Losing Your Belly Fat Outside the Gym

Your hormones matter. In fact, hormones have an incredible way of affecting everything about your complex body, including your body composition. In that way, there isn’t any shortage of men and women frustrated with that bit of fat that can’t seem to go away around their mid-section.

The quest to rid this curse of belly fat, however, is often filled with dead ends, desperate measures, and down right miserable tactics in dieting and extreme exercise. Sure, you can’t eat like an asshole and expect to being the best physical version of yourself, in the same way that training quality movement and building capacity should be a vital lifestyle habit if you want to look like a fit person.

The juxtaposition we often see here, however, is that there are a great deal of people that do eat well and do train hard, but it doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to belly fat. It’s these cases that I like to point towards hormones.

The belly fat issue is often times fueled by the body’s defense mechanism against stress. Long duration stressful training, lack of recovery, stress at work, lack of sleep, and the like are all signals to the body that keep the fight or flight response turned on. Cortisol, the hormone responsible for this expression, is often through the roof and, as a result, the body wants to hold on to body fat (usually stored in the midsection) to prepare for the battle that it thinks you’re fighting all day and all night.

If you train hard and eat well yet have trouble losing that belly fat, try to manage your stress with the same militant attitude that drives your nutrition and training. As it turns out, sleep and stress management may yield your best body composition results yet!

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach