Hello health champions. Today i want to talk about how to lose belly fat
and why intermittent fasting is a particularly good way to do that.
coming right up
Hey i'm Dr Ekberg i'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if
you want to truly master health by understanding how the
body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that
notification bell so you don't miss anything belly fat which is a concern to
millions of people is also known as visceral fat or
intra-abdominal fat we're not talking about the love handles that sit on the
outside we're talking about the inside fat and the main thing to
know about that type of fat is that it's not about calories
I know you've heard that eating less and exercising more is the solution to
everything about fat but it just doesn't work like that
belly fat is also known as dangerous fat and that's not because the fat in itself
is dangerous it's because the way it comes about is dangerous to
the liver and i'm sure you've heard about
alcoholic fatty liver disease afld well there's another kind called
non-alcoholic fatty liver disease so obviously the first one is because of
alcohol and the second one is not but the second one people have no idea where
that comes from and the answer is it's because of
fructose but what is it that's so bad about
alcohol and fructose well it's because they can only be
broken down by the liver they have to be broken down by somebody
and the liver is the only one can do it but the liver is only about 1 60th
of your total body weight so all the other fuel
from fat and protein and glucose can be spread out
evenly among all the other tissues for the most part
but alcohol and fructose can only go through the liver so
we're 60 times more likely to overwhelm to congest
the liver than we are the rest of the body
and whatever energy the liver can't use in the moment that extra energy gets
converted into fat and that fat quickly starts clogging up
the liver and spreading to the other visceral
areas around the liver so alcohol and fructose
are the worst and then there's two more things that
make it hard for the liver and that's the hormone insulin and the
hormone cortisol insulin responds to blood glucose levels
and cortisol is a stress hormone that is produced in response to stress
and that raises blood sugar which in turn then produces more
insulin so that's like a vicious cycle other than stress
cortisol is best known for cushing's disease
and this is a pathology this is where people have
some kind of tumor some abnormal tissue that is producing a hormone way
out of balance and as a result these people have
way too much cortisol which results in extreme belly fat extreme moon face
a big round swollen face they get a fat hump on their back on the upper part of
their back and they get skinny legs and flat butt
because cortisol breaks down protein to try to
convert it into glucose to respond to all that
stress but it's not really stress it's just
cortisol making it look like that so cushing's is a pathology it's an
abnormal condition with abnormal cells but you could also have stress and have
totally normal cells that do exactly what they're supposed to
but that continuous stress is pushing the body out of balance it's making it
increase cortisol production and now you have a
functional disease you have a functional hyper cortisol situation and even though
stress in itself is probably not going to give you a cushing's
presentation the look of cushing's it can be a very strong contributor
especially if you have a lot of stress in addition
to a lot of sugar and other processed foods and maybe even
alcohol and one of the best ways to deal with stress
is to practice relaxation breathing exercises
or one of my favorites is meditation let's look at fructose versus
carbs in general when you eat a grain something like rice or oats or
wheat like bread any form of crackers or waffles those are grains
corn is also a grain then those consist of starch and starch is 100
glucose glucose can be spread out evenly across the body
so it's not really going to give you fatty liver by itself
it's a bad thing in addition to fructose but it's probably not going to do it
by itself it is a problem though because it triggers insulin and it makes things
a little worse the really big problem is sugar and sugar is 50
glucose and 50 fructose so if you have a hundred grams
which is not uncommon these days then you're getting 50 grams of pure
fructose from that and that is going to clog up
the liver very quickly that's why we see type 2 diabetes
in teenagers and even younger these days they haven't had any alcohol but they're
drinking soda which is just as bad then we have
high fructose corn syrup which is just a little bit worse
instead of 50 50 it's about 55 fructose and 45 glucose
so what about fruit is fruit a good thing we always hear that you should eat
more fruits and vegetables and what they're really trying to say is
you should eat more vegetables and fruit isn't necessarily a terrible thing but
if we look back historically fruit was seasonal and depending on where you
lived you had one type of fruit you didn't have all
kinds of fruits from all over the world every day of the
year because then it becomes a problem if the
fruit was seasonal now it would just help fatten you up for the winter and
that was a good thing because then during the winter you burn through
all that belly fat and the liver fat because there was no
sugar around and fruit can contain quite a bit of fructose if we look at
pears and apples they are the highest they have almost 70 percent
of all the sugar in there is fructose so out of the total weight about seven
percent of those fruits is pure fructose
something else like watermelon is a very high percentage but the
grams the percent fructose per 100 grams of the
fruit is a little bit lower and most other fruits
are somewhere around 50 percent kind of give plus
minus five percent and you're going to find
most fruits in that range and these grams of fructose can add up pretty
quickly so if you have just one medium apple per
day that's about 12 grams of fructose and
we're just counting the fructose portion right now and then something
like watermelon which has a lower percentage but watermelon is so
easy to eat a lot of it's like drinking a soda
it's very thirst quenching and it's nice when on a warm day so you could
wolf down a pound of watermelon very very quickly you could do
two or three pounds even in a day and one pound of watermelon would have 18
grams so now you have 30 grams from just those two fruits you
have 30 grams of pure fructose clogging up the liver
as a comparison that's how much you would find in a
20 ounce coke of high fructose corn syrup
and again the 30 grams is not the total sugar it's the fructose part so if you
don't have fatty liver and you're not insulin resistant then sure you could
have some fruit once in a while but if you are insulin resistant
you have a fatty liver and you're trying to reverse it then
those fruits are going to slow you way down so focus on the vegetables
the other substance that has to go through the liver is alcohol
and there is no mystery there we know that excess alcohol produces a fatty
liver and liver disease that's kind of the hallmark of alcoholism
the worst drinks that you could have are mixed sugary drinks
why is that because alcohol is the worst fructose is a close second but when you
have a mixed sugary drink you get both and you could have actually
three times more fructose in that drink than you have
alcohol because some of those drinks are just incredibly sweet
if you have a beer that's second worst now you get the alcohol plus starch
because the beer is made from grains you're
going to get that carbohydrate in there it's not as
bad as the fructose because the starch
is a form of glucose but it's still going to raise insulin
and promote a fatty liver in addition to that
alcohol dry wine would be a better option
because now you have the alcohol you have a tiny tiny amount of sugar but
probably only about one-tenth the amount that you
get in a sweet drink and if we can speak
about such a thing the best form would be
distilled spirit so again i'm not promoting alcohol i'm just saying that
if you have an occasional drink you want to understand what it does to
you so a distilled spirit is not going to
have anything in there but the alcohol so you
only get one bad thing instead of the fructose and the glucose
on top of that even though insulin is a stress on the
liver it's probably not going to create a fatty liver by itself
it is the alcohol and the fructose that causes the fatty liver but once you have
a fatty liver the insulin is going to make it
much harder to reverse it because the insulin keeps
pushing fuel and fat and glucose into that liver so once you have a fatty
liver you are going to be insulin resistant
that's the same thing the fatty liver is an insulin resistant
liver and now you want to start lowering insulin how do you do that well a low
carb high fat diet is going to result in
less insulin produced if you want to take it one step further
then a keto diet is a stricter form of a low-carb diet
which will produce even less insulin and the least insulin produced is of
course when you're fasting because now you're not taking in any
carbohydrate at all during that period and that's why
intermittent fasting can be so powerful and now that we know what causes belly
fat and fatty liver how do we reverse it well the first
thing obviously is to stop feeding it this bad stuff
so no alcohol no fructose you eat foods that lower insulin
and you do some things to reverse stress that's pretty obvious
next we need to burn some fat all that fat in the liver
we want to convert it into energy and what has to happen then
well fasting is going to lower insulin more than
anything else that you can do and as long as insulin is high
that fat is untouchable we can't turn it into energy when insulin is high
but when insulin drops that fat becomes liberated and now we can burn it the
second thing fasting does is it increases human
growth hormone it's the most powerful way to increase
human growth hormone so again insulin goes down liberates the
fat now human growth hormone goes up and
increases the burning of that fat so the longer we
fast the more fat we burn the more human growth hormone we makes so all of
these mechanisms work in our favor when we're fasting
everything gets better with fasting so to burn
belly fat the best and reverse fatty liver there are five
steps first do intermittent fasting meaning
you shorten the time period during a day where you're eating
a popular one is eighteen six you're eating lunch you're eating
dinner in a six hour time span and then you fast the
rest that's one example second thing would be
to eat a low carb diet because low carb is
going to keep the insulin levels lower so you get into that
fat burning zone much much quicker you want to definitely stop alcohol if
you have a fatty liver and you also want to definitely stop all
sugar and fructose the fifth thing would be to
work on the cortisol and that's meditation breathing
exercises etc and then a lot of people are gonna
wonder about exercise well isn't that what we're told
all the time eat less exercise more but again it's
not about calories it's not about that it's about the hormones
so the liver can be fatty and exercise is not going to touch it
you could actually be a marathon runner and have a fatty liver that's happened
exercise won't do much but it also
won't hurt you unless you do it wrong and it can help if you do it right so
the main thing is to not go to the gym and join the
boot camp and have someone whip you into shape because that is
going to drive up your cortisol tremendously
so as long as you work out in a way such as
walking or riding a bike at a slow pace now you are increasing circulation
you're using up some energy but you're not stressing the body so in that
sense exercise can help if you do it wrong
it can hurt if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn more about how
to get truly healthy i think you really should check out that
one next thank you so much for watching i'll see you next time