The 5 Things Stopping You From Losing Visceral Fat | Dr. William Li

today we're going to talk about five things that are stopping you from losing visceral fat visceral fat is a kind of fat that is deep inside your body in your abdominal cavity deep in your belly and a little bit is normal about 10% of your total body fat should be visceral fat and it's healthy but a lot of it is very very dangerous and the first thing that keeps you from losing visceral fat is overeating now visceral fat expands naturally when you consume too many calories your body fat visceral fat is a place to store

energy and so when you overeat all those calories go in they get stored into your body fat including your visceral fat and this is true whether you're eating junk food or healthy food overload of calories is very very harmful that's right you can even overeat healthy food you know Whole Foods including fruits and vegetables nuts and legumes and seeds healthy oils Seafood that's right overeating healthy food is also not good for you but what's worse is overeating junk food especially Ultra posess Foods it's much much worse because now you're putting so-called empty calories into your

body you get the energy but you don't get any of the polyphenols or the dietary fiber that Whole Foods actually give you so step number one if you want to lose visceral fat do not overeat now how do you do this how do you avoid overeating well I'm going to give you three practical tips tip number one take smaller portions when you're putting food onto your plate right it's up to you you get the food you're taking the spoon or Fork on and putting on your plate keep about 2/3 of the plate empty all right

lots of white space number two never feel like you have to clean your plate you know that old saying about The Clean Plate Club and there were starving people in every part of the world look quit that club that came during World War I and then world War II as a way of actually trying to save food for the troops today there's too much food there's overabundance of food and when you get it on your plate okay don't you shouldn't put it on yourself but if somebody else puts it on for you don't feel obliged

to finish it all right there's a good chance if you do that you're just going to go overeat all right and that will make it hard to lose visceral fat and the third tip about not overeating is to follow the old confusion rule that's called Hara haachi bun har is a Japanese saying from the confusion principle of stopping your food stop eating when you're 80% full all right well how do you do this you say like I don't know how to do 80% well if you eat slowly and you get in touch with your own

body by eating slowly your stomach will actually fill when it gets close to that 80% Mark it's going to be releasing a hormone called leptin it's going to go to your brain brain and it's going to Signal your brain hey slow down we are getting full so this will allow you by slowing down eating and by being in touch with your body to know when your hunger has been satisfied but you're not full right most of the time we are kind of conditioned to eat until we're really full and then we take it a few

steps extra and now we're uncomfortably full we're stuffed no don't do that just eat slowly until your brain signals to you that me you know we're actually done that's about 80% full before I tell you the second thing that keeps you from losing visceral fat let's talk about why you want to lose visceral fat visceral fat is located deep inside your body okay and when visceral fat grows it can be highly inflammatory and that's the last thing you want in your body is a chunk of fat that is inflamed now this fat expands when you

overeat and as it expands inside your belly cavity it can wrap itself around around your organs like a baseball glove and what it does is it compresses them and inflammation from the fat itself bleeds over into the organs and that's not what you want that can cause organ damage and the more the visal fat grows the more highly inflamed it actually becomes and the reason that that happens is because healthy fat like any kind of fat requires uh uh any kind of tissue in fact requires a blood supply in order to stay alive right living

tissue requires circulation oxygen and nutrients it needs a blood vessel system and when visceral fat also has this blood vessel system but if it grows too fast all right uh and it outstrips its blood supply the center of it actually becomes starved of oxygen that's called hypoxia and when tissues in your body are starved of oxygen they become a hypoxic guess what happens they become inflamed and so that's why rapidly growing visceral fat that occurs when you overeat okay rapidly expands becomes hypoxic in the middle and that actually triggers inflammation now inflammatory excess visceral fat

is one of the most dangerous things that you can have in your body it's a setup for type 2 diabetes it's a setup for many different kinds of cancer for heart disease and even dementia there's a lot of research that links excess visceral fat with all these chronic diseases so you want to avoid excess visceral fat now how do you know if you have too much well to measure it you actually need to have get a scan called it a dexa scan or a dual energy X-Ray absorptiometry Scan dexa and this scan measures the different

types of tissue in your body your bone your muscle your fat okay and it tells you where that tissue is located how much of it there is so from research has already been done we know that your body has normal healthy fat and of that fat only 10% of it should be visceral fat that's what you need to actually survive but when you start exceeding that amount all right your belly is going to bulge and when you see somebody with a beer gut that's because a lot of that visceral fat inside the cavity of the

belly has been growing growing growing and it pushes out the belly from the inside out all right it's like pregnancy with a mound of fat and if you can't get a dexas scan an easy way to assess whether you're gaining visceral fat is really check your belt size your waist size because when visceral fat grows it actually expands your waist circumference all right that's the uh the the the length around your waist and your belt size you're going to need bigger pants you're going to need bigger clothes and your belt loop is going to actually

get um loosened up all right so if you need to expand your belt or you need bigger clothes you're probably growing visceral fat you don't even need to go into scale to take a look at that a second thing that stops you from losing visceral fat is midnight snacking now this is very common right you finish your dinner sit on a couch to read or watch television or whatever you do and then you reach out and grab a snack and you just start snacking on it uh and eating it all night long okay uh or

maybe you just go get a bite to eat before you go to bed well all that last bit of food before sleep or after dinner interferes with your body's natural ability to burn down visceral fat which occurs when you are asleep the thing though is that your your body will only burn on visceral fat when your insulin levels are low so as long as you're putting food in your mouth okay you're putting in Sugar you're putting in carbs your insulin is going to rise to be able to take in that energy and that's going to

interfere with your body's time it has overnight to be able to reduce visceral fat because it once you eat let's say you get a midnight snack all right right before bedtime boom now your insulin goes up it takes a little while for that insulin to come back down and as as long as that insulin is up your body's not going to be burning viseral fat so you've lost time all right so that's why eating a late night snack cuts into the time that you're burning down the amount of visceral fat so you're missing out on

the game all right a third thing that keeps you from burning visceral fat is being sedentary all right you know what that means Couch Potato right and here's the thing moving your body Burns energy burns calories and move Burns visceral fat now you don't need to join a gym or have a trainer just even taking a 30-minute walk at any point in the day and I suggest after dinner okay can be really helpful and look if it's raining outside you don't have to go outside you can walk around your house if you're an apartment you

can even walk stairs it's the physical activity that counts all right now it's even better if you do work out because you're going to burn even more calories when you're exercising much more than when you're walking but walking is is fine and it's a great start and anybody who says I can't exercise or you have trouble exercising don't worry just go walking that's a good start now living a couch potato lifestyle is guaranteed to stop you from burning excess harmful inflammatory viscal fat so here's a little tip if you need some motivation to move or

to exercise or go for a walk here's what I suggest call up a friend do it with a friend or a family member or a partner in order to make your movement social that way you're getting something out of it and so is somebody else and you're helping their health as well now a fourth thing that keeps you from losing visceral fat is eating ultr processed foods this might seem like a no-brainer right because ultr processed foods contain added sugar unhealthy fats artificial preservatives and colorings and flavorings all the things that interfere with a healthy

metabolism right and you're and you need a healthy metabolism to burn down visceral fat so when you have Ultra processed foods it damages your gut microbiome which you need for your metabolism and your gut microbiome also lowers inflammation so now you're if you damage eup microbiome now your inflammatory levels are going to go up in your body the other thing you should realize is that Ultra processed foods um are really easy to overeat remember I told you that's the first thing you don't want to do is overeat and that's because many Ultra processed foods are

engineered designed to make you crave eating a lot of it it's engineered for your brain to rea respond to The Taste and the flavor okay to want to eat a lot of it if you overindulge in those Ultra processed foods not only you loading up on too many extra calories but you're also loading up on all those other harmful additives that are actually going to interfere with your body's ability to burn visceral fat okay so what do you do instead well what I recommend is that you eat healthy plant-based Whole Foods as your primary source

of foods because the polyphenol the fiber that you're going to actually get is going to be from those whole foods are going to fuel your metabolism and feed your gut microbiome that's what sets you up for burning down visceral fat so cut down or cut out eating Ultra processed food hey just something real quick if you're enjoying this video then you'll want to check out my free guide on burning down body fat unlike the huge amounts of weight loss at fat diets promise my free guide shows that healthy weight loss is realistic achievable and sustainable

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body it's actually true 8 hours gives your body plenty of time to use that sleep time to shift your metabolism into a gear to burn down harmful inflammatory visceral fat extra calories anything else that your body doesn't need you yes you actually burn down fat while you are actually sleeping all right now the key thing is that this burning down a versal fat only happens when you're actually having quality sleep so interrupted sleep poor quality sleep waking up every few hours interrupts your body's metabolic process um uh what you really want is deep rim sleep

you know the kind where you're dreaming so what are the things that help you get good quality sleep all right and what are the things you want to stay away from well if you eat moderately you'll be more likely to sleep well overeating interferes with your sleep you know that being stuffed after a holiday makes it hard to sleep um later on and if you actually want to exercise that actually that physical movement actually helps you sleep better as well now here is one little Health tip that you should know about you might be actually

having difficulty getting quality sleep if you snore at night so if your bed partner tells you that you're snoring you might want to get it checked out by a doctor because the reason that you're snoring might be interfering with your quality sleep and might therefore be interfering with your body's ability to be able to burn down harmful visceral flat now what could be going on when you're snoring well there's something called sleep apnea and sleep apnea is basically where you've got excess tissue in the back of your throat all right and it could actually be

visceral type of visceral fat um and what that does is it um sags down because when you're sleeping you're relaxed and that fat also relaxes and it Blocks Your Airway now you're not actually getting enough oxygen and you're not breathing properly when you're falling asleep when you're fully relaxed cuts off the air flow you suddenly startle and wake up and you're never quite getting a good night's sleep when you're not getting a good night's sleep you're not burning harmful visceral fat this situation sleep apnea is common and it's a very serious condition because it sets

up for heart conditions lung conditions and a heart condition you want to really watch out for is something called atrial fibrillation it's a heart rhythm tied to sleep apnea okay and so in order to be able to deal with your sleep apnea you should talk to your medical doctor get a sleep work up and there are ways that actually uh you can actually reverse sleep apnea and actually get back to better quality sleep that's it five things that keep you from losing visceral fat hope you've enjoyed it and thank you for watching hi there if

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