Episode 32: 3 Tips to Reduce Belly Fat
Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast! I'm Jayd Harrison (@Jaydigains), a personal trainer and wellness coach. I created this podcast to share helpful tips to help you make gains in your fitness journey 💪
You may be wondering where I have been these last few months. I’ve been busy! I took the last few months of last year to develop a ton of new services and products that are launching this year. The first is my brand new Gains Club membership program! This membership (available here on my website) is packed with content to help you burn fat, eat better, and get in shape. In future episodes of the Coaching Corner podcast, I’ll preview some of the content you can find in the Gains Club.
In this episode, I’m returning to discuss effective strategies for reducing belly fat (a common concern among clients). I cover:
Measures for healthy body fat
Tips for burning belly fat like:
maintaining a calorie deficit
avoiding refined sugars
increasing soluble fiber
reducing alcohol consumption to enhance fat loss
For more in-depth guidance, check out the Gains Club membership page.
Links:
Sponsors/Affiliate Links:
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(00:09):
Welcome back to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I have been away for quite some time because I've been working super hard on my membership that I am launching now and I'm super excited. You can go to my website, jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com to see more about the membership. It includes recipes, meal plans, training programs, training tips, nutrition tips, fat loss tips, and I'm posting new content every week. So we're going to be going over some of the content here in the podcast. Just give you a little sneak peek of what's over there and to get you started. So today I was thinking the first episode back in the Coaching Corner podcast. Let's talk about how to reduce belly fat since that is a lot of people's number one thing that they ask when they come to me for a personal training consultation or if they're coming to me when I'm live on Twitch, and they have, when it's a q and a ask your fitness questions, the most common thing that people often ask is, how do I get rid of belly fat?
(01:14)
So the first thing that you need to know about belly fat is that it is body fat. Body fat is not necessarily a bad thing. Fat is how we store extra energy. That's like our battery packs, and it's also a way to keep our temperature regulated. It also helps to cushion and protect our organs and the rest of our body. But there is a certain amount of it that either too little or too much is bad for your health and is correlated with health problems. One of the best ways that you can see whether you have a good or bad amount of belly fat is by taking a measurement, right? Using a tape measure to take a measurement around your belly and around your hips. The waist to hip ratio is the best way for you to kind of gauge whether you're belly fat is in a healthy or unhealthy level.(02:11)
For women, typically what we like to see is a waist to hip ratio of 0.85 or less, and for men, we like to see 0.9 or less. Now you can get your waist to hip ratio by measuring either in centimeters or inches around your belly at the smallest point, and then measure around your hips at the widest point, and then you'll divide the number from your waist by the number of your hips, and the results will tell you where you are on that spectrum of healthy to unhealthy. Now, we also don't want to have too little of body fat, right? There's a certain amount of it that our bodies do actually need to be healthy. And I do talk more about this in detail in the how to get started with fat loss post in my membership site, which I will link in the show notes as well as in the description of this video.(03:08)
If you're watching on YouTube, on average, if you have a female body, if you are a woman, 14% body fat is the bare minimum for most women. Now, it's different depending on different bodies. Some people need more body fat, some people need less. But 14% is what we would consider as the a bare essential fat, and it kind of varies like what's considered actually a healthy body fat percentage varies according to age. For women or girls who are age 20 to 29, a good healthy range is between 14 and 22.7%. If you're in your thirties, a healthy body fat percentage is 14 to 24%. If you're in your forties, 14% to 27.6%. If you're in your fifties, 14% to 30%. And if you're in your sixties, 14 to 30%. So as you get older, it's considered healthier to have a higher body fat percentage. And the same is true with men too.(04:07)
Male bodies on average need less body fat than women's bodies or female bodies, but there is a certain amount of body fat that is important for a man or a male body to stay healthy. And that's 8% for guys. So for guys in their twenties, 8% to 18% is considered a healthy range. If you're in your thirties, 8% to 21%, if you're in your forties, 8% to 23% in your fifties, 8% to 24%. And if you're in your sixties, 8% to 25%. So as you get older, your metabolism does slow down, which is why we do tend to accumulate more fat in our bodies. And that's not necessarily a bad thing because especially as you get into way later older age that we hit kind of like a plateau where it's really, really hard for older people to actually retain body fat and that not having energy stores is really dangerous for people who are really older because if they get sick without some energy stores, it's more likely that they could experience complications or even death.(05:10)
So it is actually healthy for us to accumulate a little bit more fat as we get older. So within those ranges is healthy right now, if you have a body fat percentage that is higher than those recommended ranges, or if you have a waist to hip ratio that is larger than what we talked about before for women, that's 0.85 or less, or for men, that's 0.9 or less. If your waist to hip ratio is larger than that, then yeah, you definitely need to think about ways that you can reduce your belly fat. So these are my recommendations for how to do that. Number one is to get into and maintain a calorie deficit. Remember that body fat is mainly our body's energy stores. So when we are in a calorie deficit or an energy deficit, that means that our body's burning more calories than what we are actually taking in through the food that we're eating.(06:09)
Food is the way that we get calories, right? So nearly everything that you eat has calories and has energy. Different foods are more calorie dense and have more energy than others. So the best thing that you can do if you want to reduce your body fat percentage is to get yourself so that you're eating less calories than what your body is burning. So one way that you can get into a calorie deficit is to just take a look at your diet. Take a look at what you're eating. Managing what you eat is a lot easier than trying to exercise away body fat. Now, exercise is an important piece of healthy fat loss because again, we want to make sure that the body's burning more calories than what you're taking in and the way that you get your body burning more calories as you move more you exercise, you get your body building muscle, but there's only so much of a calorie increase that you can create in your body before it becomes dangerous, right?(07:09)
There's only so much you can exercise. There's only so many hours in the day and in the week that you can be active. And then also there's a cap on how intense your exercise can be. If you try to do two hours of high intensity interval training every day, it's not going to be long before you start experiencing injury because your body can't keep up with the repairs. So there's only so much that you can do in terms of increasing your calorie burn while staying healthy and keeping yourself injury free or reducing your risk of injury. So that's important, but at the same time, you need to be managing what you eat, and you can do this in a number of different ways. One, you can just track what you eat using a food journal or MyFitnessPal or an app like that, and just become more aware of what you're eating and how much energy is in the food that you're eating.(08:02)
Remember, we measure that energy in calories. Typically, adult women need about 2000 calories a day, and adult men need about 2,500 calories a day, and there's a lot of variation between that, depending on your age, your height, your weight, how active you are, et cetera. So some people need more, some people need less, but get familiar with what your current calorie intake is. What is your body used to getting in terms of energy? Is it within that kind of 2000 to 2,500 range? If not, then that might be your first thing you want to tackle. If you want to get even more detailed and figure out specifically what your body needs, you'll need to figure out what your maintenance level of calories is. That's the number of calories that your body needs just to stay at the same weight, right? Knowing what your maintenance level of calories will allow you to better plan to get your body into a deficit.(09:02)
So say you're a woman, right? Typically the recommendation is that women eat 2000 calories a day. Well say your body actually is only burning 1800 calories a day. If you try to eat a 2000 calorie diet, then that's 300 calories surplus. And so if you're eating 2000 calories but your body's only burning 1700 calories, then you're probably not going to be burning fat. You're probably going to be gaining fat. So figuring out how many calories your body actually is burning is essential, and you can do that by getting a calculation of your total daily energy expenditure. There are online calculators that you can use, and this will give you an estimate of how many calories your body burns every day according to those factors like height, your weight, how active you are, et cetera, your body fat percentage. So figure out what your maintenance level of calories is first.(09:54)
Remember that these calculations are only going to be estimates. You kind of have to do a little bit of testing to figure out what your actual maintenance level of calories is. And the way that you do that is you figure out what your total daily energy expenditure is. Use one of those online calculators and then use a food journal or an app to track what you eat every single day and then weigh yourself every single day. So if your weight stays roughly the same over the course of a week or two of eating that target number of calories, then that number that you ate is likely your maintenance level of calories. If you see your weight goes up, it trends upwards while you're eating that recommended number of calories that you calculated for your total daily energy expenditure, then that tells you that that number is actually higher than what your body's maintenance level calories is.(10:48)
If your weight trends downwards, then that tells you that the number that you calculated is lower. You're at a calorie deficit at that point. If you saw your weight go down, then you want to add a hundred to 150 calories to that number and then test for another week. If you saw your weight go up, then reduce that goal, your daily goal by 100 to 150 calories, test that new number for another week or two and keep testing and then adjusting by a hundred to 150 calories at a time until you see your weight staying the same. Once your weight is the same, then you've reached your maintenance level of calories. Then that can tell you what you need to do moving forward to get yourself into a calorie deficit. So say you do this, you calculate that your total daily energy expenditure is 1700 calories.(11:41)
You test that number and your weight stays the same. Then how do you know how to reduce your calories to actually reduce your body fat? The best way to get into a calorie deficit, I think, is to ease into it slowly. That way you give yourself time to acclimate. So I would recommend starting with reducing your calories by between 102 hundred 50 calories and eating between 102 hundred 50 calories below your maintenance level. To start with. If your maintenance level of calories is 1700, then the next week your goal would be to aim for 1,450 calories. A word of advice, though, as you plan your calorie deficit, you want to be very careful about going too low when your calories are at too low of a level, this can put you at risk of being malnourished. It also can have a negative impact on your metabolism.(12:40)
So in general, if you're going to be close to a thousand calories, if your calorie deficit is really low, you don't want to go anywhere below 1000 calories. In general. Below 1000 calories is dangerous territory. If you're close to a thousand calories, that's also like, Ooh, that's a little scary, right? So if you notice that your maintenance level calories, your baseline level of calories is already pretty low, and going into a calorie deficit would put you at a really low number of calories, you may need to put your calorie deficit on pause and do what's called a reverse diet. Reverse diet is a term that Lane Norton or Lane on social media coined. He's a coach, he's also a researcher. He has a PhD as well, right? And he coined this term, and it's basically basically a process of over the course of several weeks or months, increase your calories by a very small amount so that you can bring your baseline up to a healthier level.(13:53)
That way when you drop calories, you're not getting quite so close to that really low minimum number of calories. So for example, if you do the process of figuring out what your maintenance calories are, and you find that your maintenance level calories is like 1200, especially if you are a man and you are over five foot eight, if your maintenance level of calories is 1200, that is a sign that your metabolism is really slow and wrecked and putting you in a calorie deficit would put you close to 1000 calories, and that's pretty dangerous. So we don't want to do that. I would never recommend that for my clients. So what I would recommend instead is that we spend three to six months slowly bringing the calories up to a level that makes more sense for someone of that body size. A man who's five foot eight should be eating closer to 2300, 2500 calories a day at least.(14:58)
So we would work your calories to the point where you're up higher, you're able to eat more calories without gaining weight. So as you increase your calories gradually, you give your body time to acclimate to that level just little bit by little bit until the point where you're able to eat something that's closer to what would be recommended. A good way to figure out what your recommended number of calories would be is to do the total daily energy expenditure calculation. That will give you an idea of what someone of your size, your age, your height and your activity level, how many calories someone of your size should be able to eat without gaining weight. If your actual maintenance level is significantly below that, then you should do a reverse diet so that I need to put that in there. Just so you know, before you start reducing your calories to the point where you're eating 900 calories a day, that's not a great sign.(15:55)
And of course, if you find that your maintenance level of calories is significantly low, you may need to see a dietician, a registered dietician, a nutritionist, because with your maintenance level of calories that low, there could also be some kind of a medical thing going on. You want to go to your doctor, have them run blood tests, and also test your thyroid levels, get basic health tests done just to rule out any underlying health condition that could be causing your metabolism to be so slow. But you may want to work with a dietician or a nutritionist to work through that process of reverse diet because on your own it, it's very hard for people, a lot of people psychologically to increase calories, especially because through the process of reverse dieting, your weight does sometimes go up. What we look for is that it goes up, it then comes down, and then it stabilizes, and then once it stabilizes again, we increase calories, it goes up, then it comes down, and then it stabilizes.(17:01)
That's typically how we do the process of reverse dieting. But a lot of people psychologically have a really hard time with increasing calories and seeing their weight go up. So if that's the case, I would recommend getting a coach or seeing a dietician, a registered dietician or nutritionist. So getting into a calorie deficit though is number one, number one for reducing belly fat. Now, there are some things that even if you are in a calorie deficit, your midsection, your belly could be holding onto more visceral fat, right? Visceral fat can sometimes be resilient against being in a calorie deficit. And the reason for this for a lot of people is that even though they're in a calorie deficit, they still may be eating things that have a lot of refined sugars in them, or refined grains, refined sugars, refined grains. These actually are more likely to contribute to your body accumulating visceral fat or belly fat.(18:04)
So instead, what you should try to do is eat more soluble fiber. Eating a diet that is high in soluble fiber is one of the best ways that you can reduce visceral or belly fat. Soluble fiber includes things like beans, like black beans, lemon beans, kidney beans, vegetables like Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, broccoli, turnips, and carrots, fruits like avocados, pears, figs, nectarines, nuts and seeds like flax seeds, sunflower seeds and hazelnuts. And then whole grains like oats and barley. And a nutritionist recommend that you eat at least 25 grams of fiber a day. Now, if you don't eat a lot of fiber, this is another thing that you want to gradually increase over time, because if you go from eating no fiber to eating 25 grams of fiber a day or more, you're likely to experience a lot of gastric distress, some bloating, probably going to be farting a lot.(19:02)
Yeah, you're going to toot a lot. So do it gradually, increase it very, very gradually. Maybe just pick one meal to be high fiber at a time, and then let your system become acclimated to it. You can also use bino that can help having some bino before your meals or another medicine like that. Check with your doctor to make sure that it's right for your body. But yeah, eating more soluble fiber is a great way to reduce visceral fat and belly fat. Now, some of you're not going to like this, number three, but it has to be said, we need to talk about it. One of the best, most effective ways to reduce your belly fat is to reduce alcohol or to stop drinking alcohol. And the reason for that is that alcohol really reverses your body's fat burning in a lot of ways. So when you have alcohol in your system, your body stops metabolizing fat and prioritizes instead, breaking down the alcohol. This is why you see, a lot of times people have a beer belly, if they drink alcohol a lot, it's because when they drink alcohol, if they drink alcohol every day, there's a portion of the day where their body is not burning fat. It's breaking down the alcohol. It also tends to cause the accumulation of fatty tissue, particularly around the liver, which is dangerous, that can damage your liver and lead to cirrhosis.(20:32)
And I've seen this with my own clients, many of my clients who I've worked with for years and who have had a stubborn level of belly fat, it isn't really until they decide to do a dry January or a dry month or just decide to reduce their alcohol consumption, that they realize, oh, wow, now I'm actually burning fat again. So if you drink alcohol frequently, that may be the reason why you are having trouble with your belly fat. Also, alcohol is high calorie. It doesn't really have any nutritional benefit, but it is extremely high calorie, and it's just empty calories at that point. So it kind of gets you both ways. You could really ruin your calorie deficit without realizing by just drinking your calories, especially if you drink high calorie drinks like beer or like sugary cocktails. Now, it's not to say that you should never drink these things, but you want to drink them sparingly.(21:26)
If you have a habit of having a glass of wine or two before bed every night, that's probably holding you back. And I would say maybe reduce that. If you're having it every night, maybe do every other night or maybe just pick a couple nights a week that you'll have your glasses of wine. And of course, as the health research shows, no amount of alcohol is perfectly safe, right? There's a lot of reasons why we want to reduce our intake of alcohol, but especially if you are trying to burn fat. So those are my main tips for reducing your belly fat. You want to get into and maintain a calorie deficit. Avoid refined sugars, reduce refined sugars because those cause inflammation and can lead to your body accumulating visceral fat. Also, reduce your consumption of alcohol because your body is not burning fat while you have alcohol in your system. I hope that you enjoyed this first episode back in the Coaching Corner podcast, and I hope to see you all in the membership site that I've created that's on my website. That's jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com. I will be providing a lot more tips in the weeks to come, and I'm just super duper excited to be back.
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