Visceral Fat Scientist Reveals 5 Key Rules to Lose Visceral Belly Fat | Dr. Sean O'Mara M.D.

Dr Shan Oma you are known as the visceral fat doctor you really are that's your area of expertise so people want to know about belly fat visceral fat you know they want to know what the sort of cardinal rules are if you had to pick five or six sort of golden rules for living longer reducing visceral belly fat what would they be yeah so I got a good five to to do I think before get into the real quickly uh there there are four things five things you want to do not do okay they cause

visceral fat so we'll hit those real easy because just cut them out and the proportion that you cut them out the less contribution you'll have for visceral fat so the first one is processed foods you want to cut out processed foods when processed foods are eliminated uh in in individuals that we do MRI scans Vis visal fat just goes away and when it's added back in even like on a Friday and we scan somebody on Monday we can show them where it it started laying down in their adom so processed foods you eliminate especially processed

carbohydrates the second thing is alcohol so alcohol to the extent that you drink it will make it more difficult for you to eliminate that visceral fat and uh make it make it harder for you to become more healthy the third is poor sleep so if you're not adequately sleeping uh getting good quality sleep visceral fat will be laid down and will be make it much harder for you to eliminate that the fourth is stress so the more stress you have the more likely you're going to hold on to your visceral fat and lay it down

it's really really uh positively correlated to the amount of visceral fat that you have and the last one is durational exercise so if you do too much exercise you get too much distance running in too much cycling uh too much rowing and everybody's going to be a little different how much they can get away with it but it is dose dependent the more you do the more difficult it is to extract that visceral fat so those are the big five uh negatives that you want to eliminate and the five positives that you want to do

is first um I recommend people eat clean and my first thing I get people on is eating a meat Centric diet the healthiest meat hunt the healthiest uh uh member of a herd when you're hunting you want to get the healthiest P piece of meat so don't just assume all meat is the same it's not the healthier that organism that animal is uh or was it's not so healthy anymore if you're eating it um the the more likely it's going to be beneficial to you and what we have noticed between dietary strategies that the ones

that have the highest amount of visceral fat typically are eating a more carbohydrate Centric diet uh such as uh vegetarians and vegans tend to have more visceral fat when they come in and be scanned and it's interesting almost always think that they won't have it and they're they're usually very uh elevated amounts of visal fat then compared um to uh like a carnivore U they tend to have lower amounts but not always the case a lot of people go carnivore and they get scanned because it takes a while for these dietary strategies to to impact

so carnivore and uh eating uh healthiest meat possible and eating the third strategy is eating that meat with fermented foods so you want to have what I call living Foods so I cor the term living carnivore diet you can't just eat meat why because our ancestors hunted animals they were alive they had that hide they drank water that had microbes in it that didn't have chlorine and so they were always exposed to these living organisms that were just part of it so today's carnivore Community they're just wrong for that aspect they're just eating sterile meat

without these microbes so fermented foods Probiotic foods bring these living organisms that are aligned to making us more healthy and so you got to eat meat and you got to eat these microbes got meat and microbes the living carnivore diet personally I get tired of feeling like I have to double check every single ingredient when I go to the grocery store that's why I'm a fan of Thrive market so I put a link down below for 30% off all of your groceries through Thrive Market with your first order so Thrive Market makes it so you

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my neighbor have to talk forever it's just super easy so check out that link down below again for 30% off plus a free gift from Thrive market so that's three the fourth is maximum intensity exercise infrequently but in a very very intense manner so like uh pull-ups push-ups uh dips uh uh to failure and then sprinting so you want to have these stress or that which does not kill you makes you stronger and so you want to do these very very intensive exercis in a very short period of time but in frequently I try I

don't have any great science on this but I try to exercise about 15 minutes every three days I've done that for about 13 years uh and it's it's worked well for me I mix it up sometimes I go two weeks no exercise sometimes I'll exercise straight for an hour you know and maybe I'll exercise one or two days three days straight in a row so um exercise and mix it up because that's what like you you've alluded to in the past uh that it nature favors variety kind of mix things up don't do always the

same thing so that maximum intensity exercise is important and then Sunshine Sunshine is one of those things that is underappreciated by the average person but Sunshine brings life and one of the things it does is improve your nitric oxide production so if you just do this one thing go outside in or before you go outside you check your skin turer before you go outside then stay in outside for 20 minutes repeat do another video test and you will see that in that 20 minutes you've produce nitric oxide because that skin is going to snap back

so you need to have this visual confirmation that what you're doing is improving you so nitric oxide from Sunshine is one of those ways that you get visual confirmation when you go out in the sun you improve your blood flow and then the the other recommendation I I provide people two other last ones are Sun going going into a sauna because it improves your nitric oxide production your production of heat shock proteins and uh so about 20 15 to 20 minutes about 175 degrees is what I recommend in a dry finish sauna not an infrared

I I go more natural make recommendations for just the Heat instead of the infrared which I'm concerned is just too deep penetrating we don't have protection you we're evolved to get infrared from Sun but that's much shorter wavelengths so dry finish SAA and the last one is fasting fasting brings superpowers and individuals through autophagy fall in love with autophagy the disease reversing process in your body that when a human being takes a break from eating recovers autophagy in a dose dependent manner goes up with fasting and autophagy reverses that disease process and so it's optimizing

your body so that's that's my last um big take-home I got 48 things I I get to all my clients but you know just keep this short those are those are uh big ones that you can get started on anybody can do they apply them they'll see that their lives will get better uh question on the Alcohol what does do you know any mechanisms as to why alcohol contributes to visceral fat so much and I've seen literature the observational stuff saying that it definitely does contribute to it but do you happen to know mechanistically what's

going on there it's a toxin yeah it is a toxin and uh there's you know more and more studies are coming out that show there's no safe level and we used to say you know take you know two glasses of wine if you're male one glass of wine if you're a female and uh as I practice as a health optimized physician I just kept cutting it back you know just slow period of time you know I get a little little more nervous and I was a little more tental about I was drinking about um I'd

say about a quarter cup I mean it's just quarter glass of wine I got down to that and uh I just kept getting better I felt better when I kept reducing my alcohol and then went you know about five years ago completely off of it and um I think that's that the the way PE you know just just the Toxic effect imp in metabolism on the liver everybody that gives it up they just say I wish I gave it up sooner I you I've never had anybody say gez um if I uh I I complete

changed my life and I got off alcohol it's it's it's overwhelming the benefit that people have even if they're not alcoholics when people give up alcohol they just they just give a testimony about what what kind of an example in terms of the quality of life that they they derive from doing that so so I think alcohol is one of those things that you should just really cut out of your life and you nobody goes to Olympics and an Olympic sports you know Olympic coach goes and now let's get you drinking it just I mean

reality is it does not improve your performance it's just a pleasurable kind of thing and people seek Comfort they seek seek pleasure and that's what alcohol is providing what we really want to seek is greatness influence living better and influence other helping other people to live better alcohol detracts from that because it impacts your health and your ability to influence people yeah I totally agree with that man and feel like um you know just a sentiment on the you know the fasting and the sauna piece and the even the intense exercise piece all three of

those things are appropriately dosed stressors right that's exactly I think what we need to try to do without getting super weird about it is we live in an artificial modern world it's very different than how it was 100,00 years ago but any way that we can occasionally ulate how life was back then I think that's just the simple the simple thing I people think you need to go out and live like liver King and be like that guy you know you don't need to do that it's just adopting these sort of daily practices to bring

some of that influence into your life okay soak up the sun go go do something vigorous Sprint like you're hunting an animal if you don't have to think you're hunting if it makes you feel good to wear you know a pelt and and go Sprint like through the park and probably get arrested like go for it you know but and then do so on an empty stomach do it like hey I'm hungry and I'm hunting for food like make it a game but whatever just think of it like that because I'm inclined to think that

we don't need to you know go into any any Exquisite detail here but I'm inclined to think that visceral fat is a diseased state of modern man this is not something we dealt with a long time ago it's a Moder day form of chronic disease that was absence in our species because our lifestyles today are conducive towards the accumulation of chronic disease and stress heresis is one of those most unappreciated insights you want to exercise in a brief manner in a short period of time and frequently that's what happens in the wild it's what happened

I think ancestrally and I think we've gotten away from it we we pursue comfort and pleasure um if anything we probably exercise too much um there's a sweet spot as a Goldilocks trying to get the the appropriate amount of maximum intensity exercise uh infrequently with a uh healthy balance maybe some durational exercise I think it uh for the time being clients come to work with me I just get them concentrated on the maximum intensity exercise get them off The Chronic exercise but uh there there's a balance and uh I think we're just we need to

relearn that we need to make it attractive you're doing a great job with your channnel and uh your followers I think uh it's it's nothing uh is more important to influence your quality of life than the state of your health so uh I'm excited that the health space is blowing up on social media because it it uh it it allows so much improvement in how people live so it's it's great to be a part of these shows you know you know I'll end with something that's I think a really good takeaway that I've recently learned

and is you can find out your intensity by or what intensity you need to be at by your ability to maintain it and what that means is you're like how do you maintain intensity right back in the the old CrossFit days we used to look at what are called uh they were called descending ladders in exercise right it was a descending ladder and the idea behind it was to maintain intensity and what that meant and I'm not suggesting people go to cross it this is to illustrate a point was to maintain intensity so you would

do a descending ladder you'd do uh 15 calorie row something else 15 reps or whatever then you do a 10 calorie row 10 reps five calorie row you're de decreasing your duration your total output so that you can maintain intensity and it's come up over and over again in with experts that I've talked to people that truly truly live this this life that really is what we're after and it's all about being able to maintain like how frequently can you maintain intensity without your intensity declining right that's a that's a perfect Testament to because everyone's

going to have a different internal sort of barometer of what's too much right everybody's a little bit different and you know for some person it might be yeah okay you can do 30 minutes of vigorous activity every other day okay another person might be 20 minutes every 3 day it's it's going to be different and you have to look at how can you maintain intensity if you are declining and you're not getting better chances are it's too much not too little M unless you are extremely sedentary and you know you're it's in a different category

yeah no I think that is uh very much the case you know I I I'm an advocate for people paying attention to how they exercise and and being able to read uh the benefits and the harm that may happen but it's not just exercise uh it's it's what you do how you live your life and I think as species if we can be more observant you know paying attention analyzing what we're doing uh there's so much to to glean and learn from that and uh I think social media shows like yourself and other influencers uh

bring the the ability to educate people about that make them aware and we're we're going to move way past just how much weight you throw on a weight bar I'll educate people there's so many other ways uh that health is impacted but it really just start and with your motivation and uh and then paying attention to your own life and a willingness to analyze uh objectively am I getting better or am I getting uh getting worse agreed man well uh drar where can everyone find you yeah so best place to find me it's my website

u d r n m.com or I have another website growing better not holder.com I'm also on social media across a variety of platforms uh Instagram Twitter uh LinkedIn uh uh X um and uh YouTube all on the same handle d r n o m a.com perfect thanks all right thank you Thomas