fact that it was a calories in, calories out situation. Especially in med school, that's what you they teach you, and that's, you know, like the basics of nutrition science. And then when you get a little bit more comfortable with that, you start learning, oh, no, maybe it's more macronutrients. Is somebody eating enough protein to support muscle mass? And not only that, but are they stimulating the muscle to support the muscle mass, which can make you more metabolically active, which can burn fat more, right? That raises your metabolism. But then when I got out into practice and I started talking to people who were doing all of that and still not losing belly fat, then it I had to really scratch my head and dig deeper and come to find out that problem is more common than we realize. And it's it's not all protein and macros and calories. It is insulin resistant driven. There is a lot to the hormonal signaling that's happening. High cortisol, the amount of chronic stress that we have, cuz not only do we have belly fat, we have visceral fat, the dangerous fat that's wrapped around our organs that is killing you twice as fast as heart disease. Your visceral fat actually has a higher density of receptors to cortisol. And so when you're stressed out chronically, your visceral fat takes it in and grows, and it stores fat, and it's harder to get rid of that fat. But it also builds up around the belly and gives you that kind of like just just plump look around the middle. And so it gets really deep really fast, but the answer is not always calories and protein.
I even have some clients who are eating healthy, exercising, sleeping good, but I could tell that their stomach is more bloated, and it may be that they have lost stomach acid over time, and they just aren't digesting their food appropriately. They may find that things like enzymes or apple cider vinegar or different things to help with their indigestion might help with, you know, breaking down their food more and helping them with reducing some of that belly bloat.
And then if someone's not losing weight right now, how would they know if their stomach is more so because of living a sedentary lifestyle and not eating the right kinds of foods in comparison to something more like cortisol belly or having insulin resistance or having excessive bloating and indigestion?
That's a really good question and I think you kind of have to peel it back in layers based on how you feel and what you're already doing. So, if you're somebody who you know that your diet's not good already and you know that you're you could eat more protein and you know that you could be lifting weights, like start there. Absolutely start there because you will very likely see a difference. Now, after you've mastered that, like seriously start at the basics. After you've mastered that, if you are somebody who tends to have a lot of stress in your life and you are also tired during the day, have trouble sleeping, and you have a lot of belly fat, well, then look into your your your stress, but also you can you can go in and get tested for things like you can you can look at your cortisol, you can look at something called DHEA, which is down regulated if you have chronic cortisol elevation, and you can start to work through getting your cortisol managed and lowered, right? If it's an insulin issue, if you are somebody who tends to crave sugar and or salt a lot, and you have trouble losing belly fat or just all fat in general, get tested for insulin. Get tested for your A1C. Check that out. Consider lengthening the time between meals and seeing if um insulin is the problem there because if you listen to the cues that your body is sending you, right? Is it fatigue? Is it the inability to sleep? Is it cravings? Then you can start to pin down what's going on.
Aside from just everyday stresses that most people think about, like stress from their job or from their family or from their finances, but maybe they don't realize there's other stresses in their life, like from fasting too much, undereating. What are other stresses that people could have in their life that they wouldn't associate with being adding stress to their body?
Caffeine or even sometimes nicotine or you are addicted to social media or you're just like a chronic scroller or even just on your phone or on a screen all the time, too much blue light, right? So all of that can up regulate your cortisol. I used to work out too much and I had low DHEA and low testosterone and I didn't realize that it was from working out too much and not letting my body recover. So I thought that I just had like a hormonal deficiency and and I did, but it was because of that. I'm very type A, like let's go go go go go and that's not necessarily the best. But then people who worry about their family all the time or feel like they have to take care of their family all the time. It's the same thing. So we're all dealing with stress in different ways and our society and our world has just made us this way and unfortunately our bodies were never made to operate under that much stress all the time.
Yeah. If somebody has belly fat right now that maybe it is more cortisol driven, is that something to be worried about or is it more of just a cosmetic like, oh, I just don't want to have this protruding stomach? So is it something that necessarily is dangerous to have more of a cortisol belly?
Yes. So especially if you've got that visceral fat building up, so it takes more than just 1 lb of visceral fat to increase your mortality risk, meaning you're going to die faster than you should. So if you have more than 1 lb of visceral fat, you are in danger. And even more than that, if you have fatty liver, that's actually worse than having high visceral fat. So, I think people know to take this seriously, but I don't think they understand just how serious it is. I mean, you could just be cutting your life short by not knowing that you have two, three, four, five pounds of visceral fat. And it's actually kind of easy to get your visceral fat tested. You could get a DEXA scan, or you could get maybe one of those in-body scans, or one of those home scales that it gives you like a fat index, a visceral fat index. I think it's important that most people get their visceral fat tested at some point during their life, so they understand how high of a risk do I have.
And with those scales at home, how accurate do do you think those are? And then, how much would a DEXA scan be for most people?
So, I actually went and got a DEXA scan at a place place locally called DEXAfit, and I think they are national. That was $100 for me, so not terrible. Um the home scales, I think you get what you pay for, so they they tend to be a couple of hundred dollars if you're going to go for those ones. Um accuracy, some of them are up to 98% accurate. You know, I have one, and it was it's literally spot on with the DEXA scan that I got. I think not every single person will have the same experience there, and I think there's a difference in how different people fluctuate with their body water, et cetera. But it's a really good tool to at least have something, to at least have something that's you can do consistently.
And for someone watching right now, maybe they're not like me, I'm pretty lean. So, I would just think, "Oh, I don't have fat." But I still could have visceral fat.
Oh, yeah. And so, how often would somebody want to go get checked to see if they're slowly gaining visceral fat, or if they're making an improvement because if someone right now they go and get a DEXA scan and they see, "Okay, I have some visceral fat, so I want to start watching what I'm eating and my stress levels and my sleep." And so they start making progress and maybe they notice on their scale they lost weight, maybe they still have the same amount of visceral fat, maybe they have more. Um but I guess like is this something people want to check every 6 months or every year?
I mean I mean it's really depending on what you can afford and what you can do, what you have access to. I mean if I had it my way, I would be doing this yearly on every patient that I had. And then if you have more than 1 or 2 lb of it, we're going to get it minimum twice year twice a year. I just had a gentleman call me saying, "Hey, I want to talk to you about the fact that I have 3 and 1/2 lb of visceral fat and what do I do about this?" I biohacked him with some tools that I like to use and very fortunately over about 3 months he was able to lose 2 lb of visceral fat. And we were so excited about that. So he he got his done within 2 months. If if you're somebody who's like on a mission to get, you know, lose visceral fat, go ahead, get it done three, four times a year. See and and it only propels you to do better if you have those positive results. So you can do it as often you want basically, once a year minimum is what I would say.
Awesome. I'm we're definitely going to loop back to what you did for this gentleman or what biohacking means to help with reducing fat, but people nowadays they say that sleep can lead to more belly fat or to higher cortisol levels if you're not getting enough sleep. Do you think that's overhyped or is there a lot of legitimacy to that?
Oh, uh I mean sleep is the cornerstone of health. Like if you're going to do anything, you have to get good sleep because it'll hijack your ability to burn fat, to have energy, to you know, make more mitochondria if you are not getting good sleep. I wear one of these rings that tracks my sleep and you can see every single night where you get your deep sleep if you track it and which for like 90% of the population it's in the first few hours of falling asleep and then you don't get any more deep sleep the rest of the night most of the time. That first few hours is massively important because during deep sleep your body is recovering, you're pulsing out more growth hormone. Growth hormone is the hormone of recovery, physical recovery. And your brain also does this really cool thing where the brain cells actually shrink physically and let something call it's the lymphatic system. It's the drainage system for your brain turns on while those cells shrink up. All the toxins from your brain from the day drain out and get, you know, like washed out basically.
Yeah. So how can someone improve their deep sleep?
So there's a lot to it. There's things that you can do to improve your circadian rhythm to to tell your body, okay, morning is morning. So like sun, you can even use sun lamps if it's very dark where you are in the morning. You can watch the sun go up, you can watch the sun go down at night, you can remove blue light from your life, you can remove social media, you can remove caffeine late in the day to make sure that your body is primed to go to sleep at night. You can lower the temperature in your house. The temperature at which you sleep is very important. I was shocked the other day to to hear somebody say that they sleep in 74°. That is too hot. So you you need to be sleeping in like 68, 69° if you can. There are different supplements that you can use, magnesium L-threonine, magnesium glycinate. Those cross the blood brain barrier to help you get better deep sleep. Phosphatidylserine works for some people. Ashwagandha, there's a great product called cortisol manager that I've personally used. There's several more that I don't remember off the top of my head. But yeah.
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You had mentioned some blood tests already like DHEA and cortisol. Maybe those are the only two that people would want to have tested. But in general, if someone's already eating really healthy and they're still not losing weight, what would be blood tests that they could have their doctor run to see what might be some other underlying issues leading to that stubborn belly fat and stalled weight loss?
Your insulin levels and your A1C. See if you have are insulin resistant, that helps. Um if you are a female and you think you might have PCOS, that's a whole thing which is insulin resistant driven. So then you would want to get your testosterone levels checked there. Estradiol is also important in the world of um fat loss too. So get a get a full hormone panel, get your A1C, your insulin level. Cortisol doesn't necessarily need to be tested in blood work. If you really think your cortisol patterning is off, you would have to get like a spit test where you spit into a tube uh four to six times during the day so you can actually get a pattern because cortisol doesn't last long in the bloodstream. However, you could get a DHEA-S test or a DHEA test. Um basically, if you have chronic high cortisol, your adrenals will prioritize that and your DHEA levels will be de- deprioritized. And so that that's a clue where you might have cortisol issues. Oh, and there's one more thing, HS-CRP. Hi- highly sensitive C-reactive protein. That's an inflammatory marker. If you have high HS-CRP, meaning over two, that's a huge mortality risk in and of itself, too. A lot of the time, if you're somebody who's fairly healthy, like you don't have heart disease or anything like diabetes or anything like that, but you have a a high HS-CRP, it could be coming from high levels of visceral fat.
Mm, okay. And you had mentioned that with one of your patients that you were able to use biohacking to help with lowering his cortisol and maybe improve some of those blood test markers you just talked about. What were those different strategies to help improve things like HS-CRP and um your other markers that you listed off?
Okay, well, I've been working with this guy for several years, and he started doing all the exercise, which can burn fat more, right? And he started doing all the eating right, more protein to support muscle mass. And then when I'm talking bio hacking I I get real nerdy and and like I'm I'm a I'm a I'm a peptide nerd at heart. Like if you look at my YouTube channel, it's full of peptides. So he got on something called tesamorelin. Tesamorelin's a peptide that can help you pump out more growth hormone and from your pituitary before you go to bed, but it also has this amazing ability to hit receptors on your visceral fat to tell them to turn on and and start burning fat. And so he that's that's a pretty intense bio hacking thing to do, but it it really actually worked, and it was kind of cool to see. But for most people, if they have high cortisol, especially if you've got that visceral fat building up, we are always going to be bombarded with stressful events, stressful situations, stressful jobs, our family, we can't control people, right? But you really have to learn to become more resilient to stress. Now, if you want to bio hack your way through it, and you want to, you know, do things like I'm into cold plunging, that helps me get really energized if I do it in the morning, it helps me focus. Um I take supplements like NAD to help me focus, too, and that lowers my stress. Take count of the things that you have that you are grateful for, that, you know, we're all still alive, right? Like those are ways to lower cortisol ultimately. Like do gratitude journaling, you know, get good sleep, eat as healthfully as you can, don't eat a lot of processed foods. That that doesn't help. And learn to let things roll off your shoulder. I know it's sometimes just getting back to the basics or even for me things that help me with lowering my stress levels are not watching something when I'm eating or getting outside in nature or honing in and taking inventory of who are you spending your time with or what are you watching and or what are you listening to? I used to listen to rap music. These things can impact us and so even my husband and I we listen to like country or beach music and vacation songs because they're just so happy.
Yeah, exactly. No, that's very true and I even I have to be reminded like don't talk to yourself negatively, right? So, the more you say um I'm not good at this or that, then you speak it into existence. Um and and the more you build yourself up that you you speak it into existence as well. The five people that you surround yourself with the most need to be positive encouraging people. Turn off the news. Um I can't stress enough how many people I have met coming me to me for anxiety, like ready to jump on anxiety medications because they're so worried about the state of the world. While I'm not discounting what's going on in the world, sometimes your brain is just not equipped to handle all of that. And so, you need to turn it off and and and focus on what's in front of you. Also, we didn't talk about exercise, but exercise literally is not only good for you, but it metabolizes and uses the blood sugar that is chronically elevated due to excess cortisol. So, you know, ancient times when when we were threatened by something, our cortisol would go up in response to that, which would dump sugar into our blood for use. These days we're chronically stressed out, but we're sitting at our desks or we're sitting on the couch. And so if we're not using that blood sugar from being stressed out, we are creating metabolic destruction.
So what exercise would somebody want to do? Like is walking okay or do you do they have to do strength training? Like what would be something that would be most beneficial in terms of exercise?
Well, I mean it's actually a good question. Most of the time I have one answer to this, but in this situation I think it's different for your situation. So if you're really stressed out and you're not like a type A like get everything done all the time like wake up super early like go go go kind of person, yeah, walking is excellent. You know, just just go for a walk. Just get that zone two cardio in, which is where you're exercising, but you can still hold a conversation. It's good. It's good enough. If you're somebody who's go go go like I need to get everything done and conquer the world, you might be somebody who needs more of like a hit program like high intensity exercise to to like get it all out, get your brain focused on something else for a little while. For most people though, if you really want to, you know, get the most longevity out of an exercise program, it's weight training. Like again, put on more muscle, increase your metabolism, lose fat, you'll look better, you'll feel better, and you'll live longer.
How many days of a week should someone or how much time or does it not matter how much time as much as it is the intensity?
If if three times a week is all you can do, that's that's fine. If that works for you. I'm more of a four five days a week kind of person, but you know, get whatever you can get in.
And then how long would somebody You had mentioned one of your patients seeing results pretty quickly, but for the average person if they start implementing uh journals and walks and strength training and just finding ways to relax a little bit more to lower their cortisol specifically, how long would it take for someone to notice results? And then therefore now start seeing weight loss again.
Yeah, I think it depends on um how sick you are. Like if you're somebody who has something called metabolic syndrome and you're you're quite overweight, um you're edging towards diabetes or you have diabetes or you have like a cholesterol issue or heart disease and all that, it's going to take longer. I mean there really is something to the amount of damage that's been done to your body in terms of like how long it's going to take to reverse it out. If you're somebody who thinks they've been doing all the right things for a long time, I don't think it's going to take long at all. I think maybe two, three months.
Oh, yeah. Great. And is is there such thing as it's too late?
Oh, gosh, no. No way. No way. I mean, surprisingly, most of the people who come to me these days are older men and they're sick of feeling tired, right? They're sick and tired of feeling tired and yeah, sick. But just implementing some of these small changes have made a huge difference. I think a lot of them are kind of angry that they're not getting this advice from their doctors already or they don't know how to make it actionable. But many of these these people that I've encountered lately, they're they're in their 70s, you know, like they're still got a lot left to give and they got a lot they got a lot of energy they they just didn't know that they they could find.
And so if people have just one action step, cuz I know we talked about a lot of different things, but if you're like, "Listen, do this one thing tomorrow." What is the one thing you'd want people to start doing more of?
I really do think putting on more muscle is like the biggest, best thing that you can do for your body. That's That's my thing. It's like people just It's It's incredible what more higher muscle mass can do for your body.
I left links to all of Dr. Ashley Frawley's social media handles and her contact information in the video description. And if you enjoyed this conversation, I know you're going to find a lot of value in the interview I did with Dr. Roshni on how to start reversing insulin resistance and the exact steps to start helping with reversing metabolic syndrome. That video I will put right here and in the video description. Don't be silly, subscribe to Lilly and I'll see you in the next one.