How To Beat Menopause Belly Fat!

hi guys dr. Christie Anna's physical therapist personal trainer and nutritionist and today I am gonna tell you guys how you can beat belly fat gain in menopause as a women's health specialist that's a question I get all the time actually two questions why does it happen and how can I stop it so there are actually really two main reasons why this tends to happen number one is hormone yeh for hormones those affect us all our life as we start to go through menopause though estrogen decreases and because of that a hormone called follicle stimulating hormone which is a mouthful starts to increase and they have linked that specific hormone to actual belly fat gain they're doing research on that now to see if there's medications that can kind of combat that but that's very new the other option for that is Chinese medicine there are some and minimal Studies on it but some herbal medication or herbal I should say supplement and acupuncture at least have some key studies around them that show that that helps to decrease that level a little bit so the other hormone that tends to decrease is progesterone and with a decrease in progesterone you get an increase in cortisol which is the stress hormone and that actually causes insulin resistance which then causes all that weight to be gained right in the belly so not good so you can help to control those cortisol levels number one is try to reduce your stress in any way shape or form that you can and everybody is different on what works for them whether it's meditation or acupuncture or exercise but find something that's gonna help reduce that stress level making sure that you get believe it or not 7 to 8 hours of sleep which sounds like a lot to some people I'm sure but again that helps to keep those cortisol levels level decreasing the amount of sugar in your diet too and actually especially even fructose that way you don't have an increase in that insulin either so that's so very helpful you want to increase the protein in your diet a little bit and also increase the healthy fats I know that sounds kind of crazy eat fat to not have fat but that really helps to keep things level and your hormones need that believe it or not we all need fat for lots of things lastly there are some studies showing that green tea might be helpful in that too again research is a little minimal on that but green tea tastes pretty good and there aren't a whole lot of harmful side effects so it's certainly worthwhile trying the second cause for that weight gain in the middle is a decrease in our metabolism now every decade that actually gets worse yay but you can actually work on that and that's the cool thing so there are a couple ways to exercise that really make a difference number one is strength training and that strength training for the whole body you can't just spot target number two is interval exercise so you may have heard of something called high-intensity interval training you can get interval work in your daily exercise and it doesn't have to be jumping or bouncing around you just really want to get your heart rate up and then it kind of drops back down now that being said if you're not doing any exercise at all that's probably step one you've been just starting with a nice walk is a great start now I know I said you can't spot target any fat but if you don't have great strength in those abdominal muscles everything is gonna look worse so I'm going to go ahead and show you three different easy hopefully exercises that you can do at home to work on that abdominal strength step lying down for the first one on your back legs are going to come up hands down and it's a tiny little push up towards the ceiling notice my legs aren't going backwards I'm using those lower abdominal and pelvic muscles to really lift up bring my feet back down to the mat keeping that neutral spine that happy position for your back hands behind the head keep that chin tucked really focus in leading with the abdominal muscles and then it's a tiny lift the other thing you want to be very careful of is that you're not flexing into the spine so you don't want to lift too high and you want to make sure that you're not pressing your abdominal muscles out or as I call it pooching okay you want to avoid that and then the last one that you can do is a plank preferably on the forearms because that's going to target the abdominal muscles more so than up on the hands so pushing up so the back is flat and go ahead and try to hold 30 seconds a minute and does it okay if you can only start with ten even and if that's too much you go ahead and drop your knees down onto the mat and if that's too much start off on like a counter or even the bed and that will be a little bit easier so those are the main reasons why we tend to gain a little bit more weight in through that belly but there's definitely stuff that can be done so thank you so much for tuning in today if you'd liked this video please click that little like button and share 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