Annihilate Belly Fat By Evading This...

Hello, all champions. Today I want to talk about how to get rid of belly fat naturally and for good. And there are two things that you absolutely must avoid to get rid of belly fat. And you probably heard of them, they call sugar and stress. And some people are going to say, "I already knew that next." Give me something new. Someone else might be saying, "I don't believe that." And it's usually followed with something like, "Because my grandpa always fill in the blank, always ate candy, always drank a bottle of whiskey every day, he never exercised, he never ate vegetables and he lived into his 90s." Well, that's maybe the case, but that doesn't mean that is optimal. There's always a freak of nature who can get away with a lot of things. That doesn't mean that's how it works or that's what we should do. Most people are probably going to say, "I believe that sugar and stress is bad. I understand that, but it's so hard to deal with." And a lot of people believe that everything's okay in moderation. And I tend to agree with that, but I might have a different opinion about what moderation is. Now, the problem is a lot of people are always looking for the next thing. They think the answer lies in finding out one more thing, one more biohack, one more magical supplement. But I'm here to tell you that you don't need another list. That's not what it's about. It's about knowing more. If you haven't fixed the problem yet, if you're still eating sugar, even though you know you shouldn't, if you're still having a lot of stress, and you know you should do something about it, but you haven't, then you need more information. You need stronger information that will give you a stronger why. And there's this story about a dog on a porch, and he's just kind of half laying down, and he's whining and complaining. And there are two guys on the porch. The guest asks the owner of the dog, "Well, why is your dog whining and complaining so much?" And the owner says, "Well, right over where he is, there's a nail, and I bet it's hurting him." And then they keep talking, and the dog keeps whining and complaining, and then the guest asks again, "Well, if it hurts, why doesn't he just get up and move to another spot?" And the owner says, "Well, it doesn't hurt that bad." And that's how a lot of us live our lives. It doesn't hurt that bad yet. We're not sick enough yet. So what we need to do, if we know there's things we should do, but we're not doing them, we need more reasons, more information so we can create a stronger why. And that's what I want to do for you. So let's start in with sugar. Most people know that sugar is going to raise blood sugar. That's typically the first thing they're going to think of. And the body needs to have a certain amount of blood sugar in a certain range. When we eat something that raises blood sugar, then the body has to bring it back down into a certain range, and it uses insulin to do that. So now this blood glucose starts dropping. And the more we tend to increase the blood sugar quickly, the more it tends to drop quickly. And very often we get a little overshoot. And then we eat again, and it drops again, and we eat again, and so forth. So every time that we have a large blood sugar spike, we're going to release a large amount of insulin. And if we do this over a long period of time, like several times a day for years and years, now we're going to develop insulin resistance. And that's one way that we can develop insulin resistance. The second way is the fact that sugar also has fructose in it. It's 50% glucose, 50% fructose in sugar. And this fructose is different. It doesn't raise blood sugar, but it can only be processed through the liver. Or it doesn't raise blood sugar much, I should say, very, very slight increase. But because the liver is the only organ that can process this fructose, it tends to overwhelm the liver very quickly. Because we're eating amounts that never occurred in a diet before the last 100 years. So these are the two primary factors that create insulin resistance. But one thing that happens now is that because the blood sugar rises very quickly and has to be brought down very quickly, the body has to do something with all that glucose that we just ate, all that fuel. And the body can only store a tiny little bit of glucose as glycogen. So most of this excess that we have every time we eat gets turned into fat. Some of it gets turned into glycogen, but over time more and more of it becomes fat. And that's called lipogenesis. Now another thing that happens is that we create blood sugar swings. As you can see from this graph, when something comes up very quickly, it comes down very quickly, then that is not what the body is looking for. The body is looking for a very stable level of blood sugar. And when it rises and falls very quickly, we tend to get what's called hypo glycemia where on the bottom of this curve, our blood sugar is too low. And now we get cranky and irritable and unfocused and we get cravings. But in this video, we're going to talk about sugar and stress. And the thing to understand is that blood sugar swings. This hypo glycemia is actually a form of stress. And I'm going to deal with that a little bit later in the stress portion. But a lot of you have been told that it's all about calories. If you want to lose weight, if you want to lose belly fat, then you just have to eat fewer calories. But that is unfortunately not how it works. It's not that it doesn't matter at all. But the question is, what sort of hormones are we triggering? Because it's not the calories per se. It's how the type of food we eat trigger different metabolic and hormonal reactions. So we just said that sugar will move you toward insulin resistance. And when you're insulin resistant, that will increase your tendency for lipogenesis, meaning making fat, turning carbohydrates into fat. But it hits you from the other direction as well in that it reduces lipolises, the breakdown of fat. And that is your ability to turn fat into energy. So when you're healthy, when you're metabolically healthy, when you're insulin sensitive, then your ability to burn fat for energy and your ability to store food as fat should be in balance. And then of course, if you're insulin resistant or if you're overweight and you're trying to lose some weight, then the burning should be higher for a period of time until you're in balance and then you maintain it this way. And it's kind of like a sea saw there. But the more insulin resistant you are, the greater your tendency to store this energy. So it's going to go up and your burning ability will go down. And the more insulin resistant you are, the more you're going to shift this out of balance. And what happens when everything you eat gets stored and you can't retrieve it to turn that fat into energy. What happens is you get hungrier. And most people don't realize this little fun fact. They think that insulin resistance is just an inability to control blood sugar because that's what we're told. And then we're given medication and insulin to control the blood sugar. But when you're injecting insulin, now you're shifting this imbalance even further. And that's why calories per se don't matter. It's not the calories you get in sugar. It's the fact that they trigger these hormonal and metabolic shifts so that you store more of them as fat and that you eat more. The calories in sugar make you eat even more calories. The next problem is that they are empty calories because with every type of food that you eat, your body wants to turn that into either energy or tissue. And now the body needs vitamins and minerals as catalysts to plug into these metabolic pathways. But with sugar, you're not getting any of these vitamins and minerals. They're completely absent in sugar. So now your body says, okay, I got the raw fuel. Now I need the catalysts to make this into energy. But when it's missing, the body is still unsatisfied. It knows that something was missing. So it's going to create hunger. It's going to make you eat more, hoping that you'll eat some real food and that it's going to get those vitamins and minerals. One more problem is that when you're insulin resistant, then very often that's going to drive leptin resistance. So when we stuff a fat cell full of fat, full of energy, that's the purpose. It's supposed to hold on to that energy and when it's It's full when it's satisfied, then it signals with leptin that I've had enough, you can stop eating now. But leptin resistance means that we stuff the cell full, but we're not getting the message that we are full, so we keep eating. So when you're leptin resistant, now what's going to happen is even though you eat a bunch of food, you have less satiety, less satisfaction, less fullness, which again may makes you eat more food. So here's several different ways where it's not about the calories, it's about the type of food makes you eat more. And we all know this, that there's always a little bit of room left over for a sugary dessert, even if we're super full for any other type of food. As if that wasn't enough, sugar can also create what's called dysbiosis. And that's three different words, this means out of balance, bio means life and osus means condition. So it's a condition where the bacteria, the life bacteria in your gut is out of balance. And how does this happen? Well there's different types, you can have dysbiosis anywhere in your body, you can have it on your skin, you can have it in your mouth, in your stomach, in your small intestine, in your large intestine. Actually everywhere there is a bacterial culture that can get out of whack. But let's say that you eat something, this is your neck, your throat, and it gets into the stomach. And then out of the stomach, we feed that into the small intestine. And then the small intestine is going to go on for a very long time, about 20 feet worth. And then it's going to dump into the large intestine. So here is something called the Iliocicol valve. It's a little flap that's supposed to close between the small intestine and the large intestine. And then once it gets into the large intestine, we get ready to dump everything. And here's kind of how this works, that the large intestine is where most of the bacteria are supposed to be. So the small intestine is supposed to have something like thousands, like 10 to the third power, thousands of bacteria per cubic centimeter per milliliter. So that's a very small amount. And the large intestine normally has about 10 to the ninth billions of bacteria per cubic centimeter. So in other words, there's supposed to be very, very few bacteria in the small intestine, but a million times more in the large intestine. Now if this Iliocicol valve isn't working quite right and stress can get it out of whack, can get it to not close and open properly. Now if we get a little bit of backflow into the small intestine and then we eat a bunch of sugar and fast food, now we get what's called SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And the more sugar and the more processed food and the more quick carbs we eat, the worse that SIBO overgrowth can get. So the digestive tract is set up to do things in an orderly fashion. We start off with some acid in the stomach to start breaking things down, but then we put it into the small intestine where most, almost all the food is supposed to be absorbed. So the carbohydrates, the simple carbs, we break them into simple carbs, they get absorbed. We break down the protein into amino acids and that gets absorbed in the small intestine. And the very complex carbohydrates and the fiber is primarily what makes it into the large intestine. And the simpler the carbohydrates is, the higher up in the digestive tract it's supposed to be absorbed. But if we have SIBO, small intestine bacterial overgrowth and we feed them a bunch of sugar, now they're going to migrate higher and higher up. And they're going to produce toxic waste products and they're going to produce a lot of gas. So they're going to make hydrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide gas and methane. And these byproducts can cause altered movement of the food stuff through the digestive tract called peristalsis. So we can slow it down or speed it up depending on what's happening. So the problem with SIBO or one of the problems is that we're supposed to have thousands, but with an overgrowth, now we get hundreds of thousands or millions, which is still a tiny amount compared to what's in the large intestine, but it's a different, it's an abnormal culture, it's an abnormal flora. So now in these byproducts and these different bacteria, these unbalanced bacteria migrate and move forward into the large intestine. Now we can get that large intestine unbalanced as well. And that's one way that we can further unbalance the large intestine. We create dysbiosis and we could have some pathogens develop in the small intestine that now make it into the large intestine and start feasting on the fiber that it shares with all the other bacteria there. And why is this such a big deal? Why do we care about this? What's up with a little bit of dysbiosis? Well, the effects of SIBO and large intestine dysbiosis are manyfold. So one thing that can happen is gas, bloating and diarrhea or in some cases constipation. We can get a reduction in absorption of nutrients in the small intestine and we could get nutritional deficiencies. Now in the large intestine, those bacteria, if they're out of balance, they actually make a lot of our vitamins. They make a lot of nutrients. They package, repackage the nutrients for us. So that can also contribute to nutrient deficiencies. We can get a decrease in bacterial diversity and there's a lot of healthy species that are supposed to keep the others in check. And when we don't have enough of those, now we get pathogenic overgrow. So the bad guys, the things that make us sick and toxic, start overgrowing. And that can lead to an irritation of the gut lining, both in the small and the large intestine. We can get a leaky gut, which is primarily in the small intestine where we absorb a lot of this food. But when we have a leaky gut and things start spilling out into the bloodstream that are not supposed to be there, now we can also get things like systemic inflammation. So now with the leaky gut, systemic inflammation, we can also get a lot of food allergies. We moved toward autoimmunity and this start poisoning. It starts spreading toxins into the rest of the body. And there's something called a gut brain axis that can get disrupted, which means some of these toxins now make it into the brain. Because if you have a leaky gut, you're probably going to develop a leaky brain because it's controlled by a lot of the same mechanisms. So now that's something called neurotoxicity. And they've done multiple studies where they inject people, healthy people with just tiny, tiny amounts of some of these toxins that these bacteria produce. And they instantly get anxiety and depression. So a lot of these symptoms have to do with the mechanisms that we're talking about. This often also leads to autoimmunity where your immune system gets confused by all this chaos and starts attacking your own tissues. And when your bacteria get out of balance, they are actually responsible for a lot of your metabolic signaling. So now we can get altered metabolic signaling. And it thinks like appetite, regulation, and leptin and grellen, the leptin is a cytyth hormone, grellen is the hunger hormones. And now both of these can get out of balance and start affecting you. So that your hunger and your cravings may not actually be cravings that you have. But it's your gut bacteria telling you that, hey, I have cravings. You better go eat something. And this altered metabolic signaling also involves glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity. So with the wrong kind of bacteria, you can become more insulin resistant just from that. So sugar is one of the absolute worst things that you can eat. But I also want to touch on something called necessary versus sufficient. So sugar is a huge problem. It's not the only problem. So yes, it is necessary to cut out the sugar, but unfortunately it may not be sufficient. If you have enough pathogens, if you have enough imbalances, you can't fix that probably without taking out the sugar, but there may not be sufficient. There may be other things that you have to do as well to get the balance back, to get rid of some of those pathogens if it's gone far enough. So let's talk about stress and what that actually is. That stress at. at the most fundamental level in your nervous system is something called sympathetic activation. So you have two branches to your automatic, your autonomic nervous system. One is fight flight, the other is speed breed. Now, the fight flight, that's the sympathetic. It kicks in when it thinks you're in danger. And that's why sugar and stress have a lot to do with each other because sugar is the emergency fuel. Whenever your body is under danger, it thinks it needs more energy, more sugar than it starts looking for that. It's tries to raise blood sugar. So let's talk about hypoglycemia. Like I said a little earlier, that hypoglycemia is actually a form of stress. And that when you're supposed to have your blood sugar in a certain range, and then your blood sugar rises and falls, then every time that it's in the bottom, when it's bottoming out here, your body is under stress. And because it's very, very important to bring it up again, then everything under the curve here is a form of metabolic stress. And your body is going to produce cortisol. It's a stress hormone that its primary function is to raise blood sugar and get it back into that range. Or when we are stressed, when we have a high, strong, sympathetic response, now it tries to bring it a little bit toward the higher end of normal so that you have a little extra fuel. But the cortisol is the hormone that does this. So whether you're trying to bring it up a little bit because you're stressed, or because you're hypoglycemic, it makes no difference. It's still a form of stress that results in cortisol. And once again, nature has been really, really brilliant in designing this because if you have a wild animal chasing you and you need more energy, your body releases cortisol, the glucose goes up, but because you're being chased, you're running, you're expanding, you're using up all that energy. So you don't need insulin to break it down because a working muscle is going to suck up that glucose naturally. So it's a perfect cycle, perfect setup, so to speak. But if you are not running from a wild animal, if you have more chronic stress, if you're sitting in traffic, if you're stressed because you can't pay the bill or someone is messing with you, now that glucose is not being absorbed by the muscles and you need to release insulin. And this is how chronic stress drives insulin resistance. And because it does that, it's also part of driving metabolic syndrome and it contributes to increased blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, central obesity, meaning you're packing on most of the weight in the middle, the dangerous, the organ fat, the visceral fat. And it also drives dyslipidemia, meaning cholesterol that is out of balance. It's not just if it's high or low, but it's if it's inflamed, if the LDL particles are too small and damaged from that inflammation. And here are some more cortisol effects. It will make you eat more because your body is trying to generate energy to get through this dangerous situation and raise some blood sugar. So cortisol is one way to do it, but it also triggers you to try to find something sweet to increase blood sugar that way as well. And therefore, you're gonna have cravings for things that can raise blood sugar fast. So you have more of a tendency to eat things that aren't good for you, like sugary and processed foods, high glycemic foods, comfort foods. And by that mechanism, it's also gonna increase your tendency for emotional eating. And through all these mechanisms that we've talked about, making fat, auto carbohydrate, et cetera, increasing lipogenesis, it will also increase fat storage. The cortisol will very forcefully drive fat storage. And unfortunately, it does it in the abdominal cavity, especially. So this visceral fat we talked about, it especially stimulates some enzymes to turn it into fat in the abdominal area. And when the cortisol is trying to increase the blood sugar, now normally, that doesn't happen, but with chronic stress and very high levels of cortisol, it will part of what it's using to make glucose is gonna be protein. So there's a disease where people have very, very high levels of cortisol. And what happens now is they start breaking down protein, which means muscle. So these people are gonna have a huge belly where they store all that fat. They're gonna have skinny arms and legs. They're gonna have a flat butt because they're eating up the protein with the cortisol to turn it into glucose. And then that glucose drives up the insulin and the insulin stores the fat primarily in the midsection. And also when you're stressed, your frontal lobe, your executive center of the brain is not working as well. And one thing that resides in the frontal lobe is motivation. So with higher cortisol, with higher stress, you're also gonna have less motivation to go do things that are good for you, such as exercise. And now that comes back to bite you because with less motivation to exercise, now of course you're gonna exercise less, but exercise was one of the things that could drive the frontal lobe to give you more motivation. So now with less exercise, it gets back to have even less motivation. And now you exercise even less. You drive the frontal lobe even less and so on and so on. And one more thing that cortisol does is it will ruin your sleep. Because the hormone that helps you sleep, that regulates your sleep cycle is called melatonin. It's released by your pineal gland right in the middle of your head. And that kind of makes sense that cortisol completely shuts off that melatonin because if you're in danger, obviously you don't wanna fall asleep. You wanna be bright and alert and awake to deal with that danger. So as long as cortisol is high, then you're not gonna sleep all that well. So I hope I've given you some things to think about so that you can strengthen your motivation and your result to do something about sugar and stress. And if you're ready for that, then let's talk about how to do this. It's really quite simple. Once you understand why things happen and how the body works and what these things do, then it's not all that difficult. So I recommend you eliminate all added sugar. Look for added sugar if it's more than a gram for serving, then don't eat it. Also eliminate all sweet juices. And I know that there's some good things in juice, but there's also too much sugar. It's a sugar bomb. If you occasionally make some green juice and don't over-sweeten it, that's probably fine, but don't buy into the idea that orange juice is something that's good for you. Then you want to reduce sweet fruit. So tropical fruit, fruit that's very high in sugar. It's not that you can't ever have it, but the more insulin resistant you are, the more you want to reduce it. And you want to emphasize having maybe some berries instead. Like a handful of berries just has a fraction of the sugar that you're going to get in sweet fruit. Then you want to reduce the processed foods because that's where you're going to find most of the added sugar and the preservatives and the seed oils and all that garbage. And if you want to reduce it by 100%, that's absolutely fine. That would be a great thing. But just don't do like the average person where they get 60, 70% of their calories from ultra processed foods with high macronutrients, high carb, high seed oil, high sugar, and very, very low or non-existent nutrients. So I don't think that you have to avoid it completely if you can handle it. Some people can't have a little bit than they fall right back into it. But I think that you should have at least 90, maybe 95% of your food should be real whole food and the processed stuff should be a rare exception. Then to deal with stress, I strongly recommend breathing exercises because once you have a stress response, your body fires off and you're making hormones, you're making stress hormones, you're negating your immune system for hours and hours and hours after that, even if it was just a very brief episode of stress. Whereas if you do something like a breathing exercise, if you consciously calm yourself down, now you can reset your body and the stress hormones go back to normal in minutes, a couple of minutes, instead of staying up for hours and hours. And the more you do these breathing exercises, the more you train your body to return to normal. that state automatically. I also strongly recommend meditation because it can change your mindset. It can change your outlook. In addition to the breathing exercises, it goes a little bit deeper in silencing your mind and reducing that stress. Then I suggest that you plan out your sleep and your exercise. Don't just let it happen by default. Make it really, really important that you sleep at a certain time when you can and that you exercise at certain times, at regular times, when you can. You want to make all of this really important. Don't just do it when you get around to it. Use all the information and all the nudging that I've given you to create some goals, make a result and a decision and make it really, really important because you're worth it. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. If you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.