The Hidden Fat That’s Wrecking Your Hormones (And How to Fix It)

Could you be “healthy”… but still at risk?

In this episode, Kristin breaks down one of the most misunderstood (and most dangerous) aspects of metabolic health: visceral fat. This is the hidden fat you can’t see that’s silently impacting your hormones, inflammation, and long-term health.

While most people focus on the fat they can pinch, this conversation reveals why the fat surrounding your organs is far more important and how it may be the missing piece behind fatigue, weight struggles, hormone imbalances, and chronic disease.

The best part? This is one of the most responsive types of fat meaning you can start reducing it quickly with the right lifestyle shifts.

Tune in to hear:

•  The difference between subcutaneous fat and visceral fat and why it matters for your health 
•  Why visceral fat is the most dangerous type of fat in the body 
•  How hidden fat around your organs drives chronic inflammation 
•  The link between visceral fat, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes 
•  How visceral fat impacts your hormones, including cortisol, insulin, and leptin 
•  Why you can look “healthy” on the outside but still have high visceral fat (TOFI) 
•  How visceral fat contributes to cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s, and dementia 
•  The connection between visceral fat and fatty liver disease 
•  Why fat is actually part of your endocrine system and not just storage 
•  The key lifestyle habits that are secretly increasing your visceral fat 
•  How stress, sleep, diet, and alcohol all play a role in fat storage 
•  How to measure your visceral fat (DEXA scan, waist circumference, and labs) 
•  The most important bloodwork markers to track for metabolic health 
•  7 practical strategies to start reducing visceral fat right away 
•  Why your body prioritizes burning visceral fat first and how to use that to your advantage

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Website: https://energeticallyefficient.com/ 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Fat tissue, visceral fat tissue, subcutaneous fat tissue, etc., is really part of our endocrine system. It is an organ. People don't realize that fat is an organ. Now, what does that mean for you? Why do you care? Well, you care because if adipose tissue is part of your endocrine system, it's constantly communicating with your hormones. It has a role conducting the orchestra, I would say, of your body. And what we want is for the orchestra of our body to be playing beautiful music. Hi, and welcome back to another episode of the Energetically Efficient Show. I am your host, Christian Rowell, and today we are talking about a very exciting topic that you might have never heard about. Did you know that not all body fat is created equal? We have different kinds of body fat, and there is a critical distinction between two kinds of body fat that I'm going to talk about today. Today's topic is all about the harmful, dangerous visceral fat. And it's something that you may not have heard of, or at least that you may not know much about. So I want to change that for you today. So the first thing that I want to share is that there's a big difference between what we think of as body fat, like the fat that we can see. When you see someone walking around with a beer belly, you can literally see subcutaneous fat on their body. So subcutaneous fat, like I just mentioned, that is the kind of fat that we can see. That's the kind of fat if you pinch a part of your thighs, if you pinch on your butt, on your midsection, on your arms, anywhere in your body where you carry excess fat, for some people, it's under the chin, it might be in their back. For women, we know that spot above the bra that some women can get excess body fat there. All of that that we see is called subcutaneous fat. That's not the fat we're going to talk about today. That fat as a general rule, although I obviously want you to reduce yours so that you're in a healthy body fat range. And just as a reminder, for women, I want your body fat ideally 28% or less. That was that's considered what's metabolically healthy. Some places would say under 30%, but really 28% or less is going to get you to start to optimize your metabolism. And then on the low end, we really don't want to go below 15% because you can create all sorts of hormonal dysregulation and other dysfunction in the body if you stay too low of body fat for too long. And for those men who are listening, or for the husbands or partners or spouses or children or fathers of the women who are listening, you want to be about 10 points lower than that. So when I say I want a woman between 15% on the low end and 28% on the high end for just regular body fat, again, this is subcutaneous fat. For men, I would want those numbers to be 5% on the low end and 18% on the high end. There's about a 10% difference between men and women. But again, we're not talking about subcutaneous fat today. That fat, I don't want to say it's innocuous because it certainly creates all sorts of calamity in the body, but the fat that I want to talk to you about today, the really important fat for you to learn about and for you to understand is called visceral fat. And visceral fat is a fat on your body, you guys, that you cannot see. This fat is internal in your body. It's wrapped around your most important organs like your liver, your kidneys, your pancreas, your stomach. It's internal to the body and you cannot see it. Now, I will say if you get a DEXA scan, you can see your visceral fat because a lot of DEXA scans now will give you like a body image that will show you different radiations in terms of color for what is fat versus what is muscle. And one of the most rewarding things that I see in my practice all of the time is where a client hires me, I have them get a DEXA scan at the beginning of our work together. And then throughout the course of our work together, they're losing body fat, losing body fat, gaining muscle tissue, feeling better, having so much more energy, like really feeling so much better in their skin. And when we get that final DEXA scan at the end of our work together, it is fascinating to see the color images. I'm actually going to show you an image right here, the before and after. So you can see if you look in that middle section, how the color changes, because there's more fat on the left photo and less fat on the right photo. That visceral fat literally disappears when you put the right lifestyle modifications in place. And don't worry, we're going to talk all about what those lifestyle modifications are, so that you can leave this episode with some very actionable takeaways that can help you reduce your visceral fat. And in a moment, I'll explain why you don't want it. So we think of visceral fat as the metabolically dangerous kind of fat. And the reason that I call it metabolically dangerous is because it actually creates problems in your body. And you may be thinking, well, how can fat create problems other than it just looks unsightly? Again, remember, visceral fat is fat that you can't see. So it's not that it's creating unsightly fat that you can't see, it's that visceral fat does a couple of things that make it dangerous. One of them, and I think the biggest problem with visceral fat is that it literally drives inflammation in the body. It releases inflammatory molecules in the body that cause the body to have more systemic inflammation. So visceral fat by itself is inflammatory. It's literally creating havoc in your body while you have it. I will talk later about how much visceral fat I would like you to have versus your other fat, but but we'll get to that in a moment. So, really, because it's leaking and creating more inflammation in the body, visceral fat can be the underlying cause, or rather an underlying contributing factor rather, to a ton of disease in the body. Remember, I've shared this on prior podcasts. The root of all disease in the body is some kind of inflammation. All disease in the body begins with some sort of chronic inflammation, systemic inflammation in a certain body part, in different tissues, developed in certain organs, creating it more systemically throughout the body. And so if we want to avoid dis-ease, we must reduce our inflammation. And a primary way to reduce inflammation in the body is to reduce your visceral fat. So the other interesting thing to note, and I'll talk about why visceral fat is dangerous in addition to the inflammatory reasons in a moment, but the other thing to know about visceral fat is you could be someone who could look lean. You could look like you actually are somewhat healthy, but you could have a lot of visceral fat. So we call this thin outside fat inside, T-O-F-I, tofi, a person who is thin on the outside, but fat on the inside. Visceral fat is not just you look at someone and see that they're overweight and assume that they have visceral fat. You could have someone who actually carries a lot of excess subcutaneous fat on their body, who has a lot of body fat that you can see, and they may not have much visceral fat. They actually may be more metabolically healthy than outward appearances may reveal. So this is why I think it is so critically important for everyone to get a DEXA scan to understand their visceral fat numbers, especially you guys, especially if you're over the age of 40. And if you are approaching the age of 40, if you are in that 35 to 40 range, I recommend you get one so that you can start to see what your baseline is so you can see any changes over time. If your visceral fat gets worse and not better, we know that that's a sign that you're becoming more inflamed, that you're getting more metabolically unfit as you age, and that you have more metabolic dysfunction. Okay, so what else does visceral fat do in addition to drive chronic inflammation? Well, visceral fat is strongly linked to things like insulin resistance, one of my favorite topics, one of the things I do not want you to have. I want you to be insulin sensitive. We want your body to be sensitive to the input of carbohydrate, not resistance to, or like I've talked about on prior episodes, we don't want your body to be like the teacher in the peanuts cartoon, like wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, when it hears insulin. You don't want it to resist the input of insulin. You want to be insulin sensitive. And I'm moving my hands like this for those of you hopefully watching me on video on YouTube or Spotify, because insulin sensitive is on one end of the bandwidth and the other end of the bandwidth is full-blown type 2 diabetes. And the distance between those two is a gradation of insulin resistance. You become more insulin resistant and closer to type 2 diabetes, um, the further away you get from insulin sensitivity. So just past insulin sensitivity, you have a little bit of insulin resistance developing, but not a lot. But then as you get further down the path towards type 2 diabetes, you develop more and more insulin resistance. And visceral fat, again, drives insulin resistance. So we don't want visceral fat for that reason. Uh, visceral fat is also linked to, in addition to, of course, type 2 diabetes, because of the fact that it's linked to insulin resistance, it's also linked to cognitive decline, things like Alzheimer's, things like dementia. Why? Because again, visceral fat drives chronic inflammation, and visceral fat is a strong indicator, having a lot of visceral fat is a strong indicator of metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance, trending towards type 2 diabetes. So of course, cognitive decline goes hand in hand with that. And if you weren't aware, I know I've shared this on prior podcasts, but I think it bears repeating as many times as possible, especially in case you're just finding me for the first time, that we now refer to Alzheimer's in the literature as diabetes type three, because there is such a strong, strong correlation between metabolic dysfunction and Alzheimer's and dementia. So I don't care whether you are the tofu type, the thin outside fat inside, if you carry a lot of excess body fat, if you think you're relatively healthy, it really, really would be important for you to consider getting a DEXA scan so that you can evaluate your visceral fat in addition to the amount of lean mass you have on your body, that's your muscle tissue, and the amount of body fat you have on your body, because that's a really good indicator for you of your metabolic health as well. Okay. Another thing that visceral fat does, because remember at the outset of this, I said it does two primary things terribly. One is to drive chronic inflammation. The other, in addition to what I mentioned about it related to insulin resistance, cognitive decline, and type 2 diabetes, is that it disrupts our hormones. Okay. And let me just remind you, ladies, at this time of our life, speaking to all my ladies who are in our perimenopausal, menopausal time of life, we don't need more things disrupting our hormones. We already have a lot that's changing in our hormones, just by nature of the fact of the age that we are. So given the fact that our sex hormones are going to be declining in our perimonopausal and menopausal time of life, we really want to be mindful of those top-down hormones, top-down, meaning oxytocin, cortisol, and insulin, which impact our sex hormones. Leptin is also impacted by visceral fat. So just as a reminder, what leptin is, is it is that hormone that is released in our body after a meal where we say, we're full. It's not GLP1. Leptin is our satiety signal. So I know a lot of people think of GLP1 as the signal that tells our body we're full. But the real master hormone telling your body that you are satiated and you don't need to eat anymore is leptin. And when people get really askew with their hormones, and when they get into a tremendous amount of metabolic dysfunction, they can experience something called leptin resistance, where you really never feel like you're full despite how much you eat. And that is not a state that we want to be in. Remember how I mentioned insulin resistance? Your body is really not listening to the input of insulin, so it thinks no insulin is coming out, and more and more and more and more insulin needs to come out in order for your cells to hear it. You don't want that happening. That turns you into a fat storage machine. And you also, of course, don't want that happening with leptin because then you never feel satiated. So when we have a lot of visceral fat, it can affect our leptin hormone, it can affect our cortisol hormone, it can affect our insulin hormone, all of which downstream are going to affect our sex hormones. And then the whole hormonal milieu is just that much worse because you have this visceral fat that's creating all of the problems. So I want to make sure that you guys understand that in terms of visceral fat, and this is really true of all of our fat, but I want to obviously focus in this podcast episode about visceral fat. Fat tissue, visceral fat tissue, subcutaneous fat tissue, et cetera, fat tissue is really part of our endocrine system. It is an organ. People don't realize that fat is an organ. So your adipose tissue, your fat tissue in your body, is literally part of your endocrine system. Now, what does that mean for you? Why do you care? Well, you care because if adipose tissue slash fat, different name, same thing, if adipose tissue is part of your endocrine system, it's constantly communicating with your hormones. It has a role in the messenger conducting the orchestra, I would say, of your body. And what we want is for the orchestra of our body to be playing beautiful music where all of the different instruments are in tune, where all of them play together harmoniously so that we sound beautiful. And that would be an optimal metabolic functioning system. That would be a system that has amazing oxytocin coming out from the top, that has cortisol that isn't spiked too often, that has just the right amount of insulin that comes out, that leptin works when it's supposed to, that all of those fun sex hormones of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone work well. All of that would play this beautiful music through the orchestra, and it would include and communicate with your adipose tissue. So when we have excess visceral fat, it makes that orchestra not sound great. There is interruptions, there's inflammation, there's things that are out of tune. There are people playing off key. There are there are instruments playing when they're not supposed to be playing, because again, visceral fat is part of that communication system and it's creating all sorts of havoc downstream. So really think about the fact that fat is not just stored tissue on your body. It's part of your active system, it's part of your active endocrine system, and it truly is an organ. It's not just for storage. Okay, a few other things that I want to make sure I talk about in terms of the problems that visceral fat creates in the body. So you understand why this is such an important thing to pay attention to, is that it increases, so it can cause what I'll refer to as downstream metabolic chaos. So visceral fat, it's not just that it creates inflammation, that it disrupts our hormones, those things are, of course, all bad, but it's also impacting our body in several other ways. I'm just gonna peek at my notes for a second because I took notes on four specific things that visceral fat can do in order to create that metabolic chaos. So it can, number one of the four, is it can increase free fatty acids, which flood the liver. So visceral fat can put a lot of downstream impact, negative impact on the liver. Again, part of it has to do with the inflammation it's creating, but it's also because it's releasing these free fatty acids and that those can impact liver. So that's one of the things that visceral fat can do in terms of the metabolic chaos it creates. Another thing is that it visceral fat, and this is one of the things that I feel like is the most supported in the science, and the one of the things I wish people knew more, is that visceral fat creates fatty liver. Okay, have you ever heard of something called NAFLD that's non-alcoholic fatty liver disease? You do not want that, my friends. None of us want non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. People have heard of fatty liver in the context of someone who drinks too much or in the context of, you know, a full-blown alcoholic or someone who's damaged their liver over the course of many years and decades. But I'm talking about for someone who doesn't even drink alcohol or who drinks very little or who doesn't have a problem with alcohol, you can still develop a condition called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And truly, if I had to summarize non-alcoholic fatty liver disease most succinctly, I would say it is a result of I don't want to say extreme, but it's a result of pretty severe metabolic dysfunction where your body is producing way too much insulin out of the pancreas. There's way too much glucose going into the storage form of glycogen in the liver, and the liver is getting assaulted by this glycogen all of the time, or this glucose that it has to store as glycogen all the time. And more importantly than that, it's not being released. You aren't engaged in things like strength training, in things like really good exercise, walking a lot, maybe doing some running, maybe doing some sprinting up the hill, maybe doing some really high-intensity exercise. And like I mentioned, strength training that's going to help that liver recover. So non-alcoholic fatty liver disease can be found much more often in someone who has high visceral fat. And by the way, you guys, and I promised you I'd get to it. I will talk about what pounds we want to look for in terms of visceral fat, but you aren't going to believe it. Like it is way, way, way less than you would think, especially considering like the varied degrees of weights that we all have around the planet. The amount of visceral fat that I want you to have on your body is a very, very small number. I mean, I want it close to zero. So it gets a really small number, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. Okay, the third thing in terms of the metabolic chaos that is created by visceral fat is that it impairs insulin sensitivity, again, because it's making you more insulin resistant. Therefore, the body stores more fat, especially in the abdomen. So not only are you creating more visceral fat for yourself by virtue of having visceral fat, because it's like this vicious cycle of which came first the chicken or the egg, but you're also going to have more subcutaneous fat in your abdomen, meaning the kind of fat you can see. For us women, we think of it like the muffin top that hangs over pants or hangs over swimsuits, or, you know, it just feels like you never have a flat stomach or you never have that six pack, or you're always wanting to hide your midsection in tops, or you want to be in a one-piece swimsuit instead of a two-piece swimsuit. All of that is driven by excess visceral fat, which is why it's so important for you to understand your number. And so, just by way of a fourth thing, how the metabolic chaos is created, and I've sort of said this already, but it's really just that it's creating this vicious cycle of visceral fat leads to more visceral fat. And then it impairs your metabolism more, creates chronic inflammation, and all of that leads to more fat gain. So if I was starting my fat loss journey and I was like, what do I even focus on? The first thing I would do, and I have all of the clients who work with me one-on-one do this, is that you have to go get a DEXA scan. And I say that because I want to see your visceral fat number, I want to see your body fat number, I want to see how much lean tissue, how much muscle you have on your body. And then of course I want to see your total overall weight. And then I want to see your bone density. If we're tracking bone density, visceral fat, your lean tissue, meaning your muscle, your overall body fat, and your overall weight, I can help you so well create a program for yourself and then write you customized meal plans are going to allow you to get to a point where you're losing all that visceral fat and losing all a lot of excess body fat so that you feel and look really good, also. So we really want to get out of the cycle of creating more visceral fat and more inflammation and just more fat in our body so that we don't feel well. Okay. So how do we get visceral fat, right? Like we've talked about what it is, we've talked about earlier it's located, which remember is deep inside the cavities of the body or the cavity of the body because it's around those really important organs. But how do we get it in the first place? Well, the good news is if you've listened to other episodes of the Energetically Efficient Show or followed me on any social media, you'll know that I talk about several things that I recommend as long-term lifestyle habits that you adopt if you want to optimize your metabolic health. And the good news is those are the kinds of things you can also do to reduce your visceral fat. So the way that we get visceral fat is things that you're, when I say these, you're gonna be like, oh, really, Kristen, those things are all causing visceral fat in my body. So just wait for it. The answer is yes. So one of the fastest ways to get visceral fat is to be in chronic stress. So to be elevating our cortisol all the time, to be spiking cortisol all day long. So for all of my high achiever listeners, which are many of you, I can tell you for certain that when I was practicing law, if I had not been regularly exercising, if I hadn't been running, if I hadn't been strength training, if I hadn't been doing classes and all sorts of different things that I did through all those 17 years of practicing law, I would have probably had a lot higher visceral fat because I had chronic stress all the time. I probably was producing cortisol more than I realized. And that is a driver of visceral fat. So number one is we want to start meditating. We want to start doing things like reducing our stress. We want to take walks in nature, we want to get sunlight in our eyes first thing in the morning, we want to wind down before bed. We don't want to drink coffee too late in the afternoon. There's all sorts of things we can do to reduce our stress. And then, of course, just choose to spend time with people who are good for our central nervous system as opposed to who dysregulate it. Another driver of visceral fat, in addition to the chronic stress, is poor sleep. So if you're not focused on sleep, if you're not getting adequate sleep, if you're not focused on getting quality deep sleep and quality REM sleep every single night, you are going to increase the amount of visceral fat that you have because poor sleep, especially poor sleep over time, is going to drive visceral fat. So first we want to focus on stress. Second, we want to focus on sleep. And obviously, I'll talk more about some of the key takeaways for you as we go further into this episode. Third, and you know I hate these, third, is if we consume an ultra-processed high sugar diet. Okay, so if we're having tons of sugar, if we're having a lot of processed food, if we're doing fast food with our family all the time, if we're eating, you know, buns on our burgers, if we're having a lot of pasta, if we're eating a lot of rice, if we are consuming a lot of candy, if we're eating tons of candy bars, all of those things are gonna drive visceral fat. All of those things are also gonna drive blood sugar roller coasters, they're gonna create insulin resistance, they're gonna make you lack energy, they're gonna make you lack motivation. None of that is good for you. So the third thing, again, that drives visceral fat is an ultra-processed high sugar diet. The fourth thing, and this is a big one, and I work on this with clients all the time, the fourth thing truly is alcohol consumption. Now, I'm not saying you have to be a teetotaler in order to get rid of your visceral fat, but if you're someone who finds yourself either having a glass of wine or two a night to wind down, or finding yourself having four, five, six, seven drinks on the weekends because that's just the lifestyle you've created for yourself. You may want to take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself if you are still willing in your 40s, in your 50s, in your 60s, if you are still willing to make those same lifestyle choices that many of us might have done in our 20s or 30s because it's creating so much visceral fat. Again, visceral fat is going to block everything in your life from getting better in terms of your metabolic health. So we don't want to be drinking a lot of alcohol, which is going to be one of the primary drivers of visceral fat. So that's number four. Number five, and I I always think these are so interesting because, like I said, they're they're all, I mean, the the opposite side of them is all what I recommend in terms of my clients. So we'll get to those. But the fifth one is having a sedentary lifestyle. So if you're sitting behind your desk all day, if you're only Walking a few thousand steps a day, if you're not tracking your steps so that you actually get out and get movement, if you're not getting in nature, if you're not strength training. If I have been a broken record about one thing over time, it's been strength training, strength training, and strength training. And most importantly, why it is so important. So I really encourage you guys to start a strength training program. If you want to reduce your fat, remember, Discover Strength is my favorite place. It's what I recommend. We are opening in Nashville on May 16th. And so you can come in and get a workout at Discover Strength Nashville. If you're local to Nashville, you can get a workout at a Discover Strength location across the country. There are truly so many locations. They are in Minnesota, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, New Jersey, now Tennessee, now Naples, Florida. They're in Georgia. Boy, there's I know there's now one that's going to be opening in Lake St. Louis. I think that's in Missouri. There's so many coming around the country, you guys. So I just recommend that you go to the DiscoverStrength.com website, click on studios, and see if there's a studio near you or coming to you. And even if there isn't, you can do virtual workouts with them. I have clients all over the country who are doing virtual workouts with Discover Strength. So there truly isn't an excuse because movement, including strength training and not being sedentary, is critical for avoiding visceral fat. And then I've mentioned five things. So just by way of a recap before I get to number six, number one is chronic stress, that elevated cortisol is going to drive visceral fat. Number two is poor sleep. Number three is ultra-processed high sugar diets. Number four is alcohol. We don't want to drink too much alcohol because that's going to drive visceral fat. Number five is having a sedentary lifestyle. So this is not getting our movement in, not strength training, being too sedentary, being stuck behind our desk. And then six, the sixth one is when we have hormonal changes. So to all my perimenopausal and menopausal women, we unfortunately are more susceptible to visceral fat at this time of life because of those hormonal changes. So remember when I mentioned earlier in this episode that visceral fat can be affected by our cortisol, our insulin, our leptin, and vice versa, that visceral fat can affect those things. This is why it's so important to get all these lifestyle habits dialed in at this point. Okay. It's so critical for us to be focusing on what are the lifestyle habits that are going to reduce my visceral fat, that are going to lower it, or if we already have optimal visceral fat that are going to keep that visceral fat off my body so that I don't gain more. What are those lifestyle habits? We'll move into those in a second, but we really want to focus on that, especially for my perimenopausal and menopausal ladies, because hormonal changes by themselves can cause us to increase our visceral fat, can increase visceral fat. It's just unfortunate. And I would argue that this evidence, the hormonal changes, is really more about the lifestyle drivers around this time than it is about, okay, my hormones dropped and now I have more visceral fat. It's not that simple. It's really we are in the perimenopausal and menopausal times of life and we're really busy with our career. We're really busy with our kids. Maybe we have aging parents. We have the confluence of all of these different factors happening at once. And because of that, that means that we are abandoning our strength training regimen. We aren't walking as much. We aren't getting in nature. We aren't taking care of ourselves. We're not sleeping enough. We're spiking our cortisol too much. All of those things contribute to visceral fat. So I'm telling you, we really need to focus on, especially for my petomenopausal and menopausal ladies, which I know are many of you, we really have to focus on how we can optimize all of the different lifestyle factors to reduce our visceral fat. Okay, so other than a DEXA scan, how do we know what our visceral fat is? If you didn't get a DEXA scan and you want to know your visceral fat, a really easy way to see whether you're at risk. Now, this isn't going to tell you how much visceral fat you have, but it's a way for you to know whether you're at risk is you would take a tape measure and you would measure your waist circumference. So that means really basically right at your belly button and you would measure all the way around. And if your waist circumference is more than 35 inches, chances are you have a fair amount of visceral fat. So it's just a really good thing to measure. But like I've said, there are some people that have larger bodies that have a small amount of visceral fat and some people that look really what I refer to sometimes as skinny fat. So they might look like they are thin, but they are fat on the inside because they have more visceral fat. So the the gold standard way to do it is for you to get a DEXA scan because then you actually know what your visceral fat numbers are. But if you want to see if you're at risk, you could always measure your waist circumference and see if you are more than 35 inches. And then another thing to look at, and I work on this with clients all the time, I look at labs, we dive into their blood work, I help them identify what questions they should ask their doctor or nurse practitioner about their blood work because there's some markers that are just really, really important. So if you have a high fasting insulin, that's a huge one for visceral fat. So if your fasting insulin is high, which is indicative of insulin resistance that's developed over time, chances are you have higher than desirable visceral fat. And so when you look at your fasting insulin, this is something that you have to request from your doctor. Do you know that fasting insulin is not something that we do as a matter of course? It drives me crazy. You will always get your fasting glucose on a blood panel, but you won't get fasting insulin on your blood panel unless you ask for it. So please ask your doctor or nurse to add fasting insulin. And then once you get your fasting insulin, we want to see that as five or less. We want that number to be pretty low. And there are tons of people with numbers in the teens, 20s, and higher. So just know that if you have high fasting insulin, chances are you have less than desirable visceral fat. And then we also want to look at two other numbers that I work on with clients all the time, and that is triglycerides. So your triglycerides are a measure of fat in your blood. And the higher your triglycerides, the higher likely is your visceral fat. So your triglycerides, I always say I want that 75 or less. I would like your triglycerides to be under 75. Mine are typically in the high 40s, low 50s, simply because I keep myself so active and I take good care of my metabolic health. But if I have clients that hire me and they're in the 90s or 100 or 110, I just tell them over the course of our time together, we're gonna get that down under 75. And we're always able to. I had a client, a woman one time hire me. Her triglycerides were higher than 225. And in the time that we worked together over the course of six months, we got her triglycerides down to 90, which was incredible. And guess what? She had been trying to get pregnant for years. She had had two failed IVFs after before she hired me. And part of the reason she wanted to work with me is so she could become metabolically healthy, so she could actually have a child because she had received a PCOS diagnosis, which is truly just insulin resistance in the body. And so we reversed her PCOS. We got her triglycerides down to 90, and she got pregnant, which is amazing. If you look at your Western medicine labs, they will tell you that triglycerides under 150 are fine or that under 150 are good or quote unquote within range. That's not optimal. Optimal for triglycerides is 75 or less. So I'd like you to focus on getting your triglycerides down to 75 or less. And then the last thing you want to look for on your blood work before getting, or in addition to looking at your DEXA scan number, is you want to also look at your HDL. So low HDL can be a signal that you have higher visceral fat because HDL, remember, is what we've traditionally always called good cholesterol. Now, I would argue that not all LDL cholesterol is bad cholesterol, and most practitioners who understand cholesterol would agree with me on that. But HDL specifically, we actually want higher. So I remember one time my HDL was at 98, which I was so thrilled about. Like basically the closer to 100 it is or over 100, awesome. But people have HDL that's like 40, 35, 30. Those are terrible numbers. At a minimum, you want your HDL over 40, but you want to kind of bump it up to closer to 100. So how do we do that? We avocados, avocado oil, olives, olive oil. We have walnuts, we have salmon, we have things that have really good essential fatty acids in them. And then you can increase that HDL to a really optimized number. And so we'd look at our HDL. And then of course, you would really know what your visceral fat number is if you get a DEXA scan. And I'll talk about what my DEXA scans have shown over the years after I get into how to reduce your visceral fat. Okay, so what are the ways that we could reduce our visceral fat? So I've created a list for you guys. And this list may sound familiar to other things that I've talked about in this podcast episode, but that's what's the good news is it's not like you have to find some new strategy out there. It's really coming back to the basics that I recommend over time. So number one is we really want to figure out ways to manage our stress. So we want to reduce that cortisol. Cortisol spiking is going to contribute to visceral fat, especially when it's consistent over time. So managing our cortisol is truly a non-negotiable. And so we want to do nervous system regulation. We want to spend time in nature. You might consider doing breath work. I do breath work a lot of times at night before bed. Sometimes I also do it in the morning, but breath work is an excellent tool for regulating your central nervous system. In fact, there was an image that I took. I did a really intense breath work session at the last spiritual retreat that I was on. And I'm going to put the image up here of what happened to my blood sugar while I was in that breath work session. You guys, you wouldn't even believe it. So let me just give you a little bit of context here because I think this story is so interesting. So shortly before that breathwork session, we had taken a break for lunch on this retreat. And I hadn't eaten yet. I was breaking my fast and I thought I really wanted to go to this place that I'd been to in Mexico the year prior, where they offer these low-carb gluten-free pizzas. So I thought, I'm going to get one of these little small personal for yourself low carb, gluten-free pizzas. But the truth is the crust, even though it's not made of gluten or anything like that, it does have some rice flour. It had some tapioca flour. So it does have more carbs than let's say something that you made at home with your own like cauliflower crust, right? Or like an almond flour crust. It still had more carbs in that. So I ate this pizza. It was excellent. And then I started walking. And I was walking and walking and walking. And then I walked back to the retreat where we started a session of breath work. So my food had digested, and I noticed that my blood sugar had come up a little bit because I had had that pizza, of course. And so it had raised probably about, I'd say 15 to 20 points. And then we started the breath work. You guys, my blood sugar plummeted to, I think it got to below 70 during that breath work session. But again, I'm going to put the image right here so you can see it. It was so remarkable and such a reminder of how much our cortisol drives our blood sugar. So we have blood sugar that's responding to our stress all the time. So I know this, by the way, because remember I wear a CGM. So just a little quick plug for my favorite continuous glucose monitor right now, which is called Stello, S-T-E-L-O. And I love it because it integrates with the Aura Ring app. But even if you don't have an Aura ring, even if that's not something you use, you can look at the Stello app itself on your phone and see what your blood sugar is doing in real time. So I could see that my blood sugar went up a little bit after I had that pizza. But again, because I started walking after it was going down pretty quickly because I was using that sugar for fueling my exercise. But then as we got back to the retreat center and I started to do the breath work, my blood sugar went all the way down to 70 or below. It was quite remarkable. So just as a reminder, we're talking about ways to reduce visceral fat. And the number one way is to reduce your stress. And so that would include things like breath work, being in nature, and other central nervous system regulation tactics like meditation. So we got to reduce our stress. That's number one. Number two, and this is truly, I know I'm a broken record guys, but it is one of the most effective interventions for visceral fat, and that is to strength train. We must strength train. Okay. I recommend discover strength. I talk about this all the time. We have to strength train if we want to reduce our visceral fat. Strength training is going to improve your insulin sensitivity. It's going to get you away from that insulin resistance and make you become more insulin sensitive. And so it's truly one of the most effective strategies for being able to reverse insulin resistance and to reduce that visceral fat. So number two is strength training. Probably not a better exercise you could do if you want to reduce your visceral fat. Number three is that we're going to make sure that we get a lot of movement during the day. The number of walks I take with the dogs during the day on breaks from morning, noon, and night is remarkable. And I do it on purpose because I want to be in nature. I want to get sun. I will do a whole nother episode in the future about sunlight and about the importance of getting sunlight during the day. So even today, before I came here to record this podcast episode, I sat outside for a few minutes with the dogs after a client meeting. And I got done with the meeting and I sat outside with the dogs. I'd already walked them in the morning, but I wanted to be outside in the sun during the time where I can get vitamin D. So most people don't realize that it's not just that you can be out at any time willy-nilly to get vitamin D. You have to be out within the vitamin D window. And so for today in Nashville, the window of vitamin D is 8:50 a.m. So I'd have to be outside between 8:50 a.m. And of course I was out with the dogs long before that and 445 p.m. So that is the window of vitamin D that I can get in my body. So I went outside in a tank top in shorts. I had as much skin as exposed as possible. And I'll do that again this afternoon after I get done recording with you guys. I will make sure I take the dogs out and that I'm getting as much vitamin D as I can on my skin because it improves my mood, it improves my hormone function, it makes everything in my body work better. Vitamin D is such a key ingredient to healthy bodies that I'm gonna do a whole podcast episode on it sometime. Okay, so making sure that daily movement. And then we want to make sure, especially after we eat a meal, that we're walking after we eat a meal because it's that post-perandial blood glucose stroll. It just means walking after a meal is gonna reduce that blood sugar. So we want to make sure we're doing that. So number one is regulating our stress. Number two is strength training, and number three is getting that daily movement. My goal for myself every day is 15,000 steps. I very many days get over 20,000 steps, but 15,000 steps in my minimum. And I am constantly shocked at how many people work with me, hire me, who are getting less than 5,000 steps a day. And I will just tell you, if that is you, please, please hear me when I say you have to change your lifestyle. You must. Like it's not, it's not just a nice idea. I should strive for more. It's you have to figure out a way to get more steps in your day, or you are going to suffer from chronic inflammation, a lot of visceral fat, metabolic dysfunction, frankly, misery. You're not gonna have much energy. You're not getting enough vitamin D because you're not outside walking. There's so many reasons that I need you getting more steps than that. So please, please hear me when I say it's really important to get more movement than that. Okay, so we talked about the first three. The fourth, also one of my favorite topics, is eating a protein forward diet. So protein forward nutrition. We want to make sure that we're focusing on getting adequate amounts of protein in a day. I've talked plenty on here about the fact that I want that to be at least 30 grams in each meal. So let's say 30 to 40 grams, ladies, for your meals. For men, it's closer to 50. So you have that in each meal. And if you do that three times a day or four times a day for ladies, that's easy for you to get 120 grams of protein. 30 grams of protein four times a day is 120, or 40 grams of protein of protein three times a day is 120. So just make sure that you're focusing on protein. This is animal proteins are the best sources, but you can also do tofu, you can do soy, you can do plant-based protein powders, you can do whey-based protein powders, you can mix this up with protein shakes, chia seed puddings, or you can do your chickens, beefs, salmon, other fish, turkey, uh, poultry, all sorts of things. Just make sure that you're getting at least 30 grams of protein in each sitting, and that's going to support your satiety. It's going to help you build the muscle tissue, it's going to support your metabolic rate, all things that we need if we want to reduce our visceral fat. Okay, so in addition to the first four, the fifth, and I've talked about this in other podcasts, but I love this topic. This is time restricted eating. This is not just eating whenever we want, wherever the wind blows, 6 a.m., 11 p.m. No, this is saying I have a window of time during the day when I eat. I eat, let's say, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Maybe I eat from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Maybe I eat from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. I don't care. I just want to make sure that you are restricting the window of time in which you eat. And an intermittent fast is 12 hours or more without food, going all the way up to 24 hours. Longer term fasting is when you go 24 hours or longer. So maybe you get done eating at 7 p.m. You set your fasting timer. Here's the app I use. It's called Zero Longevity. I love it. So I use that app to track my fast every single day. And for example, I had broke my fast before I got here. So before I got here to start recording for you, and according to my app, because I was uh broke my fast before, I fasted for, let's see, it was 16 hours and 42 minutes. So I fasted between 6.50 p.m. last night and then it was 11:30 this morning. Now, some days I might only fast for 13 hours. Some days I might fast for 18 hours, but I'm really paying attention to my hunger and satiety signals. So that I make sure I at least have three opportunities, ideally four opportunities, where I'm stimulating muscle protein synthesis. So on a day like this, when I had my first meal at 11:30, I'll probably eat my second meal at let's call it 2:30, and then another at 5:30. And if I still feel hungry, I might have something else at eight and then call it, or I'll just be stretch out my dinner until later and not eat that till like six or six thirty. So ideally, if you're gonna eat earlier in the morning, you would stop earlier in the evening. If you're gonna eat later in the day, you would eat later in the evening, but you would stop around eight o'clock at night just so that you can help with your sleep. Okay, so time-restricted eating, aka, intermittent fasting is another one. And then I just have two more for you. So I know we've already talked about five of the seven that I'm gonna talk about. So the six and seven, six is sleep optimization, because like I mentioned at the outset of this, poor sleep is going to increase your visceral fat storage. We're trying to reduce our visceral fat. We want it as low as possible, which means we have to get adequate sleep. I think my sleep score last night was like a 93. I was so happy. I've been very focused on sleep lately. Okay, last night it was 89, which is pretty good. But then the night before, I had a 94, which was so amazing. So today, 89, I had an hour and 41 minutes of REM sleep and one hour of deep sleep. And the night before that, I had one hour and 44 minutes of REM sleep and one hour and 28 minutes of deep sleep. So my sleep scores and how well I sleep is a lot of practice over time and a lot of iterating what my sleep routine is, what things help the best for me before sleep, what I need to do to wind down before sleep, and all of these things I work on consistently so that I can optimize the kind of sleep I get. I've also discovered that for me lately, just in terms of building two businesses, being very busy, um, exhausting myself often during the day, that I need more sleep. So I'm not judging myself for needing seven, a half, eight hours of sleep when I used to survive on six, six and a half more regularly. So I'm just paying attention to what my body needs. And that's of course helping keep my visceral fat down, which is incredible. And then seventh, certainly last, but definitely not least, is having a really honest conversation with ourselves about our relationship with alcohol. So this is, I'll just refer to it as having an awareness about what we drink, being conscious about what being intentional about what we drink, and more importantly, being intentional and conscious about when we don't. So it's not, oh, I'm with these people, everyone's drinking. I always drink when I'm with these people. I'm just gonna do it mindlessly, I'm just gonna do it unconsciously. It's do I actually want to have a drink tonight? Do I want to have three drinks tonight? How am I gonna feel tomorrow when I do that? And really asking yourself the kind of questions that by the time we hit our 40s, 50s, and beyond, we really need to start paying attention to. We really, my desire for you guys, if you are a regular listener to the energetically efficient show, is for you to become more intentional and conscious about everything in your life. I know it feels like it's hard, but it truly is when life gets better. When you start to realize that you are the co-creator of your reality, that you are creating all of the time with source, it becomes magical. It truly is the most exciting thing for us to recognize as we are here living in these human bodies in this lifetime. And so I really encourage you to become more conscious and intentional about how and when you drink alcohol and not do it mindlessly. I still have the occasional glass of wine, have the occasional drink of alcohol, but I'm very intentional and conscious about when I do it and how I do it. And I try to be really mindful about the situations and circumstances in which I do it. Okay. Moderate intake, I should mention, can increase visceral fat. So we really, really, especially as we age, we want to be mindful about our alcohol consumption. So I told you I would give you some tips in terms of what I want yours to be, but let me just remind you of what these seven things are that you can do now. These are your practical takeaways to reduce your visceral fat. So number one is to regulate, reduce your stress. Number two is to start a strength training program. I put a link to Discover Strength below this video. Number three is to increase your daily movement. I do recommend you consider getting an aura ring so you can see what your steps are each day. Number four is making sure we're focusing on protein when we eat, having a protein-forward diet or lifestyle. Number five is that we're going to engage in some intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating, which again is simply not eating for 12 hours, 13 hours, maybe 14 hours, 15, 16, 17, et cetera. But start with 12 or 13, you'll feel better. Number six is optimizing our sleep, making sure we're getting focused on really good sleep. And number seven, of course, is being conscious and intentional about your choices around alcohol. Okay, so last but certainly not least, I want to tell you what should you look for in your visceral fat? Well, before we start a recording, I pulled up my most recent DEXA scan, which was last summer in the summer of 2025. And I'll get another one this summer. But last summer of 2025, my visceral fat was 0.12 pounds. So that means it's just 0.12. So it's not even over a pound. I want your visceral fat, you guys, to be less than one pound. So please write that down. We want it less than one pound. I have clients hiring me all the time who have two pounds of visceral fat. Three pounds of visceral fat, four pounds of visceral fat. I had a client hire me who had seven and a half pounds of visceral fat. That is a very dangerous amount of visceral fat to have. And just so that you know, I remember reading the book several years ago called Outlive by Dr. Peter Atea. I know he's become somewhat of a controversial figure these days, but he has some really excellent data in that book about visceral fat, specifically in chapter six. And one of the things that he shared is if you take your average, let's call it a 40-year-old man who weighs 200 pounds and who's 20% body fat, that literally describes so often the average man. Okay. If that average man who's 40 years old, 200 pounds with 20% body fat, that means he has 40 pounds of fat on his body. Okay. So if just four pounds of that 40 pounds of fat on his body is visceral fat, okay, if just four of those pounds is visceral fat, he is in the top 5% of cardiovascular risk for heart attack, stroke, et cetera, for his age and gender. It's important, you guys. We got to know this stuff. The higher your visceral fat, the higher your risk of cardiovascular events. So when I saw seven and a half on a client who hired me, I was like, wow, we have a lot of work to do. And I'm happy to report that we took several pounds of visceral fat off his body during the course of our six months together. I wanna say we got it down to like two point something by the end of six months, and he was continuing all of these amazing practices that we worked on in six months so that he could improve his visceral fat even more. So mine over time has been, I was just looking back at mine. I'm going way back to 2019. So I had 0.6, another 0.6, then I had 0.11, which was an experiment that I ran that made it really low. That was in 2021. In 2022, it was 0.23. Later in 2022, it was 0.34. In 2023, and I would say this is when perimenopause started to creep on me the most. In 2023, it was 0.50. And then I really got serious over the course of a month, and I got it down to 0.14, and then it was back up to 0.27. It went up to 0.34 in February of 2024, and that was before I started HRT. A month or two after I started HRT, it went down to 0.1, and then it went up to 0.8, and now it's down to 0.12. So it's always been less than a pound for the most part. The highest I ever saw was 0.6. And so you really want to optimize it by ideally having it at 0.5 or less. But let's just start with getting you to less than one pound of visceral fat total. So the good news about visceral fat, and I want to leave you with this because I think this is such an exciting way to consider a reframe, is that visceral fat actually responds really well to all these lifestyle things that I've indicated. Think about it this way, you guys. Your body's highly intelligent. It's always wanting you to survive. It wants you to become the survival of the fittest. So when you start losing weight, when you start engaging in intermittent fasting, when you start strength training, the first thing your body's gonna do is reduce that visceral fat. I know you want it, maybe, ladies, off the back of your triceps first. I know you want it off your butt or your thighs first. I know you might want it off the subcutaneous fat that you see in your midsection, but your body is smart and it knows that that visceral fat is driving chronic inflammation and all sorts of other dis-ease in the body. So you actually are gonna have visceral fat reduce many times before the rest of the fat in your body. I say to clients all the time, the fastest way to torch visceral fat is to start doing one 36-hour fast once a week. So, like, don't eat on Mondays or don't eat on Wednesdays or don't eat on Sundays. Whatever day you choose, you literally have dinner the night before, you go to bed, you don't eat that next day, you go to bed and you wake up and you have breakfast. It is just one day of not eating with two full sleeps. And that's a 36-hour fast, and that will torch visceral fat because your body will preferentially use that fat for fuel when you're not eating, and that's what's going to help reduce it, which is amazing. So you can improve your metabolic health. You don't have to extreme diet to do this. You just have to adopt all these lifestyle factors that I've already talked about. And that's exciting because it can be empowering to reduce your visceral fat, not scary. So, my goal for you, as you know, I talk about on this podcast all the time, is for you to become metabolically flexible, for you to have optimal metabolic health, for you to thrive, for you to have energy, and reducing your visceral fat is just one of the ways you can do that. I would argue it's one of the most important ways you can do that. So make sure that you're taking a few practical takeaways from this episode and implement them in your life right away. If you ever want to reach out about private one-on-one coaching, I'll pop a link below this video so you can look at that. And then make sure you follow along for when I launch Hot and Fit, which is twice a year. This is Hot and Fit AF over 40, and also my Radiant Reset Detox course, which we launch four times a year. I appreciate you being here, and I look forward to seeing you on another episode of the Energetically Efficient Show. Bye.