Your Toxic Belly Fat!
Think that last inch or two (or 10) of belly fat is harmless? You eat “healthy and organic” yet you don’t seem to lose much weight? One of the reasons so many people struggle with belly fat is because it is actually a temporary protective mechanism against disease. You may find that you get fatter as you age and that they weight is harder to come off, but guess what? That actually may be a good thing for a little while!
The catch is that you have to figure out what is going on and fix it before you gain continuous weight and get a chronic disease.
Toxic Exposure
If there is one thing we can do as individuals to improve our health it is to avoid toxins. Toxic exposure to things like plastic (all plastics), hormones & hormone replacement therapy, makeup, lotions, creams, pesticides, heavy metals, car exhaust, processed food, soft drinks, city water, food additives, GMO foods, hormone laden meat, most cleaning chemicals and even perfumes leads us to a lifetime of sickness and “unexplained” disease.
In an ideal world your body would be able to detoxify all of the toxins and they would pass through the body, but given the huge increase in exposure, the new chemicals and the modern “franken-foods” that we are creating each day, belly fat and toxin load is accumulating in many people. The load on the liver, kidney and other detox organs is becoming overwhelming.
The Body’s Compensation Mechanism
When the liver gets backed up and overburdened with toxins and hormones it pushes the fat-soluble toxins out into the blood stream. (Yes, now you have poison in your blood stream) The fat-soluble toxins then go throughout the body until they run into a fatty cell that can absorb them. Abdominal fat is one of the closest areas with a large amount of fat cells, but the brain is another large repertoire of fat cells that the toxins can deposit into.
Side Note: This is one of the reasons why you see so much autism and ADHD in the young population today. They are overburdened with toxins and need somewhere to store it, so the brain takes the blunt hit and we see so many side effects.
One of the side effects of losing weight rapidly is that you end up with toxins recirculating in the blood stream. As you lose your belly fat, you slowly but surely release toxins into your blood stream and often people feel awful. This is very common with ketogenic diets where people begin to lose weight quickly.
If you have ever started losing weight and then hit a plateau, this can often be because you are still overburdened with toxins that they body is either trying to keep stored or as you lose some it continues to create more to protect you from the toxins.
What Can You Do?
- The first thing to do is avoid as many toxins as you can. You will need minimal toxic exposure as you try and release all your toxic fat cells.
- Slowly increase your dietary fiber and eat lots of beets. Beets help to thin the bile. The bile combined with dietary fiber is supposed to bind toxins and then push them out the other end.
- Use Takesumi. (Buy here) Many patients need Takesumi aka bamboo charcoal for multiple months in order to help with a slow and safe detoxification process.
- Lose weight. Once your system is clean, then you can begin lose weight rapidly to release the toxins from storage. If you reach a plateau, then focus on more detoxification and you will often see that the weight loss from a healthy diet restarts itself. (Yes diet is a little more complicated than a single bullet point. I recommend the Primal Blueprint as a lifestyle for all patients looking to lose weight.)
Have questions? Let me know!
What is the Promal Blueprint?
The Primal Blueprint is a book published by Mark Sisson.