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Finally, the Truth About Belly Fat in Women

Belly fat is more than just a nuisance that makes your clothes feel tight. It’s a concern for many women, leading to moments of frustration and decreased self-esteem and also posing significant health risks. Understanding the root causes of belly fat and the strategies for managing it goes beyond the quest for a slimmer waistline—it’s about making informed choices for your overall health and wellness.

In the sea of fitness trends and weight loss myths, the truth about belly fat in women often gets distorted, leaving many confused and disheartened. It’s time to clear the air and uncover the facts, empowering women with the knowledge to take control of their health and body image in a compassionate and informed way.

What Causes Belly Fat?

Belly fat, a common concern among women, can feel like a stubborn puzzle. But what really contributes to its accumulation? Understanding the factors can empower you to make informed choices toward a healthier lifestyle.

Dietary Habits: It’s no secret that what we eat significantly impacts our body shape. A diet laden with processed items, excessive sugars, and unhealthy fats is a fast track to gaining unwanted weight, particularly around the midsection.
The Age Factor: Aging is an inevitable part of life, bringing hormonal shifts that slow down metabolism and favour fat storage around the abdomen. This is notably evident during and post-menopause, marking a challenging phase for many in managing waistline expansion.
Post-Pregnancy Changes: The joy of motherhood often comes with a lingering souvenir — belly fat. Shedding the pregnancy pounds can be challenging, particularly in the stubborn abdominal area.
Activity Levels: Our modern sedentary lifestyle contributes to belly fat. Incorporating regular exercise is essential in dodging weight gain and promoting overall health.
Stress: Have you ever noticed snack cravings when you’re stressed? There’s a reason. High stress triggers cortisol production, a hormone that increases appetite and directs fat storage to the abdominal area.
Genetic Blueprint: Just as we inherit eye colour or height from our parents, genetics also determine our body’s predisposition to fat storage patterns, including that pesky belly fat.
Hormonal Shifts: Beyond aging, hormonal changes across a woman’s life, particularly during menopause, rearrange fat distribution, often relocating it to the belly.

Understanding the multifaceted reasons behind belly fat can guide you toward healthier choices. Remember, every step towards a balanced diet, active lifestyle, and stress reduction helps manage belly fat and enhances your overall well-being.

What Type of Fat Is It?

Not all belly fat is created equal. The fat lying directly under the skin, known as subcutaneous fat, is what you can pinch. In contrast, visceral fat takes a more hidden approach. It nestles behind your abdominal muscles and envelops your vital organs. While both types can be concerning, visceral fat poses a greater health risk, contributing to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other conditions.

The Dangers of Visceral Fat

Visceral fat is metabolically active and can significantly impact your health by releasing inflammatory markers and hormones that influence blood sugar levels and cholesterol. This hidden fat is a silent predator with risks that extend far beyond the waistline.

Is it even fat?

Not all round bellies are fat; bloating can also affect the size of your waistline. Identifying food sensitivities and adjusting your diet can help reduce bloating and internal inflammation, giving a more accurate picture of your body’s fat composition.

How to Get Rid of Belly Fat

Reducing belly fat might seem daunting, but adopting specific lifestyle changes can make a significant difference. While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to losing belly fat, there are strategies to help reduce it:

Fads and Fiction

Beware of quick fixes like diet pills, body wraps, and extreme fasting regimes. These offer fleeting results at best and are dangerous at worst. The myth of spot reduction, or losing fat from a specific body part, lacks any scientific backing and also falls into this category.

The Facts about Losing Belly Fat

A comprehensive strategy encompassing diet, exercise, sleep, and stress management holds the key to trimming belly fat:

Nutrition: Focus on whole, unprocessed foods like vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, and grains. Minimize sugar and processed items.
Exercise: A mix of cardio and strength training can significantly reduce visceral fat, enhancing overall wellness.
Sleep: A consistent sleep pattern is essential for hormonal equilibrium and crucial in weight management. Quality sleep is a pillar of weight management; aim for 7-9 hours nightly.
Stress Management: Adopting meditation, deep breathing, or yoga practices can effectively keep stress and cortisol at bay.
Pinpoint Bloating Triggers: Understand what leads to bloating—fizzy drinks, alcohol, certain foods, or high salt intake. Avoiding these can noticeably slim down your midsection.

Fads often promise much but deliver little, leading to harmful cycles of yo-yo dieting. Fiction suggests targeted fat loss is possible, a notion debunked by science. Fact tells us that a holistic route—balancing nutrition, activity, rest, and stress relief—is the most effective path to reducing belly fat.

The Surprising Influence of Oxytocin on Belly Fat

Intriguing research highlights another ally in the fight against belly fat: orgasms. They trigger oxytocin release, the so-called love hormone, which helps reduce carb cravings and alleviate stress by lowering cortisol levels. Beyond its stress-busting capabilities, oxytocin can also aid in lowering blood pressure and enhancing digestion, attacking belly fat from multiple angles.

The Best Advice

Ultimately, the best advice for managing belly fat—and overall health—is to live life fully. Enjoy nutritious foods, stay active, cultivate love and laughter, connect with others, and practice self-love and acceptance. Your body changes at various life stages, such as puberty, motherhood, and menopause, as well as through life events like illness and aging. Learning to love and accept your body through all its transformations is perhaps the most vital step in your health and wellness journey.

Remember, belly fat is a common issue that many women face, but it doesn’t define your worth or beauty. Understanding its causes and taking actionable steps toward a healthier lifestyle can improve your well-being and foster a positive relationship with your body.

Body Image and Mental Health

The pursuit of an “ideal” body can lead to a host of mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphic disorder. It’s essential to remember that health comes in all sizes and shapes. You are more than your appearance; you are strong, capable, and deserving of respect and love, just as you are. It’s not about achieving the perfect body but nurturing a healthy one.

If you, or someone you know is struggling with weight or body image issues, book a consultation with one of our nutritionists and start a healing journey toward total wellness.

Written by: DeVera Nybo, MBA, Owner, Newleaf Total Wellness Centre

What is Visceral Manipulation Massage?

Therapy Options Explained

By definition, a visceral manipulation massage is a slow and gentle process of massaging the viscera, or internal organs, to promote better function, reduce pain, and increase mobility. Sometimes internal organs, such as the kidneys and the stomach, will hold onto stress which can cause nerves to lock up.

When this happens, visceral manipulation brings natural movement through the organs and produces better blood flow to the viscera, resulting in overall better health.

What Kinds of Health Issues Can a Visceral Manipulation Massage Help Cure?

Digestive disorders are the most common ailments treated with visceral manipulation. Bloating, constipation, severe menstrual cramps, nausea, acid reflux, and esophageal issues sometimes require gentle massages in circular motions to bring movement and function back into your body.

These movements break up scar tissue, stimulate the fibers of visceral nerves, and prepare your body to better cope with health issues.

Other Health Ailments That Visceral Manipulation Could Help with Include:

Sports injuries, such as whiplash, sprains, and sore muscles.
Men’s health problems, such as swollen prostate, pelvic pain, and testicular pain.
Women’s health issues, such as endometriosis, ovarian cysts, and menopausal symptoms.
Post-operative scar tissue buildup.
Pediatric problems, such as infant colic and painful constipation.

If you do not see your health issue mentioned here, you can contact Newleaf Wellness, one of the best osteopathic practices in Abbotsford, to learn more about how visceral manipulation massage could help alleviate your pain and restore the positive balance to your body.

Visceral Manipulation Massage Can Improve Your Mental Health as Well

Your mental health and physical health affect one another. When you feel bad about your body, your mental health will suffer. When you are coping with mental illnesses, such as anxiety and depression, your physical health becomes less important.

A visceral manipulation massage can help you restore focus and the connection between your body and mind. Stress comes from the mind but builds within your body, becoming trapped in your nerves and muscles. The act of slow, gentle strokes on your skin, muscles, and viscera provides a release of endorphins that allow your body to let go of stress and begin healing from the inside out.

The experts at Newleaf Wellness Center are well-versed in what it takes to restore your mind and body. Our osteopathic practice in Abbotsford provides you with the opportunity to choose positivity and better flow through visceral manipulation massage.

Newleaf Wellness offers a variety of therapies including physiotherapy, chiropractic, naturopathic, and massage therapy in a warm and compassionate environment in our Abbotsford location.

If you have any questions about this article or would like to make an appointment, please contact us.

Do we really have to talk about mental health and counselling?

Mental Health and Emotional Wellness

The first time I went into mental health counselling office, I remember looking both ways to make sure nobody I knew was watching. I was embarrassed about feeling so broken—and ashamed that I couldn’t seem to fix my situation on my own. I didn’t want to admit it, but I needed help.
When we experience a physical injury, we generally don’t think twice about booking an appointment with a physiotherapist, a chiropractor, or a massage therapist to relieve the symptoms. But when it comes to our mental health, many of us hesitate to reach out. Instead, we often navigate relationship issues, anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, addiction, disordered eating, and other mental health
concerns in silence.

The following are just a few reasons people give for avoiding mental health counselling:

“It’s a sign of weakness to ask for help.”
“As long as I don’t think or talk about the emotional pain, I can convince myself and others that
I’m fine.”
“If I start talking about my problems, I’m afraid I’ll have a breakdown and won’t be able to stop
crying.”
“A counsellor is just going to tell me I need to be on medication.”
“Therapy is too expensive.”
“I’m too busy for counselling.”

In my own life, these beliefs contributed to my hesitation to seek support, and they were reinforced when I was told that I shouldn’t need the help of a professional to navigate my personal issues. And so, I silently sat with my trauma and watched as it slowly crippled me into a shell of who I used to be.
The American poet Maya Angelou powerfully sums up what decades of research on counselling has shown us: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” When I finally realised that I needed to talk about my trauma, and I mustered up the courage to walk through the doors of that counselling office, it was the start of my own journey toward healing.
I’ve worked with many clients who, in their first counselling session, reminded me so much of myself: ashamed and afraid, yet carrying a spark of cautious hope that maybe, just maybe, sharing their story might provide some relief. For these clients, and others who are contemplating therapy, I wonder what might happen if we were able to reframe the thoughts listed earlier. Perhaps our view of reaching out to a counsellor for support might shift to something like this:

“Seeking help and being vulnerable is a sign of incredible courage.”
“Trying to convince myself and others that I’m fine is exhausting. Talking about painful
memories and emotions can be difficult, but it means I don’t have to carry this alone.”
“It’s okay for me to cry. And I generally feel lighter after letting it out.”
“Only doctors can prescribe medication. My counsellor is here to help me talk through my own
goals for therapy, whether or not medication is part of my healing journey.
“Counselling can be expensive—but many people have benefit plans that can help with covering
the costs. But if the cost is a major barrier, I can talk with my counsellor and see if other
options—such as a sliding scale for payment—are available.”
“Setting aside time now to manage my problems and focus on my mental health will save me
time in the long run.”

If you or someone you know are considering mental health counselling, what might you expect in a session at Newleaf?

First, you will be met with empathy, genuineness, and unconditional acceptance. Our role is not to judge; rather, we are here to walk alongside you as you process your own experiences and find meaning in your story.

Just like rehabilitating physical injuries, finding healing for emotional and psychological injuries can take time. If you or someone you know is struggling, I encourage you to try counselling. Feeling curious, but unsure? We offer free consultations and would be happy to meet with you to talk more about whether they might be a good fit for you.