Episode 24: The Real Reason Your Body Stores Fat

The reason so many people struggle with weight loss is because they don’t understand why the body accumulates fat in the first place. So today, I’m going to explain the two types of fat and the requirements for losing excess body fat - including that belly fat that never seems to go away. 

Truth: it takes more than just diet and exercise. 

Hormones play a huge factor in fat loss. I’ve worked with over 200 people on helping them lose weight through balancing their hormones, including Ben, a client whose story I share in this episode. Together, we helped him permanently lose over 100 pounds in one year without any drastic measures. Just a better understanding of how hormones influence fat gain, and how to balance hormones to reduce fat for good.

Listen in as we talk about:

[1:38] Why so many struggle to lose weight and keep it off

[2:29] How a client lost over 100 pounds without plateauing or extreme dieting or activity

[3:05] 3 things that happen after losing the first 10 pounds

[5:44] What is subcutaneous fat

[7:26] Mandatory 3 conditions for fat loss

[8:18] How to achieve stable, permanent weight loss 

[9:10] The difference between subcutaneous fat and visceral fat and why one is more challenging than the other

[10:55] Implications of visceral fat and how it affects hormones

[11:31] Why stress is such a factor in weight loss and gaining fat

Resources mentioned in this episode:

FREE live training: Wednesday, September 28, 2022 “How To Lose Your First 10 Pounds Naturally Using Food” (space is limited to 30). Click here to register

Hormone Reboot Program

Connect with Andrew:

• Facebook Group
• TikTok
• Website

Transcript

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the hormone helper podcast. I'm coach Andrew, your hormone helper from fit for all fitness. I personally coach over 1600 men and women to help better understand their hormones so they can lose weight and get their metabolism back on track with this podcast, you're gonna hear from me and my special guests about everything from metabolism to thyroid, to weight loss,

and we even talk a little bit, a sexy time as we chat to spread more knowledge thick like butter on your hormones. If you're ready to learn, I'm ready to share. So let's do this. Thanks for tuning in again, where today we are gonna talk about thunder thighs, beer, belly, donut rolls, stress tummy, your spare tire cellulite,

or any other way that you can think of to call what the problem is. And that problem is your body fat. So I've been meaning to do an episode on this for a while now is I feel almost every client I start working with has a reduction of body fat as a part of their goals. They state, they wanna have stable energy levels.

They want less gut distress. They want a better metabolism. Oh yeah. And of course they want their way to be down to this topic is what people talk about the most. Whether it's with friends in a close circle for coffee, family, over a dinner conversation, or even your partner, when you're trying on different outfits in the bedroom to wear,

there are many people my clients included who have a poor relationship with how their body looks and have those specific areas that they either wanna spot target or sculpt away to make themselves feel more comfortable with how they look. People do the usual stuff to try and keep their fat percentage down. They reduce their calories in their diet. They may cut out carbs for a couple of months.

They up the amount of cardio. They do daily to burn more calories. And of course they try to get more sleep and better rest for themselves. Don't get me wrong. All the things I listed, they're not bad. For example, if someone spends their days eating more than 5,000 calories a day, sure. Lowering their calorie intake is gonna help their body fat.

Or if someone hasn't done activity in four to five months, of course doing a 30 minute runner walk is going to help daily. But here's what these people don't anticipate. All of that stuff eventually stops working and then they stop seeing results. The scale won't go down anymore. Even when they try to cut the calorie shortage even more or start doing even more activity.

I wanna go through an example and it's my client Ben. So we've been working with each other for a little under a year now about 10 months. And at this point in filming this podcast, Ben has lost a little over a hundred pounds. So it's about 104 pounds. He has lost his weight consistently. So roughly 2.3 pounds per week during our working together,

he has never plateaued in his fat loss ever. Now, of course, Ben has done the usual thing that everybody else does, except he hasn't plateaued or stopped seeing weight results like everybody else does. So what's the difference? Well, for most people, I come across, they stop seeing results at that 10 pound mark. Once they hit 10 pounds down,

one of three things happens. One, they can't seem to lose anymore and they have to keep doing what they're doing to keep that weight off two. They lose that weight and then it comes rushing back with more weight on the top. And three, they cave as diets are kind of too extreme or maybe their activity levels too high. So they can't keep up their routine.

And the weight slowly returns them to how they were before all of these suck. It's a shitty way to go. There is nothing worse than cutting out all of the foods. You love spending three hours of your daytime on the treadmill, struggling through crazy cravings for sugar and salt. And then you wake up one day and you find your back to where you started,

which is square one. I'm gonna tell you this because Ben literally just did that before working with me. It's crazy cuz we were speaking on and off for I'd say probably six months. And during that time he tried different diets and he struggled to do it on its own before he reached back out. And, and I ended up actually just calling him on his challenges.

I'll tell you all something straight up before we get into the fat loss situation today, I am always gonna tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. And that's especially important as a coach because I feel like a lot of coaches only tell you what you want to hear. And then you're disappointed with what you actually receive. So I'm the guy who's like,

I'm gonna tell you what you need to hear, cuz I ultimately care about you. And in Ben's case, I really did just that. I think I said something like, dude, I don't wanna have another conversation with you in six months and find that you're like still in the same place. He is. However, one of the very few people who then took up the opportunity to work one-on-one with me and start on this true and sustainable journey of fat loss.

I'm gonna walk you through the same stuff. I literally told him about body fat, because if you don't understand why your body keeps it on you, you're never gonna be able to have your body, let it go or prevent it from gaining that weight back here it is. It's the secret sauce. My secret sauce, all that body fat is, is stored energy.

It's a reserve tank of your fuel that their body's gonna keep to make sure that you have the energy. You need to deal with your energy output as well as your emergency daily uses around stress. So there's actually two different types of body fat. One is called visceral fat and the other is called subcutaneous. While these fat stores operate the same way they get stored in two totally different places in the body.

What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk about subcutaneous first because this type of fat is kind of located between the skin and your outer abdominal wall. So it's the really surface level stuff. Really this type of fat that's stored by your body. It's usually caused by dietary or lifestyle reasons. For example, poor eating habits, not enough calorie intake, too much calorie intake,

excess sugar consumption and lack of activity by maintaining a healthy diet and keeping up with regular exercise. The idea is you can burn calories and shed subcutaneous fat that your body is storing, cuz that is all surface level. This type of fat is really what you call your body's reserve tank. So the body only stores this type of fat. When it feels you either a don't have enough energy to support yourself during the day,

meaning you keep dipping into that reserve tank of energy all the time or B you continue to store too much energy to the point where it actually starts making your reserve tank larger. You see losing fat requires certain conditions to be met for the body to say to itself, I don't need that reserve fuel anymore. If we don't meet the conditions of the reserve fuel storage,

our body's gonna keep storing body fat until it feels we have enough storage to maintain whatever we are usually doing. This is where weight yoyos back to either that certain number you're stuck at and why people can't break past a certain number, their body isn't meeting these conditions, the conditions for fat loss. And that means that it's not gonna let that energy go.

Even though each person is different, I can safely say that these conditions are identical, virtually the same for everyone. And the ones that I'm gonna list are exactly what I look at with people who join our hormone reboot program. It's every single condition. So the conditions for fat loss go like this one, am I in taking the daily amount of energy and nutrients that my body needs for my current weight and my goal weight.

So this needs to take into account things like physical job activity, level, body type nutrient amounts, along with making sure that it's met every day consistently. Then the second condition is, do I have the nutrients I need to make the hormones while still running my system. That means if any of this energy is converting or digesting that you still have to be able to operate without your excess levels of fatigue or your metabolism slowing down for any reason,

the third is pretty easy and that is, am I in danger right now? This condition refers to how much weight someone loses in a certain period of time. So as much as I'd like to say as a coach, like, Hey, a person can lose like 50 pounds. I no a person can't lose like 35 pounds in a week or 50 pounds.

It's not possible. Their body would think that it is in starvation mode and maybe it's in danger. And then it's gonna stop that from happening, which is why my clients who need fat loss to happen. I have them lose about 2.2 to 2.8 pounds per week. As long as you meet all of these conditions, these three conditions, I talked about the subcutaneous fat.

It's really not that hard to get rid of or to keep off. So an example for Ben, his storage of fat was mostly this tight. And the way that I got him was basically to have him meet all of these conditions consistently day by day, making sure all of these three things were met. So his body didn't go back into what I call storage mode.

That's where your weight just keeps piling on. Now what about that second type of body fat that I mentioned, the one called visceral body fat. This is the real tricky one. So this one lies in between the space between all of your abdominal and your reproductive organs. It hides in like a little, what do we want to call it? An apron like wall of tissue.

And that's called the momentum name doesn't matter. But essentially this apron like wall of tissue, this type of fat cell grows substantially large. So to the point where it basically can't hold its own spaces to sell. So it starts to crowd other places. It starts to crowd your organs and expand around every organ that you have. Now, although this type of fat is normally centralized around your midsection.

If the fat deposit becomes large enough, it starts to circle things like your heart, your intestines, your liver, like literally and circle everything. This is the type of fat that's dangerous. It's not just dangerous for weight. It's dangerous for your body as well. Cuz it can also build up in your arteries. This is why doctors refer to this as what we call active fat,

because it can actively increase the risk of serious health problems. So according to research, if you were to calculate your total body fat, you've got about roughly 10% of your total fat that's visceral in nature. So someone's 300 pounds. You're having 30, 40 pounds of, of fat or has 300 pounds of fat on them, 30 to 40 pounds of fat.

That's gonna be your visceral. And that is very, very dangerous. So visceral fat contributes to a lot of things. So insulin resistance and multiple sh studies suggest that it's because visceral fat creates retinal binding protein, which is basically a protein that increases insulin resistant, visceral fat can also raise blood pressure quickly. And most importantly, it increases your risk of developing life,

threatening conditions. So medical conditions like heart attack, heart disease type two diabetes stroke, breast cancer, colon cancer. Alzheimer's a lot of stuff can happen as this starts to build up and crowd your organs and affect the way your body works. So it's safe to say that this fat, ain't no joke. Now this fat wanna guess where it comes from,

it's tied directly to your stress, hormone cortisol. There are other things that make it, but the main one is your hormone cortisol. So you're stress in your life. Whether physical from a really reconstructed or constricted diet and excessively high levels of activity, maybe it's mental from long work hours with little rest or always being on the go or even emotional with ongoing stressors or family issues that never go away.

These things are all responsible for the increase in your visceral fat. Now this fat it's very hard to get rid of. And that's because of all three of those conditions that I mentioned earlier, they can even begin to look out for those. If you're under chronic stress and under chronic danger. So what ends up happening is is your body. Can't focus on these three signals.

If it's focused on trying to deal with the stress in that moment. So you are in danger, that is the way your body sees it. When you have a lot of this fat, the way your body sees it is you need that energy stored around you. So you can be safe and be protected from that danger just to live another day. Now more than one in three people experience this type of fat in more than a 10% amount and it doesn't go away unless you balance your hormones and reduce that level of stress.

So when I'm taking a look for clients, I'm looking at what type of body type do you have and what type of fat do you store? Is it visceral? Is it subcutaneous? You're gonna have a little bit of both, but you're gonna have a main of one. And once I take a look at that, I say, okay, how can we get this person to meet those three conditions?

Make sure that you're not in the stressor mode, make sure that you're intaking enough for all of your activity level and your goal and make sure that you have enough to have your hormones. From there. The weight comes off the weight and by weight, I mean fat comes off and it comes off consistently and it doesn't yoyo back. The body is safe,

keeping you at that number because it knows that you are meeting the daily intake every single day. And now that you know the difference between the two, here's how you can determine which one you have. I want you to feel yourself, okay, not touch yourself. Please don't do that. Okay. That's the type of feeling that we do not want listening to this podcast,

please. I don't want messages saying, Ooh, I touched myself and it was great. No, feel yourself please. And this is the way that you're gonna do it. You're gonna pull the skin on the back of your Palm and you're gonna roll it gently between your fingers. The way that you're gonna feel is it's gonna be really supple. It's gonna return to the surface quickly that,

and it's gonna help basically stay in one place. So subcutaneous fat basically floats along the surface and it's like a gelatin and it can move around. So it's very light. It's very fluffy. You're gonna find it underneath your skin. So around the skin of your stomach, where you can move around the skin of your hands, back of the forearms, there's less of that there,

but it's really easy to determine this visceral fat, however is hard. It's grainy feels like cottage, cheese and texture under the skin. And I'm sure if I think of an example, like you've seen someone at the beach with like a really big belly. That's like rock like a stone. Like you can tell it's hard. It doesn't move. They get up.

They bend over still like a Boulder that is visceral in nature. An extreme example. I know, but everyone can picture it when I mention it that way. That is how you can tell the difference. So I want you to be able to tell the difference. So then you know, what type of fat you have now, this is just the tip of the iceberg with this.

And there's so much more to unpack. And before we go to today's episode, I, I want to, or before we go from today's episode, I should say, I want to let you all know that I'm doing a live training, literally on this stuff and on how you can lose your first 10 pounds naturally by balancing your hormones. So it's gonna be in two weeks time from when I,

of course film this podcast and I'm gonna drop the registry for the live training, into the show notes. So there we're gonna be discussing how to drop that weight, how to go about to keep it off. Just like I've done with Ben and 240 other people this year. So I, I work with a bucket, 10 people. If you want to get more knowledge on this and get started on dropping your weight,

as well as balancing your hormones in the process, then you are gonna wanna attend. You're gonna wanna be there cuz there's a lot to unpack with this. So the first three free 33 33, holy cow, the first 30 free spots. There we go. Say that quickly, fast five times the first 30 free spots are almost full. And after that I'm gonna be opening up additional seats for $15 each.

So I want first 30 people in there cuz I want to be able to answer everyone's individual questions, but as I have to extend the seminar longer than an hour, then obviously I've gotta make sure that that makes sense for me as well too. So make sure that you grab your free spot. So if the link is still up, then there is still space available.

Say, so just click the event, right? Link in the show notes. And you're gonna be able to hop in and register. It'll send you a link to join and then that's gonna be on September 28th, 2022. You'll be able to hop in and then we'll do the live training on that. Or you can send me an email at Andrew F I number four,

a L L studio.com. So Andrew at fit number four, all studio.com. If you're listening to this episode past the September 28th time, and we're gonna see if I can't maybe find a way to get you that training as a recording. So hopefully you guys got a lot of benefit from this and I will see you on the next episode. Well, it seems I'm all out of info juice for today.

That's all for this episode and thank you so much for listening. Please leave a raving review for me. If you've learned something good and make sure to subscribe to the podcast. So you don't miss an episode. Now, if you're in the mood for some more great content and tools to get your hormones on track, why not check out our free Facebook group and the blog on our site?

We do amazing weekly trainings in our group that me and my wife call teen teachings that give good tips for anything, hormones and metabolism related. It's also a great community where you get to share your goals and success with like-minded people just like you I'll make sure to drop both the Facebook group link and the blog link in the show notes for you. Or if,

if you are ambitious, like me, the name of the group is weight loss and balanced hormones. It'll say fit for beside it with a picture of me. So come and join us and have more.