Philip Pape: 0:00

Raise your hand if you've got a little belly fat you want to lose. You've gained some belly fat with age. You're frustrated because things like restricting calories and exercise aren't really working anymore. This episode is for you, because belly fat isn't about eating less food. It's not about doing more ab exercises. There are actually seven root causes that drive fat to your midsection, and most of them have nothing to do with what you're eating or how you're training. Today, I'm breaking down each cause, from stress to sleep, to hormones and more, and giving you specific solutions that actually work to finally drop that belly fat.

Philip Pape: 0:49

Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're going to expose why belly fat accumulates in the first place and what you can actually do about it. I keep hearing from people who say they're doing everything right with their nutrition, they're training consistently, but they're still carrying stubborn fat around their midsection. They're frustrated because the conventional path doesn't seem to work. Even if they've dropped some body fat, there's still that extra little bulge in the midsection. And then, when I ask what they've tried, it's always the same things. I've tried going even harder on the diet. Maybe I've added some cardio. Maybe I've added it's always the same things. I've tried going even harder on the diet. Maybe I've added some cardio. Maybe I've added some, you know, resistance training in the ab area, including loaded ab work, which I highly recommend.

Philip Pape: 1:33

But it doesn't necessarily address the root cause, and today I wanted to walk you through what those are. I wanted to walk you through seven root causes of belly fat accumulation, just to get a better understanding of where this all comes from and why it tends to change and increase with age and with menopause and with all of these other factors. We're gonna talk about things like stress and sleep and hormones, of course, but we also are gonna understand the physiological mechanisms. And then, how do we counteract them and what is your biggest constraint? What is the thing that you want to do to get very specific and intentional for the cause that makes the most sense for you, so you can start seeing progress? The one thing I'm not going to cover today is genetics. Honestly, I was going to have it on the list and I thought, well, you can't really change your genetics and there are different body types and shapes and people hold fat in different areas. I really wanted to focus on the things you can completely control today. So let's start with understanding why our general understanding and discussion on social media about belly fat is kind of incomplete.

Philip Pape: 2:38

I hear a lot of, I'll say, newer coaches or maybe less informed people saying that belly fat is purely about energy balance and body fat like any other fat, and unfortunately that's not the case. I've seen it firsthand, I've experienced it myself, being a guy in my 40s, and it isn't just this linear thing like, okay, do all the other things right and the belly fat's going to come off Not necessarily. So what do those look like? Well, eating more nutritiously, eating fewer calories If you're trying to go into a deficit, maybe you know moving more, moving more in the right way, doing your training, all of that and it's going to slowly disappear as you drop body fat. And, on one hand, absolutely those are the things you want to be doing to drop body fat in general, which is great for your health. Obviously, it supports your physique, for your hormones, everything else, but it's only part of the equation.

Philip Pape: 3:26

Belly fat Okay, this is visceral fat around your organs, as well as the subcutaneous fat under your skin. Okay, I want to make sure we cover both right. The visceral fat is the more dangerous fat, but subcutaneous fat is also visible and we don't all like that. For if we're trying to get leaner, stronger, fitter and we have to have the, we want to have that physique that represents that we are a lifter, we are somebody who's fit, and so both types of fat are going to respond to many, many factors hormonal, metabolic lifestyle because your body doesn't just store fat randomly, it makes, I'll say, strategic decisions. I mean I mean it's passive, it's based on what your body is just doing on its own, based on your stress levels, based on your sleep quality, based on the balance between your hormones, based on your daily movement. And when any of these factors are off, your body will preferentially store fat in your midsection.

Philip Pape: 4:21

This is a body fat distribution problem primarily, and no amount of ab crunches, no amount of calorie restriction is going to fix it if you're not addressing the root causes. And I know this because I've seen people who go on pretty aggressive deficits and actually lose a lot of weight or body fat and they're at a quite lean, almost sickly or dangerously so level and they still have a little bit of extra fat on their belly fat body in their belly area. Now, I don't want to confuse this with people who have body image issues or dysfunction. In that case, that's outside my scope. If you're dealing with body dysmorphia or any of those issues or come from the physique competitor world, again that's outside today's scope. You might have different issues to work through.

Philip Pape: 5:06

Today we're gonna work through just what are the basic seven causes, systematically, of excess belly fat, why they matter, what's happening in your body and then what you can do about it. All right, root cause number one is the big one chronic stress and elevated cortisol. Let's start with this, because this is the I don't know if it's still overlooked, but most under addressed factor in belly fat that people maybe want to put their head in the sand about or not sure exactly how to address it. Or they kind of throw up their hands and say, well, my life is busy, it's crazy, I'm a parent, I'm a exec, whatever. Nothing I can do about it. And that's not true when you're chronically stressed, whether it is from work, relationships, finances or even, yes, under eating and overtraining.

Philip Pape: 5:48

Your body releases cortisol. Now, cortisol, as I said many times recently, it's not a bad thing. It's part of the cascade of hormones in your body. It's a signaling messenger. It is your stress hormone and in the short term it is actually protective. We need to have stress sometimes to protect ourselves. It mobilizes energy. It helps you deal with threats right the fight or flight. But when it stays elevated, you're just back to back to back, keeping that sucker pumped up for weeks or months. It tells your body to store fat centrally, and this is actually part of its protective mechanism, taken to an extreme. So where does it store it? Around your abdomen. This is an evolutionary response. Your body thinks resources are scarce or you're under threat, so it protects the vital organs by padding them with readily available energy. It happens even if you're in a calorie deficit.

Philip Pape: 6:46

Elevated cortisol can make it pretty close to impossible to lose belly fat, even if you're in a deficit, regardless of how much you're eating or exercising, because of the stress component. And I don't have to tell you that stress well, maybe I do have to tell you. Stress impacts just about everything we're trying to do here with body composition. It affects your metabolism as well. So it's a vicious cascade where you often then have to eat less and less just to try to maintain your deficit. So we don't want that. So what do we do about this? Now here's where you know the hook of the episode is without dieting or exercise.

Philip Pape: 7:16

The premise if you're listening to Wits and Weights always is that you are resistance training, no matter what. To me, exercise is excessive cardio, it's running. It's doing more than you need to. It's exercising inefficiently. It doesn't mean you need to be sedentary. I'm not advocating for that as well. What I'm suggesting is doing more exercise or more of the wrong type of movement isn't going to help your belly fat situation, but having the foundations in place is going to help.

Philip Pape: 7:45

So first, we do have strength training. That is worth mentioning. You know, progressive overload resistance training. This builds resilience. This builds resilience in your body to all sorts of things. Insulin resistance is one of them, but stress is another, because it improves your body's stress response and the recovery capacity. Sound familiar because it improves your body's stress response and the recovery capacity. Sound familiar If you have listened to the podcast of the past few weeks.

Philip Pape: 8:08

I've been covering these topics a lot recently stress and recovery and sleep because they are so important and I think I didn't give them enough attention in the past. Strength training is also a structured outlet for physical stress that your body can adapt to. It is anabolic. It's kind of like sprinting Very efficient, very anabolic, very helpful. Walking very anabolic, very efficient, very helpful. Running no, very injurious causes high stress response. You know 90% of people don't know how to do it right, so it causes injury right For the 10% of you that do good on you. You know you're the exception to the rule in society. So strength training is definitely number one and that's going to be a common thread throughout the episode. To be honest, that affects all of these.

Philip Pape: 8:50

Secondly is mindful stress reduction. Now, this does not mean that you have to meditate for an hour every day. I personally don't like meditating, but I will find some time to disengage. I will find some time five minutes even to do box breathing. You all have apps on your phone. The irony is that, as much as we are stressed because we're using our smartphones, there are some helpful tools like the Breathe app on the iPhone, and there's lots of famous apps out there that help you with breathing. And I'm actually developing a brand new fitness app that, for sure, is gonna have elements of this built in to help you develop those skills, but something simple like taking walks outside without your phone. And I know I say, hey, listen to your podcast while you walk. It's a great stack, but also walk without your phone, just enjoy what you see around you.

Philip Pape: 9:38

We saw a comic in the paper yeah, the physical paper. My girls like to read the comics and I forget which comic it was. But there was a grandmother walking with her grandson out in the woods and you had a deer and birds and chipmunk squirrels, you had all this great flowers and everything, and he was on his phone. And she said can you, you know, put up, put down the phone and look at what's around you? And he said, well, I'm going to miss all the cool stuff, right? The big irony that there is so much in nature to bring you, let alone the vitamin D and the relaxation and the mindfulness and the reduction in stress. What else can you do? You can journal. A lot of people love journaling in so many different ways literally just writing down your thoughts for five or 10 minutes before bed or during earlier in the day to process your day and help kind of dump it out of your brain onto a piece of paper, and that might actually help you let go of some things before you go to bed.

Philip Pape: 10:32

The third element here of stress, of reducing it, is having consistency in your daily routine. I can't stress, pun intended, this enough. Your body craves predictability. When you eat, when you sleep, when you train, do them at roughly the same times every day. You do them and then your cortisol will naturally regulate itself. So the bottom line here is that stress management isn't just mental health advice, although it's huge for your mental health. It also then directly affects your fat loss strategy and your cortisol and thus your belly fat.

Philip Pape: 11:09

All right, root cause number two, so one, was stress. Number two is, of course, you know what it's gonna be. It's the other S word. It's sleep, poor sleep quality and sleep restriction. And this again is the other big underestimated lever for losing body fat. When you don't get enough sleep or when your sleep quality is poor, you've got those hunger hormones that get ramped up or disrupted. I should say Ghrelin, the thing that signals hunger goes up, leptin signals fullness goes down. Right, I've said this many times. Plus, there's other hormones, like GLP-1, that get affected, and so you're hungrier throughout the day. You're less satisfied. When you do eat, you're like okay, what does that have to do with belly fat. Well, sleep deprivation raises insulin resistance. Your cells become less responsive to insulin, so your body secretes more to compensate. And guess what? Chronically elevated insulin, in addition to cortisol, is one of the primary drivers of belly fat storage. People who consistently sleep less than seven hours a night have significantly more visceral fat than those who sleep enough. Even when controlling for diet and exercise, obviously it gets worse when you're packing on the pounds and a calorie surplus an uncontrolled surplus, I should say. But even when you're not, or even when you're dieting, even when you're at a deficit, you could potentially, whatever fat you do store or distribute, you might distribute preferentially toward belly fat because you're chronically underslept.

Philip Pape: 12:31

And I want to add one extra thing. I was reading Scientific American this week and there's a really cool article about the. I think it's called the glymphatic system. It's your cerebral spinal fluid. It's this fluid that basically washes over your brain and takes waste away, and it actually becomes more efficient and is used properly when you get enough sleep, because it happens only in certain stages I believe it's deep sleep, but it's often later in the night and they found that these brainwaves correlate to the fluid pulsing through and cleaning things out, and that could potentially affect everything related to your health and cognition.

Philip Pape: 13:13

Sleep is so important. I was talking to my wife this week and we're like honey yes, honey, we need to get to bed in the time we're trying to get to bed. And, by the way, no TVs, no phones. Let's agree to kind of hold each other accountable and just relax into that bedtime ritual and then go to bed. And, by the way, no TVs, no phones. Let's agree to kind of hold each other accountable and just relax into that bedtime ritual and then go to sleep and get. You know that extra half hour can make such a huge difference. Right, and the consistency is important too. Even when I'm a little bit deprived with sleep let's say I'm getting six and a half hours for a week or two, as long as I'm going to bed and waking up at the same time. My deep sleep and REM sleep are still surprisingly high. But as soon as I get a night that's interrupted and that could even be in the other direction, like sleeping an extra hour on the weekends all of a sudden my deep and REM sleep the next night or that night is cut short. You can see this in the numbers.

Philip Pape: 13:59

So getting enough sleep is important. It has to be restorative, it has to be quality sleep. You've got to have a bedtime routine the same wind down activities each night dimming the lights whenever you can before bed, putting on the blue blocking glasses, potentially wearing a sleep mask, keeping your bedroom dark, cool, quiet, limiting caffeine after 2 pm, minimizing screen exposure in the evening. You're like, ah, so many things to think about. Pick just one, pick just one. I think the blue light exposure is probably the big one for a lot of us, because we're on our screens or watching TV and blue light suppresses melatonin and that makes it harder to fall asleep. So you're just throwing everything off with your circadian rhythm. And then, I've mentioned in other episodes, training earlier in the day can be extremely beneficial to people. You know, late evening training can elevate your cortisol and your core body temperature, both of which interfere with sleep quality. All right.

Philip Pape: 14:52

Now one of the best investments I've made I talked about recently is my sheets, and I personally use sheets from Cozy Earth. They are derived from bamboo and I joked before another episode. So are my underwear, because you're going to hear this over and over, right, because it'd become an inside joke, but I love things to breathe. I sweat really easily. I get really hot and even in the winter actually even more so in the winter when you have the heat on I find and you know my wife's trying to get warm and get all the covers and I'm trying to stay cool that's where I get hot. So, like, let me let me tell you what my thing looks like Once I get into bed.

Philip Pape: 15:32

At worst I might read a book. I might read a book with an orange bulb, wearing orange, blue, blocking glasses for about half an hour Not too stressful of a book, although I was recently reading a Stephen King novel probably a bad idea right before bed and I just kind of let my mind unwind. If there's something on my mind bothering me, I'm going to reach over and just write it down or even even jot it in my phone, although I try to have something physical. And then I've got a sleep mask and I don't do anything for my ears, cause we live in a very quiet of woodsy area, but if you have street noise, you know putting something in your ear could help. You know I don't sleep with clothes on. Some people like to wear pajamas but even in the winter I get hot so I might have the fan on low. Remember, in the winter you go clockwise to actually spread the heat around, so then that doesn't make you as cool. When you turn it on, you get where I'm going. You have to think through all of these things. So then my sheets.

Philip Pape: 16:23

The most recent addition is these Cozy Earth sheets, because they're kind of silky, but not hot silky. They're actually very cool silky, I can't really describe it. They wick, kind of like gym clothes. That wicks away. You know, I sometimes wear cotton shirts when I use a barbell because the bar sticks better, but I get sweatier. So then I'm like, ah, I want to wear those wicking shirts instead, but then they're slippy, right Slippery. So imagine that kind of slipperiness and coolness in your bed. So that's why I love the Cozy Earth sheets. This ended up being kind of an ad, but I do support them.

Philip Pape: 16:52

If you go to witsandweightscom slash Cozy Earth, you can get 20% off with my code, witsandweights. So witsandweightscom dot com slash cozy earth for the bamboo sheets, because if you are serious about optimizing sleep, you've got to go through the checklist of constraints. We talked about this, the checklist of constraints, as a lever for fat loss, for belly fat, for cortisol, for recovery, and these are simple, tangible changes that you can make. All right, let's keep going through these. I've spent enough on sleep. I think you get the idea. Go to witsandweightscom slash cozy earth. Check out those sheets.

Philip Pape: 17:29

Root cause number three hormonal changes. Yes, this has to be on the list, especially estrogen, testosterone and thyroid. I would say this is particularly relevant for women going through perimenopause and menopause, and we just had Zora Ben-Umu on the podcast and she was in our Physique University doing a live Q&A. She talked about the menopause timeline starting as early as the mid-30s for some women, and so there might be an extended period here where the hormones start to decline. Then they start to go kind of haywire and then they decline again before finally hitting menopause and they've dropped, and this can affect belly fat massively. In fact, for many people it is the big driving cause. It also affects men with declining testosterone. It also affects anyone with thyroid dysfunction. There's lots of thyroid issues. Our assistant, my assistant coach, carol, shout out to you Carol in Physique University. She is a hormone expert and has personally dealt with Hashimoto's thyroiditis and understands how this affects your metabolic dial, which then cascades to everything else. We're going to talk about that in a second here.

Philip Pape: 18:38

Let's start with estrogen. When estrogen drops during menopause, the fat distribution shifts. I don't have to tell women this. You know this, you've heard about it or you've experienced it. Premenopausal women tend to store fat in their hips and thighs, whereas later in premenopause, into menopause, postmenopausal women store it more in their abdomen. You see a change in the anoid-gynoid ratio. You see a change into that different body shape, and this isn't necessarily about gaining more fat overall. That's what's important. It's about where the fat goes on your body.

Philip Pape: 19:11

I've had plenty of clients. I've worked with women in their 40s, for example, 40s and 50s, where we dial in all the things and they start to drop body fat and they start to get more muscular and lean and looking great, and yet they still have the belly fat. It almost becomes a little bit more pronounced, because now you see that that's the last trouble spot. If you will or I'll get people coming to me saying, look, I just have 10 pounds left and it's all in my belly. So if you can relate to this, that's what I'm talking about. Similarly, for men, low testosterone definitely leads to increased abdominal fat and decreased lean mass. Testosterone definitely leads to increased abdominal fat and decreased lean mass. Now there's a chicken and egg here, because if you're carrying extra body fat in general, it can also drop your testosterone, and that's a vicious cycle. But testosterone will naturally drop as well. And then thyroid dysfunction whether that's hypo or hyperthyroidism directly affects your metabolism and the pattern that your body stores fat in. Excuse me, the challenge here is that the hormonal shifts also make it harder to maintain muscle, right Cascades, we talk about the knock-on effects of things.

Philip Pape: 20:16

I recently talked about performance, blood work and how one cause can lead to multiple outcomes, and one outcome can be from multiple causes and you have to or one outcome could be from multiple causes and you have to kind of find out where the biggest of the lowest hanging fruit is. You think about muscle. It's your most metabolically active tissue, right? It burns a lot of calories, it's very active, and if you have less of it, it means you have a slower metabolism, easier fat gain. This also then contributes to your belly fat. So there is a body composition component for sure, and that's why it's good to do all the basics, no matter what, because they will give you a great foundation to figure out.

Philip Pape: 20:49

What is my remaining constraint on this list when it comes to belly fat that we want to get rid of? All right. So what do we do about the hormones? Well, you know what I'm going to say. We've already talked about strength training. Non-negotiable, it keeps your hormones as favorable as possible within the constraints of aging. Meaning everybody's going to have a different hormonal profile and women especially, are going to have those drops and those volatility among the different hormones that may, and almost likely will require at some point, hormone replacement therapy.

Philip Pape: 21:22

Right, bioidentical hormone therapy. I don't want to say that everybody has to have it. There are people, there are women in our group that I know, you know, have felt no difference across the ages. Would they be benefit? Would they benefit from HRT? Maybe, but they're not screaming to have it, whereas others are. Now there could be things that are non-symptomatic, like the belly fat, that maybe could be, you know, assisted by hormone therapy. And we're not even going to get into things like the GLP-1s today, which is probably another area ripe for study. When it comes to visceral fat and fat distribution, I don't think we have the data for it yet. There's a really good conversation with Karen Martell coming out soon where we actually got into some of that which is fascinating. So follow the podcast and catch that episode soon, on a Friday.

Philip Pape: 22:08

But strength training protects your muscle. It helps you build new muscle. It counteracts the hormones. It gives you anabolic hormone signaling growth factor, testosterone, which is hugely beneficial for men and women. It supports your thyroid. So that's training, fine. What about the other stuff? Protein we talked that to death, but it's worth bringing up again, especially if you're newer to the podcast. Getting sufficient protein is huge. It's huge, especially if you're impairing post menopause, believe it or not, aiming for that 0.71 gram per pound of body weight a day. Also, adding creatine, potentially. All of this just to support your performance in the gym, so that you can build and maintain the muscle mass, support recovery and to support your hormones.

Philip Pape: 22:49

And then the other piece here is hormone replacement therapy or even thyroid medication, whether it's desiccated, more natural thyroid, if that's enough for you, or synthetic versions of thyroid or other interventions that you should just not dismiss. Like, don't dismiss these options if you're struggling despite doing everything else right. You're doing all the things and still something's off. It's definitely worth getting it checked. If nothing else, right. Get your hormones checked, if nothing else. So hormones are really important.

Philip Pape: 23:19

It's really an entirely separate episode, potentially and actually, since I name-dropped Karen Martell, and it's really an entirely separate episode, potentially and actually, since I name dropped Karen Martell the episode she and I get into. What do we talk about precisely there? We're actually talking about menopausal hormone therapy, so it's more geared toward women, of course, but the idea applies to men as well. When it comes to TRT, get it checked. Guys, get it checked. I know some people, I know lots of guys that are on various levels of TRT. I can connect you with some people. There's some great people in the industry that deal with this in an objective, evidence-based way. So, again, don't dismiss any of these tools. If you need them once you've dialed in the basics, all right. That's number three hormones.

Philip Pape: 23:56

Root cause number four is insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia. So insulin, what is this? Insulin is your storage hormone. Again, when I talk hormones, there's no good or bad. There's how they are expressed, based on your behaviors, your lifestyle, your genetics, et cetera. So insulin is your storage hormone.

Philip Pape: 24:15

When you eat right, especially when you eat carbohydrates, all right. Carbohydrates, not good or bad. They're actually super beneficial actually. So I guess they are good. There's a lot of it depends there, right? So when you eat, especially carbs, your pancreas releases insulin to shuttle the glucose into your cells for energy or for storage, and I say it that way because you can immediately use it as energy or you can store it as fat.

Philip Pape: 24:42

When insulin is chronically elevated either because you're eating constantly throughout the day, right, and maybe you're in a surplus, or because your cells have become resistant to insulin signal I'm going to say these are two different things. There's reasons insulin can increase that are okay, that are fine, right. And your blood sugar, for example, as measured by blood sugar. And I talked all about this with Ben Zeal, who has type 1 diabetes, where he basically said look, if you're lifting weights, if you're walking and you're healthy and you don't have type 1 diabetes, you don't even have to worry about your blood sugar. And I know that's controversial in some spaces where blood sugar is everything blood sugar management and all this but honestly, it matters more when you've got deficiencies and we've got issues going on, because that is when you worry about fat storage, which again does come down to energy balance.

Philip Pape: 25:34

But there's a way to be metabolically efficient versus inefficient in terms of your metabolism, where you store fat and how sensitive or not you are to the insulin, and that's where I'm going here. Okay, it's not carbs make you fat. That is not where I'm going. In fact, if you lift weights, insulin is your friend. When it comes to carbs, because of the shuttling and storage mechanism, you pull them into your muscles, you pull them into glycogen, where you store and use them during your heavy training sessions and get the most out of them, and your muscles are like huge batteries or sinks for that glucose. But when we're talking about belly fat, especially liver fat and visceral fat, that is where insulin loves to store the excess, especially when you're insulin resistant. So you can have insulin resistance even when your fasting glucose looks normal.

Philip Pape: 26:25

I want to disconnect some of these concepts. And this is where it gets complicated. With blood work, your body is just secreting more insulin to keep the glucose in check. This is called hyperinsulinemia and it's actually a precursor to type 2 diabetes. So it's part of prediabetes.

Philip Pape: 26:42

I did a whole episode about how you can reverse or prevent pre-diabetes while eating carbs. You know, go check that out. If I remember, I will include a link in the show notes where we talk about all the lifestyle factors that really affect all of this. But number one on the list which you're going to notice a pattern here is, of course, strength training. And this is the cool thing, guys, is that you don't have to do any exotic exercise or running or cardio or anything, as long as you're lifting weights. You're going to bang out a lot of these root causes in terms of the first line of defense. Right Like you've got that out of the way as a constraint, now you can move to the next thing.

Philip Pape: 27:17

When you're lifting, your muscles become insulin sensitive. They pull the glucose out of your bloodstream without needing as much insulin. All right, that's the important thing here. The other huge thing for insulin is, of course, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Neat, neat is neat. We love neat.

Philip Pape: 27:35

Walking after meals Set a timer to stand and move. Twice an hour, every 30 minutes, move for two minutes. These small bouts of activity are going to trigger the glucose uptake without spiking the insulin. Right, it's kind of like unlocking. I think it has to do with calcium channels, don't quote me on that, but it's a signal, like many of these things. Sitting all day is a signal that's not good.

Philip Pape: 27:57

Moving a lot is a signal that tells your body to be more anabolic, more sensitive to insulin, to use all of these things and guess what To not store your fat in your belly. To not store your fat in your belly. The funny thing here is a lot of lifters I know who are eating properly and they're moving a lot, even when they're in a surplus, gaining weight. They gain more muscle that way and not as much fat, and they don't really gain any belly fat. You know, we all gain a little bit of the subcutaneous fat just because of general distribution, but being an active person who lifts weights significantly blunts that uptake so that you can be confident, even in a calorie surplus when you're gaining weight, that whatever fat you gain isn't gonna go, you know, shooting to your belly.

Philip Pape: 28:40

The other thing is when we talk about blood sugar and insulin, I do still believe it's important to have Pretty balanced meals, significant amount of fiber right, which you can't get on a carnivore diet. You can't get any fiber on a carnivore diet. I think fiber is so important for so many reasons Gut health, digestion, you know, your bowel movements, your gut microbiome, your and, of course, your stable blood sugar, which really comes more from balancing fats and carbs as well as the protein, and since you have to have protein anyway, might as well have them all together. Don't be eating one macro meals, you know. And if you have less blood sugar volatility, even if you are eating a lot like those guys, raise your hand and have to eat 4,000 calories, okay, it's fine. Don't worry about your insulin. As long as you're eating balanced meals and you're lifting weights and you're using it the way it's meant to be used, you're going to be good, all right.

Philip Pape: 29:30

So we are halfway through the seven root causes. We've covered stress and cortisol, we've covered sleep quality, hormonal changes, insulin resistance I guess more than halfway and each of these is creating a physiological environment where your body preferentially stores fat in your midsection. So now let's get to the remaining three causes numbers five, six and seven. Root cause number five is a sedentary lifestyle and low NEAT. Now, you might think I've kind of already covered this, but we just talked about insulin specifically and what you can do about it.

Philip Pape: 29:59

Now I'm talking about the direct impact beyond that of a sedentary lifestyle and not enough movement. Okay, and this isn't about exercise and running and cardio and working out or even training. Right, you can train six days a week and still be too sedentary. I see it all the time Guys who, or ladies who have a desk job and they have their training sessions and they're consistent, but then they get 3000 steps a day and you might it might sound crazy, but many of you probably can relate to that. You know, and you almost give yourself a pass because you're like well, I trained so I don't have to move as much.

Philip Pape: 30:32

Excuse me, because when you sit for extended periods, your body does a lot of things that are bad. Okay, a lot of signaling that you don't want. Your body suppresses enzymes, for example, that are called lipoprotein lipases, and these are responsible for pulling the fat out of your bloodstream and burning it. So you're actually slowing fat burning essentially right. And now your fat stays in circulation longer and eventually gets stored. You guessed it in your belly, All right. Now you might say, well, isn't it about energy balance? It is, but it's also about which energy systems your body is deciding to use and how your body is deciding to store the excess fat. And when you sit for too long, you're biasing it in the wrong direction, toward visceral belly fat. Studies show that sitting time is an independent risk factor for central obesity. That means, even if you train and exercise regularly, prolonged sitting is going to promote more belly fat accumulation.

Philip Pape: 31:31

Guys, this is such an easy thing to do. To not sit is actually a pretty easy step, you know, compared to going to a gym and training, it's easy, right. I want you to move for two minutes every 30 minutes, that's it, and make it purposeful. If you need to Walk to get water, walk to go to the bathroom, you know, go up and down the stairs, go take a phone call, whatever, like. Make it purposeful if you need to. But you know what's two minutes? It's nothing. Go on in a flash. Walking after meals is also huge. Having that 10-minute walk even is going to improve your glucose disposal, your enzyme activity. So these kind of tie together numbers four and five with the insulin and with the sedentary behavior. We've talked about strength training to death. But having a higher metabolic rate because you have more muscle mass is going to help you burn more calories in general. With that higher metabolism just put you a little further away from the. My body needs to store fat and so it's gonna store fat in belly mode, right? So your training session is important, but what you do the other 15 hours of the day, or sometimes 16 or 17,. It matters just as much, if not more, for losing belly fat.

Philip Pape: 32:39

All right, root cause number six is aging and sarcopenia. Now I mentioned. I wouldn't discuss genetics, and I also am not talking about just aging in and of itself. I'm talking about what comes with aging when you're not intervening, which you know where I'm going with this. Muscle loss that comes with aging is massive. Starting around age 30, you lose about 3% to 5% of your muscle mass per decade. For women I shouldn't say for women, men and women it could be up to 8%. Let's just put it that way. There's a lot of controversy and debate around okay, women in perimenopause actually lose, lose it faster and in some evidence suggests that that does happen. But it's also. There are also a lot of women that don't that kind of lose at the same rate. So I don't want to fear monger or or say something that isn't accurate, but it doesn't matter. You're losing a ton of muscle mass, no matter what. Okay. And muscle mass.

Philip Pape: 33:31

Less muscle mass means a slower metabolism, less glucose disposal, lower calorie burn, more fat storage, and so as you age, that alone is going to cause you to preferentially store fat in your midsection. We've already talked about lifting weights so many times today. But remember when you lift it has to be progressive. It has to be with heavier weights, more volume, greater intensity or difficulty over time. Some way that challenges you each time you go in the gym more than you did last time. Protein intake we've discussed it overlaps with this one as well. The older you get, generally, the more protein you need to stimulate muscle protein synthesis effectively, because we get a little less efficient with age. So you know bias toward higher protein as you age. We talked about potentially creatine supplementation. There's other nutrient supplementation that we didn't even get into.

Philip Pape: 34:18

But in general the goal isn't here to stop the clock on aging. You know literally it's to figuratively and functionally slow the aging process, primarily by focusing on muscle mass. Right, because that just makes aging so much harder on your body composition, your belly fat. Now, if you're already in your forties, fifties or sixties and you haven't been doing it well, start. There's a lot that gets reversed. There's a lot you can do and I've I've heard people call in, listeners and clients say, wow, it's. It's incredible how just the lifting weights part starts to shift that body fat distribution favorably and it even causes you to, you know, because you have more muscle mass, stretching out your subcutaneous fat. There's some physical benefits you know just from a physique perspective, that start to appear even when you don't change your body fat. Sometimes you have more body fat but you also have more muscle mass. It's kind of amazing, all right.

Philip Pape: 35:09

Root cause number seven I had to mention it, it's alcohol. Alcohol has several very important mechanisms that promote belly fat. Here's another. I'll call it an easy one, right, if you're. You know this is not addressing alcoholism or addiction per se. This is just social consumption of alcohol, which for many of you it's way too much of it and some would argue too much is more than zero, especially with the recent study that got buried effectively by the government.

Philip Pape: 35:37

Now that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I'm going to do an episode at some point about the alcohol health study. That was public you could Google it right now. You could see the study and it was basically prevented from being transferred into updated guidelines for how many drinks you can have a day before it becomes injurious, before it becomes a problem, and what they found is that more than one drink a day starts to have serious negative health consequences over time. It has a much higher correlation with all cause mortality. We used to think two is fine a day. Now we know it's barely one. If that, if you're, you know, smaller, petite female, whatever, maybe half drink a day, it starts to be not a great thing and that's that's over the longterm.

Philip Pape: 36:18

But even in the short term, alcohol definitely affects belly fat. Your body is going to prioritize metabolizing the alcohol over everything else when you drink it and so when you drink it, your fat oxidation temporarily is suspended, right. So the calories from alcohol get used instead and nothing else gets used. So I don't want to fear manga here and say that it's going to cause you to store even more body fat. It's still energy, it's still calories.

Philip Pape: 36:42

But your body has to burn those alcohol calories. First because it's a poison, it's a toxin and it needs to clear those out through your liver, right, our natural detox system. So that's one thing that's important, calories in general. But secondly, and probably more importantly for belly fat, is alcohol raises cortisol, it lowers testosterone, particularly in men, and these favor central fat storage. And then third is that it's not satisfying to drink alcohol in terms of your hunger. In fact, you probably end up eating more. You get munchies, you get hungry, right, you drink 150 calories from a light beer or whatever beer, and then you're hungry afterward. You know, comparing that to like if you had 150 calories of chicken breast, it's going to leave you full, right, it's simple satiety equation which causes you to eat more food and then store more. That way, again, that's energy balance, but it's still part of the equation.

Philip Pape: 37:31

So what do you do about this? Well, it's pretty straightforward here. You're going to cut the amount or the frequency of your alcohol and, wherever you are today, start there and shift. If you drink every night, take two nights off a week, right, I used to drink every night. I used to have a glass of red wine every night and then beer on the weekend, and then I switched to just beer on the weekend, and then I switched to one a weekend. Then I switched to non-alcoholic beer and now I might have one non-alcoholic beer every other week because I just don't desire any of it anymore. And even the non-alcoholic beer, it's more like, well, I'm kind of bored the desire for it, which is a good thing, because you don't need alcohol for anything. You don't need it to enjoy time with people. You don't need it for the flavor necessarily. You might say you do, but then when counteracted with the negatives, right. Anyway, you can hear where I'm going with this.

Philip Pape: 38:24

I think it's a great idea to try to reduce it, if not eliminate it. It's really your choice. It's gotta be personalized to you and where you are today. If you're having three drinks when you go out to eat tonight, have one or two. Make that a intentional plan, you know. Give yourself a post-it note, a reminder, something on the kitchen. Tell your accountability partner, your spouse, whatever, say, hey, I know, I like to drink. Just remind me that I'm going to have one and I'm going to have seltzer water or diet soda. For the rest, you know, and maybe I'm going to start with the water or the excuse me, the seltzer diet soda, just to kind of get the act of the drinking going with a non-alcoholic beverage Right.

Philip Pape: 39:13

And you can if you're, if you're drinking for you know, because it's relaxing or it calms you down, you know how many more things can do that without the side effects. I mean drink-wise, there's what I love is called what is it called? Cryo brew. It's brewed coffee, but you can have herbal tea, sparkling water, diet soda, and you can also do things reading before bed, you know, talking to your spouse. There's different ways to enjoy yourself without having to drink the enjoyment via alcohol, because for most of us it's just a habit, it's not something that you actually crave or want, and so you just work it through the behavior change process. So I'm going to actually mention one more thing If you strength train consistently, it actually offsets some of the drinking right, and if you eat well the rest of the week, it offsets it somewhat. And I don't want to say that as a license to drink. I just want to say that get the foundations in place regardless.

Philip Pape: 39:58

So if we bring this all together, we've covered seven root causes of belly fat storage that have nothing to do with just diet and exercise. It's chronic stress, poor sleep, hormone changes, insulin resistance, being sedentary, the sarcopenia that comes with aging and muscle loss or that is sarcopenia and alcohol intake. Now you could argue that, oh, alcohol is part of your diet and sedentary lifestyle is part of exercise. But I'm talking about not having to do chronic metronomic cardio, sweating it out type exercise to burn more calories just because you're trying to lose belly fat. You don't have to do crunches and a whole bunch of ab exercises to try to lose belly fat. It's not going to work. It's not going to work. Whatever evidence you've seen that spot reduction might be a thing, it's minuscule compared to just training in general, watching your energy intake and supporting these other things as needed, especially sleep and stress. And that creates the environment in your body where then fat storage preferentially happens in your midsection, when you're not doing any of these things right, or when you're doing a lot of these things that work against you. And so you have to find the solution. That is your biggest constraint right now. Right, not restricting calories more, not doing more ab exercises, but addressing the physiology that's driving fat to your belly in the first place.

Philip Pape: 41:13

Now a real health thing, a tangent I want to cover before we conclude about belly fat. It's not just cosmetic, right. Visceral fat around your organs is metabolically active and so it's inflammatory. It secretes inflammatory compounds, it disrupts your hormone signaling, it increases your risk of metabolic disease. It's a vicious cycle because the other things you're doing do those as well, but oftentimes they're happening because they're increasing the belly fat.

Philip Pape: 41:40

So when you can address the seven root causes, belly fat is often one of the first things that ends up going. I'm talking about the visceral fat, not necessarily subcutaneous fat, because it's the most metabolically active. It actually responds fastest when you improve your sleep or your stress management or your training. So it might feel like belly fat is stubborn, but it could be more responsive than you think and you might make faster progress than you think. But you've got to do it. You've got to take the action today. So those are the seven root causes of belly fat, and you might be doing all these things and you might still not be seeing the results.

Philip Pape: 42:17

If so, I think this is where another level of objective data can be helpful, and this is why I've partnered with Vitality Blueprint, so you can get performance blood work. All right, you can get a performance blood work analysis, where we're going to look at your hormones, your inflammation markers, your metabolic health, all of the things that affect what we talk about today and you might find that there's something that's not being addressed through something as simple as your nutrition. All right, and then we can get your biggest constraint and build a clear path forward. We don't want to guess. I definitely want you to do the things we talked about today lift weights, get your steps, dial in your sleep, your stress all the big pillars. But there are always layers on top of that, like the hormone replacement therapy, where you have to get a level deeper to get an answer.

Philip Pape: 43:03

So go to winsorweightscom slash bloodwork if you want that performance bloodwork analysis. It's a one-off thing where I put together a plan for you based on the results. You can hit me up with quite as many questions as you want. I'm effectively your coach in the short term, based on the data. It's performance analysis. It's not medical analysis. There's actually a medical person on staff who will also be looking at your bloodwork from a healthcare perspective. So go to witsandweightscom slash bloodwork if you want that today. And remember that losing belly fat it's not about just doing more of a deficit. It's not just about doing more ab stuff. It's root causes, so that you can get leaner, get stronger, get healthier and then drop that belly fat. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember that the strongest version of you is waiting on the other side. I'm Philip Pape and this is Wits and Weights. I'll talk to you next time.