Beat Menopause Belly Fat by Starving Your Fat Cells (Not Yourself)

during menopause your body is perfectly fine with carrying around a little bit more fat because fat cells will make the estrogen that it's lacking you don't want those extra pounds so in this video I'm going to show you some ways that we can keep that body fat and belly fat under control by starving your fat cells and not starving yourself hi I'm dr. Becky from dr. Becky Fitness calm I'm a college instructor of the science of nutrition and I'm also a 48 year old woman so I understand how menopause can add a layer of difficulty when it comes to weight control now the hormone changes that we go through at menopause they'll do a couple of different things to the body one of the most important is that they will shift the way your body deposits fat if you used to be more of a pear shape or fat would more easily accumulate in the lower part of your body well now it will accumulate more around the belly if you were apple shape to begin with it's just going to increase around that midsection also with the hormone changes we're not going to get the estrogen production out of the ovaries so your body is going to just naturally look for different ways to increase its its estrogen one of those ways is with the fat cells which will produce some amount of estrogen for you now estrogen of course is the hormone that we talk about mostly with menopause but I think when we're talking about belly fat at this mid midlife age range we also have to keep in mind another hormone that encourages belly fat which is cortisol cortisol is what we think of as the stress hormone and when we talk about stress we can mean either physical or emotional stress either one you know physical even too much activity or a lack of sleep those are physical types of stress emotional stress of courses is what we usually think about those things will increase cortisol so when we're trying to to keep belly fat under control and get that flat stomach back we have to really work with the changes of the body in a way that gives it what it needs so it will give us what we need so what we're going to do is we're going to cut back on how much we're feeding our fat cells so what do we know about how fat is made well fat cells are like your storage closets they are the place where we throw excess things to tidy up one of the things in your body that wants to stay tidy is your blood your blood allows a very small range of highs and lows as far as how many substances it will it will accommodate if you have too much excess of something particularly let's talk about sugar so if you have too much excess sugar in your blood that is not a good situation for your blood your Bloods going to do what it needs to to get rid of that what's it going to do it's going to push it into those those natural storage units that the fat cells so in order to get belly fat under control we need to create an environment inside of us that just naturally limits the excess in our in our blood we're going to do that in two ways we're going to do better food choices and we're also going to use something called time restricted eating food choices foods to avoid let's go over those first low calorie diet foods foods that are packaged at 4-4 diet are usually not going to be of any benefit to you the way these foods are made into a low calorie food is a one of one of three ways there are either smaller portions so it's basically the same junk food made into a smaller smaller portion well portion control is not a bad thing but it's probably not going to be satisfying to you and it might actually increase your cravings which could lead to problems down the road another way that these diet foods are made low-calorie is by giving artificial sweeteners instead of sugar so taking out the sugar and putting artificial sweeteners now there's a lot of controversy about artificial sweeteners as far though as menopause and and belly fat is concerned they they do tend to be an inflammatory food which can cause us the hormone problems that we're trying to avoid there's also some evidence some that says that cortisol is increased with artificial sweeteners which of course is what we're trying to avoid so the third way that diet foods are made low-calorie is by taking out the fat and replacing it with sugar now anytime you take out a fat from a food you're going to lower the calories because there's a lot of calories and fat but it's also going to remove a lot of the flavor so to bring flavor back we have to put sugar in its place sugar is obviously going to get into your bloodstream very quickly and cause the problems where we have to shuttle that extra sugar into our fat cells so we want to avoid diet foods of course we want to avoid any sugar or refined type of food these types of foods you know think about it you put a cookie in your mouth in it and you can just hold it there and it will break down well that's because it takes nothing for your body to break down that that refined carbohydrate so it's going to go right into your system and move right into your blood just like that your Bloods going to take out that excess and put it right into your fat cells we want to avoid those types of foods we want to then increase the amount of the opposite types of foods those would be foods with high fiber and who foods with healthy fats high fiber food is going to slow down how quickly that sugar can get into your system so these would be like your vegetables your beans even fruit even though it's a natural sugar and it's actually more of a simple sugar has a lot of fiber so that if you need to satisfy a sweet tooth fruit would be a great way to do it healthy fats during menopause we also this belly fat that we get is not just something that we don't want to be there because of appearance reasons it also is an increased risk for heart disease and things like that that younger women don't necessarily fall victim to so healthy fats when we're talking about nuts and seeds chia seeds hemp seeds flax seeds these are types of things that I always have in mind in my kitchen these types of healthy fats avocados they will actually help to keep belly fat under control they keep you satisfied and they cut your redentor your risk to heart disease now some extras too to keep your one of the things that's important when you're trying to have a long-term weight loss goal is to make sure that you're enjoying your diet so there are some extras that you can throw into your diet that will help you during menopause cinnamon I like to use what's called Ceylon cinnamon Cey LOM cinnamon will help to keep your insulin your blood sugar under control chocolate particularly with 70% or higher cocoa content will satisfy some some of your cravings I'm not huge on recommending it but if you need a little bit of something you want to go with the 70% cocoa type of chocolate that also is some evidence that that will help keep cortisol levels under control and oh let's talk about alcohol they're from the North American menopause society I believe it was them state came out and said that moderate alcohol in midlife for women around menopause will actually help to keep weight under control so what is moderate alcohol intake it's basically one drink a day seven drinks a week no more than that so what is what is a drink it's a 12 ounce beer five ounce glass of wine which is not a large glass of wine or one and a half ounces of a harder alcohol okay so so those are our food choices we want to move away from from refined types of foods and we want to move toward high fiber and high fat or healthy fat one other one other thing that you can do is this time restricted eating that I talked about earlier now what is that well it's one of the more interesting things that I think has come out in the research in the past five years and basically what it is is that you're trying to create a window where you're not eating so it's 12 out it's I like to look at time restricted eating as as taking 12 hours of your day to eat and then 12 hours of your day too fast now what this does then is it keep it lowers your blood sugar level during that fasting period so fats not moving into your fat cells it's actually being able to be removed out and you're encouraging fat fat burning by doing this and you don't have to starve yourself which is the really nice part so when I use what I typically recommend is 3 hours before bed you stop eating you declare at the end of your eating day then you sleep during the night and delay breakfast until you've hit a 12-hour window so let's say that you stop eating at 7:30 the night before then you go until 7:30 a.m. at least till you eat your breakfast during this period you don't really have to battle hunger too much but yet you're starving your fat cells and that's going to encourage or fat-burning so I hope that gives you some ideas it is a process that you have to go through you have to stay consistent if you'd like any help on on any of those things one thing you can do is you can subscribe to my youtube channel here I try to produce videos every week that with some helpful hints or also you can go to my website dr. Becky Fitness comm and check out my weight loss coaching programs and other information on the website there thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Becky Gillaspy

Views: 1,667,417

Rating: 4.8137283 out of 5

Keywords: menopause, menopausal, belly fat, foods, time-restricted eating

Id: udieK3hsdm0

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 11 2016