Episode 37: Eating Healthy But Still Gaining Belly Fat? Here's What's Really Going On!

If you’ve been eating healthy… cutting back… trying to “be good" and yet your belly fat just won’t budge — this episode is for you.

Especially if the weight feels like it’s settling right around your middle…
your clothes aren’t fitting the same…
and you’re starting to wonder, “What am I doing wrong?”

In this episode, I’m breaking down why this is happening (and no — it’s not just your hormones!)

We’re talking about what’s actually going on underneath stubborn midlife belly fat, and why some of the most common things women are told to do — like eating less, cutting carbs, or fasting longer — can actually make it harder for your body to let go of weight.

If you’ve been feeling:

•  stuck despite doing everything “right” 
•  frustrated with weight gain around your middle 
•  confused about what actually works anymore 
•  or worried your body just isn’t responding the way it used to 

Then this episode will help you finally connect the dots.

Inside, you’ll learn:

•  why belly fat in midlife is a metabolic signal (not just a calorie issue) 
•  what blood sugar and insulin have to do with fat storage 
•  why “eating healthy” isn’t always enough 
•  and what your body actually needs to start feeling safe enough to release weight 

This is the episode that will help you stop blaming yourself…
 and start understanding your body in a completely different way.

Looking for personal guidance to help navigate your own midlife metabolism?

Let's talk about what's going on inside YOUR body and life and I will give you some clear, tangible steps to help you move forward in your health journey.

Book your complimentary discovery session here.

Want to learn more about The Metabolic Balance Program? 

Discover what everyone is talking about! The world's leading personalized nutrition and hormone-balancing system with the highest global success rate for sustainable weight loss and health transformation without pills, shakes or expensive proprietary foods.

One nutrition plan based on YOUR bloodwork. No deprivation. No one-size-fits-all diet. Just real food matched to your own biochemistry for real, lasting results.

Watch the information video here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey, hey there! Welcome back to the podcast. Now, in this episode, we're going to be talking about for some ladies, this might be a sensitive subject, but it is one that we cannot ignore in midlife. I'm talking about that fun little visitor that starts to come and hang out around our waistline as we approach our 40s and our 50s and go through menopause and beyond. If you have noticed that your weight is shifting in a way you don't want it to shift, and not just anywhere, but right around your middle in that lower belly area around the waistline, and it feels like no matter how healthy you try to eat, or how much you try to cut back, or how much you exercise, it just doesn't seem to want to budge. Then I first of all I want you to know that it isn't random and it's not necessarily anything you're doing wrong, and it also, and this is very important to understand, is not just because of your hormones. There is a reason that this is happening and happens to so many women, and once you understand why things start to make a whole lot more sense, and hopefully by the end of this episode, you will no longer be just putting it down to perimenopause, menopause, focusing on the estrogen, progesterone element, which so many of us do, because that's pretty much what we always hear about. And instead, you're going to be so much more clear on why you have that annoying little mommy pouch, as I like to call it, that is something that just seems so so stubborn to ever want to leave. So this is an important topic because and it goes beyond just how your clothes fit. This is about how you likely feel in your body. Because the truth is, if you are experiencing this middle, this middle of the body belly fat, then it's highly likely that at the same time you are also feeling other symptoms as well. You are likely feeling quite heavy in yourself, you're likely feeling some sort of restrictive movement elsewhere. You might feel very puffy and bloated and just overall uncomfortable. So it's not just about not liking the fact that your clothes no longer fit and going shopping for new clothes isn't fun anymore. You might even feel a little disconnected. You may feel that mentally things are shifting as well. Emotionally, emotionally, you're just a little more raw, and you're you're starting to disconnect from life as you're starting to lose confidence and what's going on in your body and how you look and feel. You probably feel like you don't quite recognize yourself anymore. And that is when this part really starts to get women down. And maybe you are one of these women. What we're going to talk about in today's episode is we're going to walk through why belly fat in midlife behaves differently. Why, if you've never experienced it before, it just seems to be an inevitable part of going through this midlife transition. We're going to talk about what your body is actually trying to tell you, the parts that you don't often hear. We're going to talk about why the things you've been told to do often either don't work or stop working after a period of time. And then, of course, we're going to talk about what it is that your body actually needs instead to really address the root cause issue, not just short term, but long term as well. Now I hear so many times from women when I start working with them, I never had this weight before. I feel like everything just sits right here. It's all in my middle. Some women feel that they can lose weight elsewhere, but that midsection, no matter what they do, no matter how many crunches they do, no matter how much they cut back on what they're eating, no matter how much they try to revamp what you know, the healthy foods that they're eating, it still doesn't want to budge. And underneath that, there's this quiet fear for these women. Then this might sound relatable to you. Is this just how it is now? Like, is there really anything I can do? Is this the power of our hormone fluctuation? Is this the power of menopause? This is the that fear that sits in women's minds and often gets them to a point where they just stop trying because they think that everything's working against them and it's just an inevitable part of getting older and going through this perimenopause-menopause transition, so they might as well just accept it. But here's what's actually going on we're really going to talk about what's happening here because belly fat in midlife it's very often nothing to do with calories, instead, it's about how well your body is balancing blood sugar and how responsive it is to insulin, which is a hormone that our body secretes in order to control our blood sugar levels. When your blood sugar is constantly going up and down throughout the day, I call it the blood sugar roller coaster. What happens is your body has to keep producing more insulin. Because insulin's job is to then take the glucose, the blood the sugar in our blood, out of the bloodstream so that it's not constantly spiking and crashing, and take it to our cells, essentially knock on the door and say, Here you go, I have some ready energy for you. And then in a healthy body, the cells will take in that energy, say, Welcome, come on in. They'll take in the insulin, which is bringing the glucose with it, and it will then distribute it throughout the body where it can be used for energy. One of the primary places that our body stores this insulin is right around our midsection. So if your body is in this constant cycle of spiking blood sugar, crashing, spiking, crashing, then it's much harder for your body to access that stored fat. Instead, what happens is your body stays in storage mode. And as we know, once it stores, it really is hard to shift. Now, this is a part where things get really confusing for women because chances are you're not sitting there eating junk food all day. You're genuinely trying, you're making better choices. But you've also been told things like you must eat less, you must eat uh less carbs, you must count your carbs or cut your carbs, you must try fasting. So let's unpack all of these because this is where a lot of women get stuck because there is so much confusion around all of these topics. So, number one, if you have been told to eat less, of course, this one sounds quite logical, right? If you want to lose weight, then you must eat less. It's simple mathematics. And to be fair, in the short term, absolutely it can work. That's why programs that count on calorie counting, things like Weight Watchers, have helped so many women initially. You reduce your intake of food likely from what you typically eat, the scale starts to move in the right direction, and you feel motivated. But here's what happens over time: you start underfueling your body, especially if you then add exercise into the mix. And in midlife, underfueling is something of serious concern, and it matters more than ever. So we can never get our body to a point where it isn't being undernourished because your body it's already going to be more sensitive to stress as those estrogen and progesterone levels are fluctuating and eventually declining over time. So when you consistently eat less than your body needs, your body doesn't feel safe, it goes into like hyper-vigilance mode, it can sense that things are strained, so it tries to adapt. Your body is always trying to protect you, it thinks it's helping you. So, how it does that is it will slow down your metabolism, your body will become more efficient at storing fat, your energy will therefore drop, and your cravings will increase, and you can end up in a cycle where you actually end up eating less, feeling worse, but still not losing weight over time. You hit that plateau and you don't actually feel good about it. Or in a lot of instances, you start to gain the weight back because remember, your body is trying to protect you, and if it feels like you are on the point of being undernourished, underfueled, it will slow things down to try and preserve that energy for you. Number two, we often hear about is cutting carbs, right? We have to cut carbs or count our carbs at least, and be aware of our carbs in order to lose weight. Once we get to midlife, even more important than ever. This is what a lot of people talk about. But again, there is so much confusion around this. You may have heard that carbs are the problem, and that's where diets like keto start to become something that women seriously consider doing. So I want to talk about the ketogenic diet for a moment. Keto is essentially at its core, very low carb, very high fat. And again, there are some women that do see results initially and do quite well in the early stages of a keto diet. Because by reducing carbs, especially if you ate a lot of them and maybe the wrong types of carbs, then it's going to lower those blood sugar spikes over the short term. And as I just said, that's a good thing because we don't want the spiking and the crashing blood sugar roller coaster. Because the more time we spend on that fun fair ride, the more our body starts to resist insulin and our cells say, uh-uh, we don't need this. You are not active enough that you we need this much energy, so it slams the door shut, and then that insulin and that blood sugar ends up getting out of the blood and stored as fat instead. So here's the part though that often gets missed when we're talking about carbs, specifically the ketogenic diet. Not all carbs are the same. We have refined carbohydrates, which are things that I consider white. So white bread, white pastries, white pasta, they're the more sugary foods, high sugar foods. We then have your starchy carbs that are healthier, but they are starchy, such as rice, pasta, potatoes, and even the ones made from whole grains. They are more starchy carbs. Then you have your natural, what we call complex carbohydrates, and they are your fruits and your vegetables. And in all honesty, I am still amazed to this day how many people are surprised when I give them a list of fruits and vegetables, I give them a list of proteins, which is part of how I put a nutrition plan together for my clients, but it's all based on their blood work, which types of foods they're actually going to be eating. And I get the question, where's my carbs? I don't have any carbs. It's like your vegetables and your fruits are your carbs. And it always surprises me that that part is so often misunderstood. What the problem is that when women here cut carbs, they often just start cutting everything, including the foods that their body actually needs. So if they do know that carbohydrates like fruits and vegetables are the healthy complex carbohydrates, even then they may be cutting back on those more than they should be because they're focusing more on the high fat element of something like a keto diet. But we have to remember carbohydrates, especially those healthy complex ones, the ones from your vegetables and your fruit, and whole grains absolutely play a role, essential for fiber. We need to have sufficient fiber intake. It is plays a huge part in balancing our blood sugar. These carbohydrates are essential for gut health, they are supportive for our hormone balance, and essentially they're what gives our brain its number one energy source. So when carbs are cut too low for too long, especially when we're already dealing with the other hormonal fluctuations in midlife, it can actually increase stress on the body, which again makes fat loss a lot harder, not easier. Why? Because when our body is under stress, we secrete more cortisol. And if we continuously find ourselves now on the cortisol roller coaster, similar to the blood sugar roller coaster, where we're spiking cortisol unnecessarily and then it crashes, often at times when we do need higher levels of cortisol, because cortisol does play a role, but the key is whether it's nicely balanced throughout the day, just like our blood sugar, or if it is spiking and crashing. So then number three, fasting. This one gets a lot of airtime, and I hear a lot of clients when they come to me say, I've often tried fasting, or I try fasting and it works. Some people will admit over time it doesn't necessarily work, and then there's a lot of people that have tried it and say it just doesn't work for me. So what's the deal? So let's talk about this. Intermittent fasting, it has become incredibly popular, and again, like many things, for some people it can work, but here's where we need to be careful because there are also a lot of women, especially in midlife, who intermittent fasting is actually not the best approach. These are those women in midlife who may already be under-eating, even if they don't realize that they are. The women in midlife who are feeling extremely stressed and are struggling with a hyper-vigilant nervous system and cortisol dysfunction, where they're just constantly spiking and crashing cortisol. Also, the women in midlife who are already dealing with blood sugar instability. When you add long fasting windows, on top of all of that, it can actually increase cortisol because it's increasing stress on the body, and so the stress hormones in general start to act up even more. It can worsen those blood sugar crashes because you're going too long in between meals. Although it is important that you allow sufficient time between meals for your body to completely digest and stabilize the blood sugars. If you go too long, it can in fact go the other way. So if you are trying to regulate your blood sugar, it could actually make blood sugar crashes worse if not done properly. And also, fasting can lead to stronger cravings later in the day for again people that are struggling with these types of blood sugar irregularities. Now you might recognize fasting approaches such as skipping breakfast, where you feel okay in the morning, but then by mid-afternoon, you know you need something. And at that point, you don't care what it is. And a lot of women might reach for sugar, or they might reach for a quick snack, even though it might be intentional that it's healthy, it's still going to play a part in how your body manages blood sugar for the rest of the day. And what happens is often you start to feel out of control. So sorry, ladies, I'm just I'm getting over a cold, and every now and then I still get the little froggy in my throat. So it's important to know though, again, if you have tried intermittent fasting, that isn't failure if you find that it works on occasion and then it doesn't. It's all that's happening is it's it's your physical, it's your state of your own physiology. Fasting isn't wrong, but it's not right for everyone because everybody's physiology is different, everybody's balance is different, and there is a right way to do fasting, and there is a wrong way to do it. So the key is to make sure that you are working with somebody who can really look at the big picture of your health, determine if there are any of these root cause imbalances going on, and then your fasting routine can be tweaked to support that. So this is the part now that changes everything. It's understanding what it is that your body actually needs, then. If all of these ways in which you've been told should solve the midlife, the midlife belly fat issue are no longer the way that you should no longer the approaches you should be taking, then what actually is going to work? So, well, to understand this, we need to understand what it is that our body actually needs in general, and then we talk about how we get it there. So our body needs stability. When our body feels stable and everything is in balance, it is in a state of what we call homeostasis. It's basically your body's happy place, and when your body is in a happy place, it's no longer in a hyper-vigilant, super stressed-out state, and so your body relaxes a little. And when it relaxes, it does its day-to-day jobs without any level of concern, and overall it allows our metabolism to run freely, and in general, our body's just in a much more optimized, healthy state. So we need to get it to a point of stability. Our body needs structure, and our body needs consistency. So it again, it's going to feel if you think about just how we operate on a day-to-day basis. If anything throws our day-to-day schedule out of root, like out of our routine, and we lose our structure. Even if we're doing something fun like traveling, we become inconsistent. We become inconsistent with our habits. Sometimes it can even add stress to our day. And I don't know about you, but if you're one of those ladies like I was, whenever I would just want to rein in my habits, my get back to my healthy eating habits, if I had a period of time where things slipped off track, I would actually find the Monday to Friday to be easier because my Monday to Friday was more structured, it was more what uh my body came to expect. I ate around the certain same times a day. I would often um be doing similar jobs and errands and duties throughout the day. I would exercise at the same time of day, but then the weekend would come and it was anybody's guess when where I was going to be, what I was gonna do. So then when would I be eating, what would I be eating, and I would feel things falling off of track even just over that Saturday, Sunday period. So for me, that's when I could really tell that my body did not do well when it was losing stability and losing structure, and therefore becoming inconsistent. So we need to get our body to that state all the time because then it will feel safe and it will then do its jobs much more easily, much more naturally, predominantly supporting our metabolism, and that's how we can then start to move that midlife belly. So let's dive into this a bit more. What does stability, structure, and consistency look like? Well, the first thing is your meals must be balanced, and by that I mean a balanced meal, every meal that you eat should contain as its core, as the core cornerstone, protein, lean, healthy protein. It should also incorporate a big part of your plate, probably half of your plate, should be fiber-rich carbohydrates. Remember, they're the ones your fruits, your vegetables, that's what you should be filling your plate up with. We should never be cutting out those carbohydrates. And we should have a little bit of healthy fat as well. We don't need a lot, it is high, calorie-dense, and for people that are looking to lose weight, this can sometimes seem a little off, but there are good fats and there are bad fats, and our body needs the good healthy fats in order to function. When we combine these three together, the combination helps slow down blood sugar spikes, it helps to keep you fuller longer, you feel more satiated, and therefore it's going to reduce cravings because you're not going to feel this insatiable urge to eat something between your meals. So your bought your blood sugar has chance, has time in between meals where it is able to stay stable. Think of a breakfast where you might just get up and have a slice or two of toast in the morning. Now that is just a carbohydrate. Now, if that is a white refined white slice of bread, now it's just a refined carbohydrate. There's very little fiber in there at all. There's not, it's not even a whole grain slice of bread. Now, if you were to add to that slice of bread some eggs, one or two eggs, there's your protein component, and we always need protein, especially in breakfast. If you also then add some vegetables, so maybe you whip up a small one or two egg on. And put in some peppers or some broccoli or some zucchini. So now you're adding in some of those healthy complex carbs, the fiber-rich carbohydrates in the vegetables. And you have a slice of toast, you can still have your toast, but maybe switch it up from a white slice of bread to a whole grain slice bread. So now you're getting some additional fiber from the whole grain. It's a healthier choice. So you don't have to go without what you would normally have. You're actually going to just balance it out and make sure that instead of spiking your blood sugar, and you may think, wow, does that really happen with just a slice of toast? Because so many of us are thinking about calories and we're thinking about portion size and thinking, well, I barely ate anything. When actually a lot of women are surprised when they start to eat more, especially for breakfast, than they may have ever done. If they're eating it in the right balance, now all of a sudden they're starting to lose weight, and it's an anomaly that surprises them at first. But when they realize why and understand the mechanics, it starts to make sense. What we're doing essentially is changing how your body responds to blood sugar because we're keeping it balanced with the foods that you are eating. Okay, what else are we talking about when we talk about getting stability and consistency back in your day, back into get back for your body? We talk about how we space those meals. I've just touched on that one, but let's dive a little deeper into this one. This is a big one. If you are eating consist constantly, even if it's healthy snacks, what's happening is that your body, your digestive system, and your body's process to constantly regulate blood sugars in your in your bloodstream with the use of insulin, it's never getting a break. It's constantly a process that is constantly switched on. And so what happens is your insulin levels stay elevated because they're net your your pancreas can't stop ever secreting, like creating and producing insulin. Why? Because there's always sugar in your bloodstream. Remember, everything you eat, not just sugar, it's not just eat sugar and you will have sugar in your bloodstream. Everything you eat, even the healthy stuff, the proteins, the fats, the carbs, the fruits, the vegetables, the whole grains, they all eventually turn into glucose. That's the end byproduct of what we eat. So if we're always eating something, there's always glucose in your bloodstream. It never gets a chance to dissipate and get distributed off to the cells for energy and to the rest of the body for energy. Instead, it stays there. So what happens is we have to keep secreting insulin over and over constantly. It never turns the treadmill off. And over time, the more insulin that we secrete, the more our body becomes resistant to it. That's insulin resistance, and it is a key starting point that leads to pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes. When insulin levels are constantly elevated, our fat burning button essentially turns stays turned off, and we are in constant fat storage mode. However, when we space our meals out, this allows our body to regulate blood sugar more because we give it that time in between meals to actually do something with that blood sugar. And we the insulin that was secreted does its job and the pancreas can rest for a while. It allows your body to regulate and access the stored energy. So because there's not constant influxes of energy through glucose in our bloodstream, it has to now get creative and say, okay, well, where am I going to find energy? Ah, I remember we stored energy. And where did we store it, ladies? In our little bummy pouch. So we train our body to go and find it and to go break that down and use that stored fat for energy instead. When we proper space out our meals, we allow that reset essentially between meals. So this is why structured eatum becomes so powerful. Another thing we should do is not just it's not just about the meals that we eat and combining you know the correct foods, balancing our plate out with the right foods, but it's just conscious being conscious about the fact that we need to support our blood sugar levels throughout the day, all day, every day. And there's a lot of other little things that we can do to support that because this is essentially the foundation. If you can support a healthy blood sugar balance without spikes and crashes throughout the day, I guarantee you, your body's going to be much happier and you are going to lose that belly pouch. This is the foundation of everything, and it's not really that complicated once you understand it. It's about how you build your meals, when you eat, and creating consistency. When your blood sugar is stable, everything changes. Your energy will improve. You won't have the energy crash because you won't have the blood sugar crash. Your cravings will therefore decrease. You won't feel the urge or the need to snack, and certainly not on all the foods that we often typically crave the high sugar foods, the high carb foods. The reason your body often craves them is because your body's not dumb. It knows, especially your brain, it knows what gives it the quickest energy boost. So if your body's feeling tired and sluggish and energy depleted, it knows it's going to get a quick surge of energy if you can give it sugar. And so that's the type of foods that you crave. The problem is, as we know, it's very short-lived because it spikes and then it crashes and you're left feeling worse than you did before. What else comes easier? Fat loss. Because now we're able to break down that stored fat instead of leaving it there to just accumulate over time because your body doesn't need it if it's constantly got sugar glucose in the bloodstream. Does this make sense? I'm hoping this makes sense. I'm hoping I'm connecting some dots. Now, this is exactly the foundation of the approach that I take with my clients. We don't do any guesswork. Instead, it's about understanding their unique body, their unique imbalances, and we do that by looking at a close picture of their symptomatology, their symptoms, and how they're indicating specific patterns of imbalances that are going on. But we also go one step further and we look at their blood work. Every personalized nutrition plan that I walk them through is created from their own blood work. So we start with a set of labs where we check 36 blood markers, and this allows us to have a full, complete picture of where their unique imbalances are in their physiology, and then we work from there. We create the structured personalized nutrition plan, we support it with other holistic support, sleep management, stress management, movement, not necessarily heavy exercise. That's a whole other podcast episode talking about exercise in midlife, and also our mindset that plays a big part in it, too, to help us stay consistent. So we don't do any calorie counting and we don't restrict, we don't restrict diets long term. Instead, what I teach is a lifestyle that is something that becomes quite easily to incorporate into your life, and you not only lose the weight, but you're able to keep it off long term. So I hope you have found this episode to be quite enlightening and inspiring. If you have been feeling stuck, if you have been feeling frustrated, like nothing is working anymore, I want you to first and foremost know that it's just your physiology and you're not necessarily addressing the uniqueness of your physiology right now. Instead, you're trying to apply a blanket approach of different strategies that work for some but not necessarily for others. We need to make sure that it's going to work for you in order to get those results initially and maintain them long term while also protecting your health. If this is resonating with you today, the next best step is not to try another diet. It's to understand what's actually going on in your body. And I offer a complementary discovery call to help you figure that out. No stress, no pressure, no obligation to work with me. But I always want to make sure that anybody that books a discovery call with me is going to get just that. They're going to discover what it is their body needs. And it may be working with me using my approach, it may not. But either way, I want to talk through what you're experiencing, what you've tried so far, where your struggles are, and then I'll help you decide what it is that your body might need next. So next week in the Midlife Vitality Project podcast, we're going to be going deeper into something that is so closely connected to all of this. We're going to be diving specifically into those cravings, the snacking, the I just need something now feeling that seems so insatiable. We're going to be talking about two specific hormones that don't get nearly enough attention. We're going to be talking about those hunger and appetite hormones, leptin and ghrelin, how they shift in midlife, why midlife impacts them so much, but also how your habits also do. Because once you understand how these two hormones work, everything about your relationship with food will start to make so much more sense. I hope you found this episode to be enlightening, inspiring, and if you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to reach out, send me an email at Joanne at CleanLivingNutrition.com or book your complimentary discovery call and let's get you the clarity that you so so deserve. Thanks for joining me today, and I hope you will join us in a future episode. Bye for now.