Are you struggling with increased belly fat with low energy despite your efforts?
It’s rough being a woman in your 40s and above. You have to juggle a million things at once, and with that, you have to worry about the added layer of belly fat and low energy.
But don’t worry — there are ways to overcome these issues! In this blog, you will discover tips to help increase your energy levels and reduce belly fat. Read on for more information.
I’m Functional healthcare professional. I love working with women like you struggling with symptoms of hormone imbalance as they get into their forties and beyond. One of the most common symptoms women tell me every day is their increased belly fat. If you are a woman in this age group, definitely this blog is for you.
What’s Happening to You
With increased belly fat, you experience decreased energy, and you don’t like it. You don’t like how you feel and look. You want to feel and look better. You don’t understand why it’s happening because you don’t feel like you’ve changed anything with your lifestyle.
Yet the weight is coming on in the midline and unable to do up with your pants. You have to change into more comfortable baggy clothes. You’re losing your figure, with a feeling of being quite sluggish and tired. You’re having difficulty getting through your day, even getting out of bed in the morning.
You just don’t feel like your best self. You might be wondering how did this happen all of a sudden. There are common myths about what to do with having increased belly fat with decreasing energy as you get into your forties and beyond. The most common myth is the solution of simply the need to exercise more and eat less food like carbohydrates.
Common Myth
I was out with a friend the other day. My friend told me she got the exact strategy from a nutritionist. I thought that was a good start. You might be curious about the possibility of getting the results you wanted to last. The common myth out there as you age is just lowering the calorie density of your foods, especially carbohydrates. You just exercise to maintain your weight and energy. These will affect how you look and feel.
I haven’t seen the results. I’ve worked with so many women that have already done this. These women searched on Dr. Google, chatted with other practitioners, and worked with them. They have put this strategy in place with support on their own. They feel no difference at all. It DID NOT work!
On the contrary, these women still notice their weight coming on despite making the changes already, and they wonder why. Nutrition is considered a strategy basically for helping you optimize your weight, especially around the midline – the belly fat. You also need good nourishment for energy optimization.
Proper Laboratory Testing
There’s no doubt it’s not working. We need to get more specific than those so-called strategies for women in this age group. We need to be sure we are doing proper laboratory testing to understand your exact condition. A kind of more generalized diet is not going to work for everyone. Some women have tried it, and it did not work. You need a new strategy.
As a functional medicine practitioner, I also belong to the same age group, and I understand what you’re going through. We need to get the answers through laboratory testing. We can see through the tests where you’re at in your body. You can have a couple of different types of laboratory testing.
Ideally, you can have both to check and see how these tests can optimize your nutrition for your belly fat and energy. One of these tests is called a DNA health test. This test looks at specific genetics and enzymes in how your body breaks down and uses certain nutrients as fuel for your metabolism.
We’re not all created the same. Some people will do better on a low carbohydrate diet. It’s one of the most commonly utilized, particularly for women in this age group, which is a low carbohydrate diet. Some women will do better with a low-fat diet, believe it or not.
You need to understand the genetics around the need for a lower fat to optimize your metabolism. You might need to go into a ketogenic food plan with low to no carbohydrates and high fat. You might run into trouble, probably of not getting what you want if you have a different genetic predisposition.
If you’re interested in FINDING OUT your CONDITION through a DNA Health Test, CLICK HERE.
Metabolic Pathways
You must understand we go beyond your health status to know what to do. Some real-time functional laboratory testing examines your metabolic pathways in the body. We will analyze how your body is currently metabolizing fats, carbohydrates, sugars, and proteins.
Carbohydrates Issues
The laboratory testing will suggest the right amount of macronutrients such as fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. It will also check each amount versus the other. Some women need to bring in a little bit more carbohydrates. It’s not just any carbohydrates but the correct type of carbohydrates such as more vegetables and healthy whole grains, taking out those simple ones, which are quick to convert to sugar carbohydrates in their diet.
On the other hand, other women need to lower their carbohydrates totally and focus on more optimal fats coming in higher amounts. Again, we need to be specific by doing the proper laboratory testing. You cannot typically get what you want to optimize your belly fat and energy by just looking online or working with a practitioner who is not doing laboratory testing and giving some generalized strategies.
Thyroid Imbalances
It’s common for women in the age group mentioned to have thyroid imbalances. Women often call me claiming they had their thyroid tested and looked normal. The doctor or the practitioner told them the test was average, and they were fine.
In reality, these women haven’t had their thyroid thoroughly checked. It’s common for women to have a TSH level check but not a complete thyroid panel. We don’t have a full understanding if your thyroid is functioning optimally or not. It’s not until we have this full thyroid panel. In most cases, women are more hypothyroidism or lower in thyroid function.
Hypothyroidism will affect your metabolism. We have to help you both with nutrition and lifestyle strategies. Sometimes with some natural supplement supports, possibly with medication at times to help the thyroid function properly. Once your thyroid gets back into balance, your metabolism will improve.
You need to work with someone who knows these things, such as myself. It’s important! A thyroid panel or a complete laboratory test with all the blood laboratory tests will give you a total understanding of your thyroid’s health. It’s making sure whether your thyroid is a potential reason why your metabolism has slowed down, growing your belly fat.
Stress Issues
Most often, you don’t look into other areas that are out of balance. You don’t address the area of stress. We are referring to the levels of your stress hormones that are high. Many things are happening to you and women in this age group. Many of you are always on the go and working.
You might be taking care of children or managing them outside the home. You may also be taking care of aging parents, social activities, and other activities outside of work. You may be involved in a relationship, working and taking care of that.
Most of the time, many things on your plate cause stress levels to rise too high and out of balance. Stress will have a physiological effect on your body by slowing down your metabolism. You can do all the dieting and exercise you want in the world, but you must not leave out stress. When you don’t address stress with its effects and the impact on some of the systems in your body, you will be unable to rebalance your weight by getting rid of belly fat.
Some women call belly fat a cortisol belly, which refers to cortisol as the primary stress hormone. With the production of cortisol in high amounts, your body gets out of balance. The increased production level of cortisol can slow down your metabolism accumulating it as belly fat. You need to make sure to address this.
Female Sex Hormones Lowering
Female sex hormones are lowering in your forties and beyond. Estrogen and progesterone levels are on the decline, where progesterone declines a little faster than estrogen. These two drop off, especially estrogen when you’re getting into transition to menopause.
Estrogen is a hormone supporting your metabolism. It reinforces how quickly food and toxins move through the gut. It also impacts your ability to absorb nutrients. The decline of estrogen triggers a negative impact on metabolism. Unfortunately, this is why many women continue to do the same things in addressing their belly fat since they are in their thirties but continue to gain weight as they age.
The solution you might think is just to take more bio-identical estrogen or this sort of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) stuff. This solution may or may not be suitable for you. It may pose certain risks for some people, and you may not know that about yourself.
Toxin Issues
I wouldn’t necessarily run out to do such a solution. You take estrogen to be the first solution and the most common one. You take in estrogen since it is declining and causing weight gain. But, there might be other reasons behind the decline of estrogen. You know estrogen helps your body to move toxins out of our GI tract daily because it supports motility and metabolism in the gut.
You need to address that probably a toxic load or a burden in your gut is the reason. You may think estrogen somewhat masks this over time in your lifetime. We need to have some active detoxification to help the bacteria, viruses, and toxins in your gut and liver start to move out and detoxify.
The detoxification process will help your body to improve its metabolism. Your fat tissues are storing some of these toxins. You start to get rid of some of these toxins, the fat cells shrink, and our belly fat improves. It sounds simple, but we need to do the proper laboratory testing to understand how to be specific to you.
Assistance Is Needed
You must work with a practitioner who understands the changes happening in your health at this time of life in this age group. You’re getting into the period where you’re in perimenopause or leading in transition into menopause.
I’m also in this age group, and I understand personally and professionally what’s happening to you. You also want to work with someone who understands all about hormones and holistically your body as a whole. You have to understand what causes these imbalances in the first place.
These hormone imbalances may have started many years ago, and probably they did. These symptoms began to show up in the present more obviously because the level of hormones declines. You need to understand how we can roadmap these things. You must comprehend what you need to do. , what the primary root cause of your symptoms are with that belly fat for you, and how do we move through it?
Laboratory Testing is the Key
Laboratory testing is the key! If you want to know about stress, it’s the highest. We need to check an adrenal panel. You may want to comprehend a history of a potentially high toxic burden, heavy metals due to possible high exposure, and a bunch of mercury fillings. Other toxin exposures may be in your workplace or closer to where you lived.
You may need a toxin test. We can check your liver status. You may have a longstanding history of antibiotic use on and off your whole life, maybe since you were a child or just a baby. We need to understand all these things because if there’s an imbalance that way, we will do some active detoxification to rebalance your gut microbiome.
That’s probably going to have the most influence on you if that’s your history. You can start to see and understand it sounds simple. Once we comprehend what’s going on by performing the proper laboratory testing, we can implement a customized plan to help you lose that belly fat and restore your energy.
Once you understand the root cause of why it’s happening, you can maintain this long-term. That’s my goal. When I work with women, I teach them what’s happening in their bodies so they can help themselves long-term. Then, you’re NOT in and out of practitioner offices spending endless amounts of money.
If you have no idea what’s wrong after taking or having covered full of supplements, you don’t know what to do because nothing happened. We want to target the problem to help you return to the balance and maintain the balance long-term.
I hope this sounds like something of interest to you. If you haven’t learned the root cause of increased belly fat and your energy getting lower by the minute, you can always feel free to reach out to me. You can go to my website: www.AngelaSimpsonFunctionalMedicine.ca. There is a place where you can book a FREE COMPLIMENTARY consultation, and It’s 45 minutes long. It’s enough time for us to understand your history.
We could potentially work together to help you get the balance back for your increased belly fat and low energy levels issues. I can also help you get back in the overall wellness so that you can maintain your health in the long term. Again, feel free to reach out to me.
If you’re experiencing increased belly fat and low energy problem and would like help getting to the bottom of it, we’d be happy to schedule a discovery call with you. During this call, we can discuss your symptoms in more detail and come up with a plan tailored specifically for you.
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DISCLAIMER: The information in this email is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content is for general informational purposes only and does not replace a consultation with your own doctor/health professional.
