What is apron belly?
If you are seeing your midsection bulging with loose tissues accumulating that like a swimming ring, that’s an apron belly.
There are actually different types of apron belly. For some people, it’s loose skin that hangs and folds after someone has quickly lost a big amount of weight. Pregnancy and birth can also cause that.
For others, it’s extra belly fat. This is something that deserves special attention as a potential health alert because a high amount of belly fat usually indicates visceral fat, which is the type of fat ‘hidden’ deeply in your belly around your organs.
This article is about the second scenario, and it talks about how to lose the extra belly fat naturally.
Belly Fat Causes Inflammation….Which Causes More Belly Fat (And Tons of Other Diseases).
Let’s put weight loss aside for a moment. The apron belly fat can actually be dangerous to your health because of its highly toxic properties. In addition to coating your mid-section with a layer of unsightly fat, its cells ‘pumps out chemicals that promote disease.’ Then it secretes them into your bloodstream. As a result, body fat increases the potential for several diseases.
One of the disease directly associated to belly fat is Type 2 Diabetes. It’s also a key indicator of heart disease. And besides directly causing diseases, excessive belly fat also triggers chronic inflammation, which, according to science, is at the core of a long list of diseases.
Here’s how the apron belly triggers chronic inflammation:
The excessive fat cells deep in your belly make your body produce insulin, which is the hormone that helps the body store glucose.
Over time, your body stops effectively responding to insulin and develops insulin resistance. The body creates more insulin to compensate for it, and the overproduction of insulin creates a significant hormonal imbalance.
This triggers chronic chronic inflammation.
So what’s chronic inflammation? And why does it matter?
Inflammation is your body’s process of fighting against things that harm it — such as infections, injuries, and toxins. It’s the natural response of your body’s immune system when it’s facing threats and self-healing.
How does chronic inflammation affect you?
Chronic inflammation happens when this situation lingers. Your body is in the constant mode of being hyper-alert, hyperactive, and hyper-stressed in defending itself against threats. It’s not meant to endure that kind of stress chronically. And overtime, your body gets tired, vulnerable, and sick more often. You start seeing negative impact to your tissues and inner organs. And your inner chemistry and hormonal patterns are constantly disrupted.
Throughout time, it creates bigger problems. Because our physical and mental health has a lot to do with our inner chemistry and how our tissues and organs function, chronic inflammation — if not eliminated — It also plays a key role in the progression of many chronic diseases.
This is why people suffering from chronic inflammation often see a big range of problems sometimes at the same time:
- Body pain
- Fatigue
- Muscle weakness
- Metabolic disorder
- Digestive problems
- Hormonal issues
- Arthritis
- Cancer
- Heart diseases
The list goes on and on for pages….
While lots of people thinks of these as concerns for older people, I actually see many of my clients struggling with them in their 30s and 40s. Although they were very successful in their career and other roles in their lives, they’ve constantly suffered from low energy, pain, weight problems, digestive issues, and hormonal problems, and feel deeply insecure. And it gets especially emotional when they think about not only themselves but also their children and other family members.
Chronic inflammation also makes your body retain and attract fat on autopilot.
If you need to lose weight, you should know that chronic inflammation is a tremendous barrier for weight loss.
Chronic inflammation causes weight gain.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the consequences of chronic inflammation is disrupting your body’s hormonal and chemical balance. There are multiple ways it makes you gain weight through that. For example:
By interfering your body’s response to leptin — the hormone which tells your brain that you are full, it causes you to constantly overeat without feeling full.
The problem is: there is also scientific finding that chronic inflammation increases as the weight increases. It means chronic inflammation, through triggering weight gain, reinforces itself.
And for the majority of overweight people, there’s one more layer of challenge, which is that because your body fat % is higher, it’s easier for you to gain weight because fat retains energy (vs muscle burns energy).
So when you have apron belly which is deeply associated to chronic inflammation, it can, through chronic inflammation, reinforce fat gain, which in turn increases chronic inflammation….
This growing ‘partnership’ between belly fat and and chronic inflammation works effectively to perpetuate its own patterns and cause various diseases at the same time while damaging your health on various levels.
In order to break the chained effects, you have to stop either variable of the function — chronic inflammation or fat growth.
And since it’s harder to stop chronic inflammation while you are still overweight and have lots of belly fat which directly causes it, it’s better to work on belly fat first!
The truth is every positive measures you’ve taken to lose belly fat healthily will help you clean chronic inflammation. So when you do it right, you are solving two problems at the same time. My online weight loss coaching program Lean Instinct Formula™ , which teaches you how to lose weight left and right while gaining unlimited food freedom, solves these chronic inflammation as a side effect.
How to Remove Apron Belly For Real
Here are three essential ways you can learn how to lose belly fat naturally and sustainably:
1. Lose Weight Through A Holistic Approach
Since you can’t target fat burn, it’s better to lose weight all over the body because belly fat will decrease naturally when your entire body loses weight. For many of my weight loss clients, changes on belly size is the first they see when they start the journey.
There are various ways to lose weight organically and sustainably, you can check my Lean Instinct Formula™ to have an idea about what it takes.
One thing I have to warn you against is restrictive diets. On one hand, you tend to lose weight fast on restrictive diets but it’s usually mostly water and muscle weight. So it won’t help you solve the apron belly situation.
On the other hand, restrictive diets can make things much worse. By having you deprive yourself and eat a diet that’s too low in calories and not balanced in nutrients gained, it stresses your body further (stress is another big cause of chronic inflammation) and damages your metabolism. Before you start a plan is heavily centered on calorie counting, you should know why CICO diet isn’t scientific at all.
In this short video clip below, I talk about the reason why diets aren’t the solution anyways…and WHY you’ve been working HARD on dieting but still haven’t lost weight for real. (On TikTok? Let’s connect!)
@riselean The real solution to weight and eating problems isn’t working hard tracking metrics and following rules. #weightloss #foodobsession #foodaddiction #entrepreneur #weightlosstips #foodaddictionrecovery #foodaddiction #healthyliving #healthyeating
♬ original sound – RiseLean.com
The last but not least is your emotional health. If you are already struggling with food addiction and food obsession, which are two problems that I frequently solve for people, you should know that when you deprive yourself, neurologically speaking, you are commanding your brain to generate more addiction.
How? Well, science has found out that the root cause of food obsession is your brain experiencing less dopamine it needs. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter for the feeling of joy and satisfaction. Therefore, when you deprive yourself of the food you really want, you are lessening the dopamine released in your brain. And that alone causes addiction.
2. Improve Your Diet.
This is a natural part of sustainable, holistic weight loss, but it’s worth a dedicated section because it’s so important considering toxins are major inflammation triggers.
It means that starting from today, you should largely reduce the amount of heavily processed, sugar-drenched food eaten if you are eating them frequently now.
It also mean eating food that fight inflammation, including:
- Leafy greens
- Olive oil
- Nuts
- Fermented food such as kimchi
- Fresh fruits
- Anti-inflammatory spices such as turmeric
2. Release Stress And Sleep Well.
The stress hormone, cortisol, is linked to higher amounts of belly fat. Your stress level also influences your food choices.
Find your best way to relieve stress. An important tip: SLEEP WELL.
I’ve had clients who have done EVERYTHING RIGHT but wasn’t able to get the kind of result she should. I investigated and found that it was because she only slept 4-5 hours per night. And after fixing that one single problem, while keeping following my teaching on the other things, she started seeing her body melting fat reliably.
The lack of sleep is also scientifically proven to be linked to fat gain. Just a few years ago, Arianna Huffington, the Founder and CEO of Huffpost, wrote a whole book about how someone can revolutionize his life and health just by sleeping well.
The thing is sleep is so critical to maintain your body’s natural order and balance and make sure your body works efficiently on everything including losing weight.
In my coaching, I even tell my students weight loss isn’t their job, but their body’s. The reason why they are seeing easy weight loss left and right now is because their body has been activated to lose the weight FOR them. And giving it the rest it needs is the first thing they need to do for their body to have that power.
A Transformative Solution:
Leslie Chen is the Creator of Lean Instinct Formula™, which helps men and women lose weight left and right while gaining UNLIMITED freedom of food. Leslie has coached people to lose weight sustainably for 8 years. And she’s selected as one of the Top Weight Loss Coach for 2022 by Coach Foundation.
If you are interested in finding out how real, sustainable, transformative weight loss is done and how your relationship with food can get re-coded in record time, without diets or deprivation, book a free consultation with Leslie.
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