Lose Belly Fat But Don't Make These Mistakes

Hello Health Champions.

Today I want to cover 6 common mistakes people make when it comes to exercise and

trying to lose weight and belly fat. And the reason they make these mistakes is that they

have bought into a lot of false premises but once you understand how the different types

of exercise affect your metabolism and you understand the root causes of stubborn weight

and belly fat, then it will be very straightforward to get the results you want without stressing

your body and compromising your health. I'm going to go through 6 of these common mistakes and they all build on each other so make sure

you want all the way through so that you don't miss anything and you really get the big picture

and a good understanding. The first mistake is believing the myth and here's the myth

that belly fat is just calories about 3500 calories per pound which is true but then

we're told that exercise will burn calories and if you can exercise like a 500 calories

per hour then all you have to do is exercise at that level for 7 hours to burn 3500 calories

and you lose 1 lb of belly fat. Straight math unfortunately the body isn't straight math

this math example this reasoning ignores the fact that the body is living it has behavior

it's assuming there's no change in body responses. There's no change in adaptations.

There's no change in perception or set point. There's no change in hormones or metabolism

and it's not going to affect your hunger in any way it's not going to affect your DNA

or more specifically your genetic expression, your epigenetics, which are a result of things

like stress and age and past diets. For every time in the past that you have dieted you have

expressed, you have altered, your epigenetics you have reprogrammed your genetic expression

so the math ignores all of this but your body has behavior your body very much deals with

all of this and if we're going to try to get rid of unwanted belly fat and body weight

then we need to know how did it get there in the first place and the answer is there's

two hormones called insulin and cortisol and when they go up then they're going to store

fat especially in the midsection and the main culprit is sugar. Sugar is 50% glucose 50%

fructose and fructose is almost as bad as alcohol in putting stress on the liver so

most fatty liver called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is caused by fructose

and then to add insult to that are excess carbs stress and processed foods because they will

create excess insulin and increase cortisol to drive insulin and so forth and if you have

stubborn wieght then you are almost certainly insulin-resistant so we can do exercises in

the style of the biggest loser and what happened was they starved people and they worked them

out for hours a day so yes you're going to have a massive calorie deficit but what happened

is all these people got short-term results and the reason is that they stressed the body

but they did not address the insulin resistance in a natural and balanced way and they didn't

give the body long enough to actually find its own balance and reverse that insulin resistance

they reduced it some by just forcing the body to lose weight but it was like a rubber band

The Body remembers and it just bounced back because they did not create a new set point

the body still remembered and they also did not let the body get healthy they did not

let the body repair and heal metabolically so only if you do it with harmony if you allow

the body to do its thing then it's going to find a long-term solution if you force it

and push it it's going to be a short-term solution. The big question is can exercise reduce

belly fat well the better question is can exercise reverse insulin resistance and the

answer is that yeah it kind of can a little bit, but it's not very effective and it's not a big deal

so exercise might be somewhere between zero and 20% and I just grabbed these numbers out

of my best guess just to kind of give you an idea so don't pay too much attention to

that all I'm trying to say is it's going to help a little bit but for some people it's

probably not going to help at all the big piece is going to be diet it's going to probably

be 50 to 90% of the results for most people but we also want to keep in mind that exercise

can have some benefit and I've done lots of other video though where I show you the real

benefit of exercise but just because I say exercised isn't all that great for this it

doesn't mean you shouldn't do it because exercise is absolutely necessary it's not optional

for Optimum Health and then for some people stress is going to be a huge big deal. Again

for some people add a big impact but for others it could be the big piece that's missing that

by calming down by reducing your life stress and by not trying to fight your body and stress

your body to exercise to burn calories you could actually make a huge huge difference

so the second big mistake people make is that they often rely too much on exercise and hoping

it will reverse the problem when it really doesn't have that much impact on insulin resistance

But we did say that it can help so when it does how does it do that? Well working muscle,

meaning when you activate a muscle, when you increase its temperature and activity level

and blood circulation, then it gets hungry for nutrients it really wants glucose and

therefore it requires no or little insulin to get the glucose in and therefore it helps

to bring down blood glucose and it helps bring down the overall carbohydrate pool in the body

so the body doesn't have to use insulin to put it elsewhere this carbohydrate can get

into the muscle. But the key to understand here is that this is in the muscle that you

have carbohydrate stores in liver and in muscles but here we're talking muscle that this is

not going to pull any glucose or fat out of the liver that's a separate story so what

this means is exercise is really actually pretty good in prevention of insulin resistance

and belly fat. Check. But it is not very good at reversing so by keeping the carbohydrate

pool down you can keep a lot of the sugar and fat from ever getting to the liver but

once it's in the liver it's not going to do much to pull it back out and therefore mistake

number three the people make is that they don't fully understand the difference between

maintenance and prevention and disease reversal. There are probably thousands of videos on

how to do crunches and core exercises to burn belly fat so how does that work they think

that if you feel the burn in a muscled and you must be burning fat in that area but blood

doesn't really work like that you have 60,000 miles of blood vessels 100,000 km and these

blood vessels in the red blood cells they visit every one of your 40 trillion cells

about every 45 seconds and the reason I say visit is that they don't actually go into

the cell blood cells don't go into other cells but they release their oxygen so that it

can be dispersed into the cells then how would this get you a six pack well the answer is

unfortunately that it really won't. You have several different layers and you have intra-abdominal

or visceral fat and then you have connective tissue barriers and then you have a muscle

which is the six pack the rectus abdominis you're trying to show off and then you have

more barriers connective tissue and then you have subcutaneous fat and if you have 2 inches

of subcutaneous fat then it doesn't really matter what that muscle looks like it's just

not going to be visible to the world and this muscle has no direct connection there are

no blood vessels or supply lines between the muscle and the fat the blood circulates the

whole body and delivers and retrieves resources from the whole body so there is no local effect

you cannot work this muscle and burn this fat and to the extent that it works maybe

a tiny little bit is if your muscle is borderline visible and you work it now it will grow it

will hypertrophy it will become more pronounced so that it will show up better through that

relatively thin layer of subcutaneous fat and the fourth mistake people make then is

trying to work local muscles to solve a systemic problem. Can't do it. And this is what it looked

like when he found out to his surprise that he was the subject of a video and he was being

called wrong so apparently I said in a video that spin class is anaerobic that high intensity

training becomes anaerobic and I also said that excess cortisol can backfire on weight

loss and the person in this video said that no this is wrong and I really am not hurt

I understand there's room for a lot of different opinions and you can't win everybody but what

I'm really concerned about and why I'm bringing this up is I really don't like when people

get confused when people watch one of my videos and then someone picks a few words out of

another video and says that this isn't how it works so let me clarify this so this other

person said that if a workout last for 30 minutes then it's aerobic not anaerobic something

like a spin class will go through this in some detail it also said that cord is all

in the context of exercise leads to lipolysis the way he says it is when you're exercising

that cortisol is actually fat burning which is the opposite apparently of what I said

but which you'll find out isn't the opposite. And finally the video claimed that I had

said that exercise will lead to weight gain and he says this is just plain wrong that

apparently all exercise leads to weight loss list take a look at these statements and clarify

them very often the problem is that someone just pulls a couple of words out of context

and they don't really put it into the big picture so this will all be very clear for you

that the body doesn't switch from one thing to the other if it's doing one thing and then

it starts doing something else it doesn't mean it totally shuts off the first thing

and if you're doing a low-intensity exercise like walking or biking then your heart rate is

probably going to be under 120 you'll be breathing comfortably slow deep breaths

and you'll be burning some fat and some carbohydrates and if you're doing this in a peaceful manner

you're doing oxidative phosphorylation that simply means that phosphorylation is making

energy and oxidative means that you're doing it in the presence of oxygen that the oxygen

you're taking in through your calm breathing is enough to provide energy at that level

and this could be fat or carbohydrates it so depends a lot on what type of substrate have

you been eating if you're eating mostly fat it's going to burn mostly fat. If you've been eating more

carbohydrate it's going to burn more carbohydrates if you're fat adapted it's going to look something

like this. So this black arrow would represent your ability to make energy from oxygen at

this heart rate. Now we have this basic ability but now we increase the intensity. We increase

the demand and now what's going to happen is your body makes lactic acid and this is

that first little burn in your muscles that you feel when you increase the intensity and

this is because there's insufficient oxygen. You no longer, at this heart rate and that

breath rate, you no longer have enough oxygen to supply that additional energy. So you break

down glucose and you make lactic acid which means that now you are anaerobic you are

performing anaerobic metabolism. Anaerobic means your body wants more air so you get

air hunger and you start breathing faster you start huffing and puffing. And then, clever body

that you have, increases the heart rate so that now it can speed up the blood and deliver

more of that oxygen that you're breathing in then this additional oxygen can recycle

the lactic acid. So you can turn that lactic acid back into glucose and you can now burn

that glucose with oxidative phosphorylation you can use it with oxygen you can burn it efficiently

and now your heart rate might be jumping to 130 and now you have just increased your aerobic

capacity as you're recycling this lactic acid and then the same thing happens again if you

increase your intensity further now you have your basic aerobic capacity. This doesn't go

away just because you become a little anaerobic you still have your aerobic burning your

oxygen and fat burning at the bottom it's just that you add more carbohydrate to it so if you

go more intense now you make more lactic acid you force your body to increase the heart

rate deliver more oxygen and now you can over the period of several minutes you can recycle

some of this lactic acid so you're spending a few minutes at a time in anaerobic before

your body catches up again. And we can push this further and further as we increase the

intensity we keep making more lactic acid we are partially anaerobic which forces the

body to increase the heart rate which the increased heart rate helps us recycle some

of the lactic acid and we bring up our aerobic capacity so we're going through phases of

anaerobic and aerobic but the point is that we went from almost exclusively fat-burning

to a larger percentage of carbohydrate burning and then eventually we get to a point where

we have reached our aerobic threshold that no matter how much we increase our heart rate

we just can't deliver that much oxygen anymore and now any additional demand any more intensity

is going to result in lactic acid that can't be recycled and now that lactic acid builds

up very quickly and puts an end to the duration of how long we can do this. So this would be

our maximum or high intensity interval training so it's not that exercise is purely aerobic

or purely anaerobic it's always going to be a mix of the two but more important than

the word we use for aerobic or anaerobic is the fact that we shift our metabolism in the

process so here it's almost all fat and here it's more and more and more carbohydrates

that were burning we're using up more glucose. So like everything else in the body we want to

think of this as a spectrum from low to high there's no black or white it's a gradient

and as we move up this intensity gradient now we are increasingly making more and more

cortisol for making more and more glucose and we're making more more lactic acid and

we're moving ever closer to our aerobic threshold where we switch into anaerobic you have to

get over the idea that more is better and no pain no gain it doesn't work like that

we have to understand that exercise is stress and we need some stress but more isn't better

and more that work your way up through this spectrum the more you going to stress the body the

more cortisol you're going to make which is a stress hormone and if your body is not 20 years old

and that is probably not going to benefit you very much. So mistake number five is

working out too long too hard with you need low-intensity we do need high intensity but

we do not need high intensity long-duration and then the guy said that cortisol is not fat storing it is actually

fat burning. He says cortisol in the context of exercise leads to lipolysis which is

break down of fat and this helps us understand something super super super important that

there's a difference between what's going on during exercise and what's going on after

exercise and which one are we interested in? Long-term effect. I don't care what happens when

you're sitting on the bike. What is your body going to do and how is it going to affect

your behavior in the hours and days and weeks to come so during exercise that's a catabolic

state it's a breakdown state. Your body is using up energy breaking down tissue breaking

down fiber to get the job done and the body is looking for fuel so cortisol is a catabolic

hormone it breaks down protein and turns it into energy and fats carbs protein lactic

acid it doesn't matter the body is looking for all of them when it's in a catabolic state.

After exercise, now the body tries to repair the damage from the exercise. And again exercise

isn't bad. It's good damage if you do the right amount, but after exercise now you're anabolic.

The opposite of catabolic. It's building up again so now it looks for things to repair with and

to replenish the fuel stores so Cortisone and there is absolutely no discussion or controversy

around this that cortisone which is the medication form of cortisol will absolutely every time

increase your carb cravings it will increase blood sugar it will increase insulin it will

increase insulin resistance and tip people into type 2 diabetes and I can't tell you

how many patients I've had who said that they gained 50 lbs when they were put on steroids

so steroids cortisone cortisol it's all the same thing and it triggers blood sugar which

triggers insulin so yes on the bike you're in a catabolic state afterwards it's completely

different. So apparently this guy made fun of the fact that he thought I said that

exercise makes you gain fat so I hope you understand what we just talked about and it's

not like I'm saying that you get on the exercise bike with 25 lb of fat on your body and you

get off an hour later with 26 lb of course not but we're not interested in what's happening

when you're on the bike we're looking at the big picture how does this affect your body's

overall behavior? What happens after, and what's going to happen for sure is that if you use

up carbohydrate stores and you trigger more cortisol and you trigger more insulin you

will get hungrier. You will have more hunger and more carb cravings that will more than

make up for whatever energy or calories that you've expended we also want to understand

hormones that you were stressing your body so you're shifting your body's whole balance

How is this affecting your organ health? A lot of people have adrenal fatigue. They have adrenal

stress and if you work out hard and force your adrenals to make much more cortisol on

a regular basis now this is not good for the endocrine balance and the organ health in

your body. We want to start understanding ease versus dis-ease That your body wants to return

to balance that yes we can exercise while allowing the body to maintain balance and

have some ease if you stress your body you can get some short-term changes but only with

harmony can you create long-term health and hopefully that's what you're looking for. And

I know even a lot of you watching this are guilty of mistake number 6 which is focusing

more on weight and belly fat than on your overall health and well-being.

If you enjoyed this video then that would be a great one next and if you really want to understand how the body

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