by Gemma Delaney

Struggling to trim your waistline? It’s more than just an exercise struggle; you might want to consider a holistic lifestyle approach. Escape the frustration of stubborn belly fat through a comprehensive method that targets your stress levels, tailors your workout intensity, and promotes fat burning over carbohydrate depletion.

Stress and Weight Gain – Understanding the Connection

Chronic stress affects our lives without even realizing it. Our bodies respond to stress by triggering an adrenalin and cortisol rush. This ‘fight or flight’ reaction equips your body with a quick boost of energy. However, in today’s fast-paced world, we seldom use up this energy in physical activities. Unused, this emergency rapport of fat and glucose redeposits as belly fat – easily accessible by the liver to be converted into energy when needed next.

Eating Habits that Help

Maintaining steady blood sugar levels can help reduce stress hormone release. Thus, cutting back on caffeinated drinks, sugar, and refined carbs while adopting frequent, but smaller, meals is advisable.

Tummy Toning Exercises

Lifting weights is not just muscle building, but your core supports these movements, leading to a healthy, toned belly. When you build leg strength and speed up your running pace, your body engages the core, which further leads to toning. Maintain a steady workout routine of at least three times a week, ideally four times, each session lasting around 45 minutes with appropriate warm-up and cool-down periods. Remember to take a good 60-90 second rest between lifts.

The Age Factor

Age brings along insulin resistance, making it more challenging to achieve a flat belly. Our skeletal muscle cells lose their responsiveness to insulin, leading fat cells to store additional fuel. Menopause can further exaggerate this insulin resistance due to estrogen loss, which otherwise positively influences insulin signaling. Poor gut health could also be the potential reason behind a bloat belly.

Control Insulin – Control Belly Fat

Keeping insulin resistance in check, boosting your metabolic rate, maintaining gut health and hormonal balance, along with managing stress levels are pivotal for a flatter belly as you age. An effective approach includes leaving a 12-hour gap between dinner and breakfast, which facilitates insulin clearance and aids in reversing insulin resistance. Complement this with two to three well-spaced meals during the day to shift your metabolism from glucose to fat.

stress and weight gain, holistic lifestyle approach, belly fat, fat burning, blood sugar levels, lifting weights, core exercises, insulin resistance, metabolic rate, gut health, hormonal balance, menopause, age-related weight gain, tummy toning exercises, cortisol, adrenal hormone