Why Women Can’t Lose Belly Fat After Menopause

Get access to my FREE resources 👉 https://drbrg.co/3W2w1LD

I’d like to talk about why women can’t seem to lose belly fat after menopause I’m not just going to talk about that I’m also going to talk about what to do about it as well so what is going on with this menopause thing well all these changes all stem because of this one change that happens in the body the ovaries go in retirement they’re no longer going to be producing or releasing eggs now the ovary doesn’t just make eggs it also makes hor hormones so what’s going to happen as we go through menopause is we’re not going to have the eggs we’re not going to have the the quantity of hormones but normally what’s supposed to happen is the adrenal glands which are the backup are supposed to kick in the adrenal glands make all of the hormones that the ovaries make and if the adrenal glands are strong and stable going in the menopause usually there’s very little symptoms if any at all so it’s not really normal to have hot flashes it’s not normal to have any symptoms going through menopause unless there’s a problem with the adrenal glands but there’s a bit more to this okay so yes it’s true that estrogen drops but you’re also going to get uh a more significant drop in progesterone so the ratios of estrogen progesterone it actually could make it appear that you have estrogen dominance okay which is not really true it’s just the ratios of estrogen to Progesterone and some women start going on hormone repl ment therapy the problem with that is it comes with a lot of side effects okay and complications but I’m not going to get into that right now I want to focus on another thing that happens in the body that gives you a solution to handling this entire problem because naturally the adrenals are supposed to take over and compensate for the missing hormones and no this is not a mistake in nature it all is supposed to work very perfectly so in adrenals we have several things going on we do have an in increase in cortisol that’s the stress hormone this could explain why through menopause a woman might feel anxiety uh excessive nervousness difficulty sleeping uh maybe agitated and also an overall low tolerance to stress that has a lot to do with um this part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system and that’s really what I want to focus on in this video so the autonomic nervous system is basically adapting your body to the environment your body is constantly adapting to temperature different environments and one part of the nervous system called the sympathetic which is the flut fight is increasing certain things to adapt to the stress so let’s say for example you exercise right you need higher pulse rate you need higher blood pressure to compensate for the blood flow and then right when you stop that exercise you have another system that kicks in called the parasympathetic and that system is all about calming things down and bringing things back to normal so it’s really important to have this balance between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system what’s interesting about menopause is after menopause a woman is usually left with a higher sympathetic nervous system and a much lower parasympathetic nervous system and if they don’t know this going into menopause they might focus more on the estrogen problem or maybe they might just start to exercise to really get rid of that belly fat that they’re concerned about right and then they might find wow it’s not working it’s even getting worse in some cases and so they go to one doctor after the next trying to figure this this problem out so the very important thing I want to teach you right now is about focusing more on the parasympathetic nervous system okay so that’s your recovery system that is the system that influences your sleep and your ability to recover and all the fat burning occurs in this recovery phase if you’re too high in the sympathetic and you don’t have enough recovery then you’re you’re not going to lose this midsection no matter what you do and so there’s a lot of emphasis on exercise okay and exercise stimulates the sympathetic nervous system but it does not stimulate that parasympathetic nervous system and so what I’m going to recommend is you shift gears and you start to exercise your parasympathetic it would be like taking water and putting out a fire it calms the sympathetic and that’s going to help you reduce cortisol it’s going to help you sleep it’s going to help you have a midsection that’s flat and so how do we train this parasympathetic nervous system well that system is not passive it’s active in other words it is actively working to calm you down it’s actively working to reset and bring you back to homeostasis which is kind of like a normal balance internally so I guess a good uh way to explain this is that let’s say right now you run outside and you run up a hill really fast okay and as you run up the hill the sympathetic nervous system kicks in there and it’s pushing up your pulse rate really really high you get your blood pressure really high and you get at the top of the hill and you’re huffing and puffing and you were at the peak of your sympathetic nervous system as soon as you stop okay and you do nothing that parasympathetic kicks in actively it’s kind of like a wave that is pushing things down it’s pushing your pulse rate down it’s an active force that is trying to recover you okay and all you have to do is do nothing and let it do its job and so if you were just to wait until your pulse rate is all the way back to normal you would strengthen your parasympathetic but who does that what do people do when they work out they go work out they get their pulse rate really high they let it come down a little bit they rest maybe 30 seconds if that and they do it right back they start exercising and right there you are failing to exercise that recovery system you are developing and training the sympathetic to be really really strong but without enough recovery and so over time you lose the strength and capacity to recover and so your body is ending up just producing cortisol that’s creating more belly fat it has a hard time sleeping so I wanted to make a big deal about this uh video to emphasize this one simple point that if you really understand it you can apply it to a lot of different things you need to rest a lot longer between your reps and sets of exercise as well as days of exercise so if you were to do a certain set of let’s say 10 reps or a certain time period of exercise what you’d want to do is completely stop and wait for your pulse rate to come all the way down okay before you start another one of those Cycles the same thing goes with your entire workout through a given week you have to make sure you don’t overtrain you want to make sure when you exercise you give your body a chance to completely recover and reset and what you’re doing when you’re recovering is you are strengthening your parasympathetic nervous system I tell you this might sound like a very insignificant subtle thing but in practice it was very very successful I’ve had people that I’ve taken them off of working out three times a week and put them on a workout that’s just once a week and then they finally start losing weight now on the flip side it doesn’t mean you should only focus on on the recovery and do nothing and sleeping all day because it takes this exercise intensity and this stress to make it all work out now the worst type of exercise you could do for your belly is any type of sustained exercise now I’m not talking about like walking or hiking I’m talking about jogging or running or doing marathons or long distance anything sustained of a moderate pulse rate is really bad for cortisol and it’s bad for the parasympathetic because of this one principle of waves everything in nature is on a wave you have these circadian rhythms of hormones sleep cycles your heart