Secret Reasons You Have Belly Fat (that no one has told you)

I am sure that you could tell me at least 20 reasons as to why people gain belly fat. A lot of this is pretty common knowledge given the internet

Wait. Or is it?

If we all know why we gained weight in our bellies & how to get rid of it then why do we put up with it? We would simply vanish it. POOF

Well- here may be some reasons you have never heard of .

Gut bacteria. The health & function of gut bacteria can affect how much energy you absorb from food. Some people can actually get more energy from the same foods just because of the mix of bacteria they have. So it seems as though obese people actually get more energy from the same food as lean people.

Food labels are wrong. Its great that we can now see what we are eating by reading the labels on our food. But guess what? These can be off by 20-30%. So even if you are following a calorie restricted diet that tracker may be wrong.

What the animal ate. The nutrients in milk/meat/eggs etc are based on not only what the animals eats but by how they live. So the amount of energy or calories in that steak can be much different than what we thought

You exercise the wrong way for you. But its not that simple. If you don’t know what is going on with your hormones you won’t know what type of exercise will work best. That is should you do long duration low intensity workouts or short duration high intensity?

If you have too much cortisol then high intensity shorter duration exercise may work. Many endurance athletes have high cortisol. If you only do low intensity cardio then you may increase these stress hormones and put your body in a state where it wants to hold onto bodyfat

Estrogen. Excess estrogen makes you zaftig, in other words voluptuous. We need estrogen to have babies, to manage our moods, to tell other hormones what to do. But if we mess up our estrogen balance wham fat sticks to us like mashed potatoes. Estrogen is super finicky & easily influenced by outsiders.

The good news is that there are ways you can manage your diet and exercise to manage these triggers. There are foods that drive hormones out of balance and these can be eliminated from the diet. Even a temporary reduction in these foods will help. We recently experimented with a 21 day hormone reset diet and found that it worked.

You can also eliminate animal hormones from your diet.

And change the type of exercise you are doing-think strength. Typically more strength based workouts help with belly fat reduction.

Taking prebiotics and probiotics can also help manage gut bacteria