2950: How to Lose Belly Fat (Why Eating Less Isn't Working)

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MindPump. MindPump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just stumbled into the most downloaded health, fitness, and entertainment podcast in the history of the world. This is MindPump. Today's episode, we talk about how to lose belly fat and why eating less isn't working. By the way, we have a new program, MAPS Abs and Butt. Now, it is a full-body workout program, but the emphasis is on giving you incredible abs and a nice round butt. The program is 40% off. Plus, we're going to throw in another free program if you get it, Muscle Mommy 15 or Muscle Mommy. And we're going to throw in some free guides, the Butt Building Diet Guide, so you know how to fuel those muscle gains, speed up that metabolism, and a women's supplement guide. Go to MAPSabsandbutt.com. Use the code LONG. For 40% off. Here's something that's crazy. This number should stop you in your tracks. They did a controlled study. Cutting sleep to four hours a night for two weeks raised belly fat by 9% and the deep visceral fat around the organs by 11%. Look, for a lot of women, belly fat is not a calorie problem. And here's what we're going to do. We're going to break it all down for you right now. It's super frustrating. What's going on? Why isn't anything? And this is, unfortunately, more common than you would think. Again, we have callers like this all the time. And when they call in, they're desperate because they don't know what lever to pull. I think this is so common. And I think there's two groups that get split that this happens to. Group one, who's been doing that, who's just frustrated and trying and ready to give up because it is just so much. They're so low calorie. And then we have the other group, which we call cortisol junkies. Where are fooled into thinking that this is working or it's a good idea, even though they're not seeing the results from it. They get this feeling of euphoria or this cortisol spike after their workout and it feels good. And so trying to convince that person that this approach is not a good strategy and it's the reason why you haven't reached your goals. And so I find that there's two different clients that I'm speaking to that are stuck in this spot. Either the one that is ready to give up because they've been doing this for a long time, no results. Or two, the one that's been doing it for a while, but is addicted to the feeling they get because they get this huge cortisol dump that makes them feel in the immediate after a workout feel good, but still not seeing results. Cortisol is an energy hormone. So people don't realize that. And it does give you energy in the short term. I'm glad you brought up cortisol because that gets blamed for so many different things, including belly fat. And it definitely plays a role. But here's what happens. Women who are doing this, who are under eating, overtraining, beating themselves up. It must be. It must be cortisol. So they go buy a supplement. This supplement promises to reduce cortisol and it does nothing for them. And so they spend money on thing after thing to try to reduce cortisol or work with their cortisol. Meanwhile, they're doing everything else to cause these problems. Undereat and overtrain. Yeah, they're working so hard. And the frustration is real because, I mean, usually for everything else, if you're going to work this hard, you're going to see some results from that. But there's nowhere to go when you're that low calorie. The other things that you'll see people do with this is they'll buy a. Waist trainer, which I cannot hate these things more. I absolutely cannot. First off, waist trainers, you're essentially wearing a girdle around your waist and it atrophies. In other words, weakens the muscles around your core. And so whatever decrease in waist size you get from a waist trainer is because you've made the muscles around your lumbar spine, around your trunk, around your core, smaller and weaker. Setting yourself up for potential injury. Back problems. Back problems. Back problems. Weakening yourself. It's a terrible. In fact, I know a young lady who developed an obstruction because of the tight waist trainer that she was wearing and had to go get surgery because of it. And then lastly, you know, I'm doing all this stuff. It's not working. I know what I'll add. I'll add ab training circuits. Oh, of course. I'll do a bunch of ab exercises thinking that I'm going to spot reduce. Throw more on top of it. That's right. And it's super frustrating because it not only does nothing, but the more you do, the worse things get. It's like, well, I'm doing all this work. And I'm taking in all these very little calories. Why isn't this working? And what's happened is your body has adapted and learned how to burn very little calories, both through activity and at rest. And so you continue to try to cut calories and your body continues to learn how to burn less calories through hormones, through reduced activity outside of exercise and other mechanisms that are still not clear. But we see this all the time. Well, I really blame the fitness industry for this one because we have touted the law of thermodynamics so much. And we've got people to just focus on that where it's like it's calories in versus calories out. So in other words, eat less, burn more. This is the strategy to lose weight, to lose belly fat. And so they get obsessed with that. And that strategy is just a losing strategy, especially considering that so many of my clients, when they first start, are not in a place in a good place, protein wise, calorie wise in the first place. And it doesn't benefit us when we're trying to strength train and build muscle and build your metabolism. And so this idea of when I'm not. Seeing results, I just add more cardio, cut calories and you just keep going in that eventually you run out of runway. There's two things that are happening there. So first off, law of thermodynamics is real. So I want to be clear with that. So what we're not saying is that that doesn't exist. But here's what we forget, that your body's metabolism adapts, your body learns how to burn more or less calories. And what influences that are the activities that you do and what the adaptations are that those activities promote. So in other words, are you trying to build muscle, build a metabolic rate or are you trying to or are you sending a signal that says, hey, let's slow this down? And so that makes one of the biggest differences and also how you fuel that, like building a metabolic rate through eating very little is almost impossible. Now, there are times when eating less will help. Obviously, metabolic rate, it's healthier, but there are also times when eating more helps metabolic rate. And in this case, in these scenarios that we're talking about, if this. Is you and you're listening, you're the person that needs to build the body you want. You're not the person that needs to cut and reduce and do more. And you're probably already there. You're doing you're adding more activity and getting nothing for it. And so you probably feel like, why am I wasting my time? This also leads to poor sleep. And when you stress the body like this, where you just keep cutting calories and adding activity, that signal is so loud, throws a cortisol off and makes it really difficult for someone to get good rest, good rest. And so you're going to have to do a lot of things. You're going to have to do a lot of things. makes the big difference. I mean, I want to be clear. You eventually do create this caloric deficit, but what it looks like is it looks like we first fuel the body what it needs through whole foods. We first focus on getting strong and building muscle and building metabolism. And then over time, what ends up happening is you've now raised your metabolic rate. You've built your muscle mass. Your body then needs more calories in order just to sustain that muscle mass, which then naturally kind of puts you in this nice deficit. And then in that place, we are in this deficit and your body starts to lean out and lose body fat. But what it looks like and the way you have to communicate it many times to a client is, hey, we're going to reverse diet or we're going to feed your body what it needs to build. And then yes, eventually we will lean out. But it looks like this actually giving the body what it wants and needs versus this idea of always having to cut and restrict. I want to cover a couple of studies just to kind of dispel a big myth and also to kind of support some of the other studies that I've done. And I want to cover a couple of studies just to kind of support what we're talking about when it comes to stress. So let's start with the myth, right? Spot reduction. So spot reduction is the idea that if I train a particular part of my body, I will get leaner in that part of my body. Now you can spot build, which is very different. So I can spot build. I can build my quads. I can build the muscles of my abs. I can build my glutes. But what I can't do is target body fat loss through exercise. In other words, I can't burn belly fat by doing tons and tons of crushes. There was a study medicine and science in sports and exercise. That's the place that did the study. Studied whether or not you could spot reduce and they found no. By the way, this echoes many, many studies that have been done on this topic. Then there was a study done in the Journal of American College of Cardiology. And what they looked at was, and I mentioned this at the beginning here, is they cut people's sleep way down. They sleep deprived them four hours. And here's what they found, an increase in body fat, in particular visceral body fat. Now that backs up what we're talking about. And one of the easiest ways to add a lot of stress on your body is to have crappy sleep. Like very easy. If you want to study stresses effects on the body, one of the easiest ways to do this kind of just point blank is let's just sleep deprived people. Because we know what that does. And it increased visceral body fat significantly in a very short period of time. All right, let's talk about the order of how you would attack this. Number one, let's build strength and build muscle. Feed the body so that it can build. Eat adequate protein. Upper limit of benefit, you're going to get about a gram of protein per pound of target body weight. So if your goal body weight's 130 pounds, this is kind of the target. You can be a little less than that, but that's the target. What that target says in the data is that this is the upper limit of benefit you're going to get from protein. This is where you get the best recovery, the best muscle growth, that kind of stuff. Don't eat too little. Make sure you feed your body. Stick to whole natural foods. We don't want to go crazy with overeating, but feed yourself. You want to have a moderate fat loss approach. So once you build some strength, build some muscle, you're eating more food, you feel good eating more food, then you can cut from there. And a small deficit is all you need. A very small deficit. It doesn't take that much that you have to reduce on the calorie side. And then in fact, my favorite way to create that deficit is just increasing activity throughout the day. Not scheduled cardio, not getting over on a treadmill and running for an hour, but just increasing your daily steps and activity. Whether that means you consistent with a 10 to 15 minute walk after every single meal, or you become the person that first thing when you wake up, you start your day with a little half hour walk, or you end your day with a nice half hour, hour walk, whatever it is, you just start to become more active through steps and like movement. That plus a small calorie reduction creates this nice calorie deficit with that new lean body mass that we built and leans you right out. And let's not forget, of course, you want to train appropriately, follow a traditional strength training program. For most people, I'm listening right now. It's three days a week, maybe even two more than that is typically not just not necessary, but tends to push people over the limit, especially if you're training with appropriate intensity. But let's talk about the number one thing that helps with stress management, which is sleep. Yeah. Okay. Aim for a nice seven to nine hours of sleep every single night. Make sure you go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time. This right here, the resilience of your body to stress dramatically, just that one piece right there. This is where you build everything. This is where you're going to build that lean muscle tissue. The point earlier to that with your strength training, make sure you don't skip your rest periods because this is all strength focused right now. We're building. And so to build muscle, we need to go through that process. We need to feed it adequately. And then we need to recover. And recovery is where all the magic happens. Yeah. And you talked about rest periods and building. Like I said, you can't spot reduce, but you can spot build. Yeah. If you want a midsection, uh, that where you could see the outline of some of your muscles where when you look at your midsection, it's not just flat, but you've got some defined, got a little bit definition, build those muscles, train your abs and obliques. Like you're trying to build them. This is with sufficient resistance. The reps are 12. They're hard. You're not doing 50, 60, a hundred reps. Those rep ranges tend to not build a muscle, but the 10, 12, 15 rep range, even as low as six reps that builds muscle. So train your core, uh, with the intention of building the muscles that are there. I can't stress the sleep thing that you guys are mentioning because it's, it's the thing that will dictate whether this is a success or not. I don't care how good your programming is. I don't care how good your diet is. If your sleep is trash, your body just does not respond the way it is. And like Justin said, like you do, you're not building the muscle when you lift weights, when you train your abs, you're not doing it there. That's just another stress signal that tells the body to adapt and build the muscle. If you don't let it recover, rest and fuel properly, it's not going to do that. And so with so many of my clients, like we have to put a focus on the sleep, no different than you would with your morning routine. You have to have a routine with, and different people have different things that work really well for them. Whether that be sitting down and having your chamomile tea before you go to bed or making sure you shut off all technology by six o'clock or having an earlier dinner than you usually would, whatever it is, you've got to have some sort of consistency and routine going to bed at the same time, getting up, especially as we get older. I think it's important no matter what, what your age is, but man, as, as we age, this becomes paramount, paramount in the success that you'll have on this. All right. So when you look at the studies on things like belly fat, visceral belly fat, and of course the belly fat that's outside of the muscle, here's what the studies show. It's a combination of appropriate exercise, a whole food based diet tend to work best. High protein tends to work even better and get good sleep. Okay. Make sure you get good sleep and you manage, uh, that stress when you combine those things over time. Uh, you get leaner in particular with visceral fat and belly fat. Remember more muscle or stronger muscle handles blood sugar better. It tends to improve or increase androgen receptor density. This means that testosterone that you have in your body. And yes, ladies, you have testosterone in your body. Just like men do just lower. You need that testosterone just like guys do more androgen receptors, uh, means that your testosterone becomes more effective. So now you're more in a building state in a burning state. Testosterone tends to do those two things. So by building muscle, you kind of, you kind of cause this like positive feedback loop. I'm building muscle, burn more body fat, build muscle. The fat loss becomes easier. Hormones start to balance. I feel amazing. Make sure your protein intake is high. Do what's called a reverse diet. In other words, fuel the muscle growth. Don't go into a deficit right out the gates, eat a little more, stick to whole natural foods so you can get stronger, build that muscle. Once that starts to build up, you go in a small deficit just enough to cause some loss, but to preserve muscle, make sure your daily activity is high. Monitoring steps is the best way to do it, right? Eight to 10,000 steps a day. Get, you know, seven to nine hours of sleep, make that consistent, um, and then train your muscles to get stronger. Um, and that's really the recipe. Yeah. Train all muscles. Give you a little bit more, uh, advice around the reverse diet because I feel like that's where most people have questions of how many calories and what does that look like? It's like a general rule that's worked so well for so many of our clients is if you are sticking to whole foods and you're eating the protein first, then if you are hungry feed, I tell my clients, if you are, if we're, we are strength training, like we're talking about, if you're eating whole foods and you're eating your protein first and you're still find yourself hungry, that is a great sign. That means our body is telling us it wants to build muscle. The metabolism is speeding up. I don't want to deprive that yet. I want to fuel that. And if you fuel it with those types of meals, you'll be fine where you'll have a hard time is two things. Either one, you resist that feeling and you, and you hold back and you don't. So then we don't allow our body to get the nutrients it needs to build the muscle it needs or you make bad choices and you go eat something that's out of bounds or you binge because maybe you, you resist that for a day or two, and then it gets so ravenous. You go out of control and that's typically what happens to somebody is they feel that feeling and they feel the guilt of, Oh, I can't eat. I'm not supposed to eat anymore. And so they don't. And then they allowed that to build up and then it gets uncontrollable. And then they go way over the top of that versus that's your body trying to tell you it needs more nutrients, more fuel, feed it, but feed it properly. That's right. Okay. So here's what this looks like. Now, number one, and this is very important for people watching and listening to understand visual changes, take time. Okay. Changes that you can see in the mirror. You got to give it at least 12 weeks, give it at least 12 weeks. That being said, there are things that show up sooner that tell you you're moving in the right direction. In other words, there's signs that'll tell you going the right direction, keep moving this direction. And here's what they look like. if you're managing your sleep properly and you're stressed properly and you're doing proper strength training and feeding yourself properly right out the gates you'll feel better so pretty quickly you'll start to feel good and strength will go up strength takes about a week or two to show up so by week two you'll notice the weight on the bar is going up you're doing more reps you're moving in the right direction if you continue to feel better you continue to get stronger give it 12 weeks it'll show up in the mirror don't ignore these signals we get so caught up in the mirror in the scale yet we see things like energy mood sleep libido skin hair like all these things are improving but because we haven't seen enough movement on the scale or enough movement in the mirror we think it's not working we think it's not working yet all these other signs are pointing us in the direction that our body is getting healthier our body is getting stronger lean into that it does take time it takes a little bit of time for it to really start to accelerate and speed up and show you those results stick with the process all right so there's two questions that we always tend to get like number one is can you lose belly fat without cardio the answer is yes yes yes in fact one of the most effective ways to lose belly fat is through strength training strength training preserves muscle and helps you burn body fat cardiovascular activity is actually less effective than strength training for this now that's not to say cardio doesn't play a role or doesn't have a role in any of this or that it's bad but yes you could definitely burn body fat without cardio we do it all the time another question we ask okay well how long is this going to take how long is it going to take for me to see my belly fat go down you got to give it at least 12 weeks everybody 12 weeks of consistency before you see something in the mirror and you really notice stay patient pay attention to all the signs that adam said i feel better got more energy i'm getting stronger libido is going up that means you're moving in the right direction it's a snowball effect it starts off very small but it starts to build and it builds momentum but you're moving in the right direction it's a snowball effect it starts off very small but it builds momentum and don't don't correct course correct early like so many people do because they're not seeing fast enough results keep paying attention to those signs stick with it i want to talk about one of our most recent live callers we have a lot of callers uh that fit this avatar but we just had one recently this was a woman who was working out five to six days a week she was also doing cardio on top of her workouts she was limiting carbohydrates she was eating very very low carbohydrates and very low calories circuit training circuit training like crazy and she was one of the first episodes that i listened to you spoke to a listener who was trying to get her cycle back you spoke with her about the importance of reducing training volume and eating more calories so that her body could feel safe again i felt like i had nothing to lose so i gave up my daily cardio and intermittent fasting and purchased maps anabolic and focused on daily steps taking rest breaks between sets i also started intentionally eating more calories and carbohydrates on a daily basis i was able to get pregnant naturally with my son who is now three years old and i also have a one-year-old daughter wonderful beautiful thank you from the bottom of my heart my kids are my entire world and i'm not sure i'd have them today without your advice i am 32 years old 5 10 160 pounds i average 10 000 to 11 000 steps per day i enjoy lifting weights and i've really enjoyed your maps 15 style workouts because i like getting up every morning and moving my body before my kids my husband encouraged me to reach out to you over the last few years i have watched him completely transform his body through reverse dieting and running your maps programs just preparing for the call i've been tracking over the last few weeks so that way i could give you guys some more specific numbers um so i have been averaging 2700 calories per day and i've been hitting 160 grams of protein every day i would like to lean out my midsection as this is where i have always carried my weight even before kids like to gain more muscle specifically in the glutes and legs i realize that these are contradicting goals since postpartum i have worked my way up to a 200 pound deadlift a 145 pound squat and 105 pound bench press i'm currently feeling somewhat stalled and i was a little bit stronger than this prior to having kids i want to be a strong healthy and confident mom for my kids i want to be an example of a healthy relationship with nutrition and exercise while also feeling more confident in myself thank you so much for your time and everything you do now her challenge at that time was not i want to get leaner i want to look different although that was always her challenge it was about eight to ten pounds she said she could never get off but she needed to improve her fertility she was trying to have a baby she listened to one of our podcasts about eating more reducing stress so there was a caller that we had on that actually had a similar question about fertility we told her to eat more do less exercise and then boom she got pregnant so she listened to that episode applied those strategies which by the way i'm not the same strategies uh that would have helped her lose eight to ten pounds she did she got pregnant fell in love with the process continued down that path here she is now okay two kids later her youngest is 15 months old she's eating 2700 calories a day this woman's 150 pound woman nor fit lean 2700 calories a day she's lifting weights for about 15 minutes a day she's following maps 15 which is wild it's one of our lowest volume programs feels amazing and she's like i can't believe this actually worked uh and that's because uh you know obviously every time people believe uh that's not going to work but when you try it watch what happens by the way if you're listening what have you got to lose you've already been doing it the wrong way nothing's happening try now try this try so what we did is we built a program that does the real work now it's called maps abs and butt now it is a full body workout program so you do train the whole body but most of the training volume most of the focus is on the abs and on the butt so you still work the shoulders the arms the back the chest the lower back the lower back the upper back the lower back the chest but most of the training is focused on abs and butt and it's designed to give you the glutes that you want give you the abs that you want and you and it's also designed and it comes with a guide on teaching you how to eat to fuel and feed all of this so the program's maps abs and butt it's a brand new program because it's brand new it's at discount it's 40 off and then what we did is because the program itself obviously it's a three-month program and then what do you follow up with we included for free our other popular program muscle mommy 15 or muscle mommy so you get that for free so you can follow it up with another three months of workout programming a little bit more volume you've scaled things up now so you get maps abs and butt you get muscle mommy 15 or muscle mommy plus you get a couple guides one of them talks about your diet how to fuel all of this how to feed that muscle another one talks about the supplements that might be helpful although i will be honest supplements make up like five percent of all of this so don't get excited it's diet exercise and sleep but the workout part of it you get the exercises you get the demos of what to do the sets reps the whole thing is mapped out it's at maps abs and butt.com the code is launched for the discount and all the free stuff this is one of the first programs that we've ever given another program for free to follow it up with that we recommend and part of that reason is is we've talked about how important it is to fuel the body feed the body what you need when trying to build your butt build your abs and so the idea is that as you go through this program you actually do it in a reverse diet fueling the body and you save the second program for the cut where you start to reduce calories if we do this correctly we're going to build metabolism you'll probably see a recomp during that process too in other words you'll start to see yourself build muscle lean out a little bit but the main focus is to build as you run through the first program and the second program is where you think about starting to reduce calories hit your protein intake eat whole natural foods feed yourself when you're hungry follow maps abs and butt watch yourself get stronger pretty soon by week two you'll see strength gains by week two you'll feel the energy improvement you'll feel the mood improvement you know you're moving in the right direction give it a few months watch what happens follow it up with the cut with the free program muscle mommy 15 or muscle mommy watch what happens to your body it's maps abs and butt calm thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted rgb super bundle at mindpumpmedia.com it's maps anabolic maps performance and maps aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by sal adam and justin to systematically transform the way your body looks feels and performs with detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos the rgb super bundle is like having sal adam and justin as your own personal trainers but at a fraction of the price the rgb super bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com if you enjoy this show please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on itunes and by introducing mind pump to your friends and family we thank you for your support and until next time this is mind pump