Welcome to our Men’s Health Summit. It’s impressive to have a flat stomach. Do you know the impact excess belly fat can have on your overall health? This panel provides the tips and techniques to lose that gut.
What are some of the health implications for having excess belly fat?
Dr. C. Toomar: If you have belly fat, often you also have fat around your organs. And so that inhibits their function. That’s heart, intestines, kidneys. And then one of the others is that when you have excess fat, anywhere – adipose tissue – it can convert testosterone to estrogen. So the male hormone gets converted and it also makes it harder for men to then function as men. Um, and so you have all the side effects of that. And anytime you have excess belly fat, you have to think about stress and why it’s there and how it got there. So there’s lots of different implications for stress and there’s lots of reasons why that can be there, but just in general, looking at anything that deals with health, you have to look at what I call a biopsychosocial approach to it. So it’s not just the health. You have to think of the psychological as well as the social impact of all of it. And so anytime that you are in a situation that is not optimal in health, it can also have a psychological impact. It can also have a social impact because of that psychological impact. And so all of those things sort of play together. It’s hard to name just one thing, but there’s several and they all interplay with one another and I’m sure the other panelists could also attest to that.
Can you help our others understand the difference in those two types of fat that are in our midsections?
Dr. Gigi: There is the fat that we can see. I’m gonna shake my belly. I can see it. And then there’s the fat that we can’t see, which is actually super dangerous, right? The visceral fat. And as Dr. Toomar mentioned already, it’s in our liver, it’s in the kidneys, heart, all of the vital organs. And why is that important? I mean, yes, we don’t like to look a certain way with the tire around our belly or maybe elsewhere. But the visceral fat is much more of a health concern. Because it doesn’t allow the organs to do their work, and because fat also causes inflammation. Inflammation has your body constantly in a state of stress because you’re not getting that oxygen to the vital tissues. But another kind of body stress that we experience is actually from sleep apnea. Sleep apnea actually makes it more difficult to lose weight and we now know that sleep apnea can increase dementia. It can affect sexual functioning in men. It can increase depression, diabetes, and cancer. Usually when I mention sleep apnea to my patients and I talk about the dementia or the sexual functioning, people all of a sudden pay attention.
What are some of those foods that we can eat to help flush out some of those fatty things that are in there?
Dr. Monique: One of the analogies I used to use years before I wrote this book was you think about a car. If someone gave you the keys to a Porsche nine 11, or whatever, Carra, whatever the high end sports car, you’re not gonna pull up to the gas station to put 87 Octane in there, right? You’re gonna put high quality fuel in that car. Why? Because you want that car to perform go zoom vroom and go from zero to a hundred, right? In six seconds flat or whatever the sales pitch is, so your body should be treated no less. Why are we treating our bodies less than, when it’s really the greatest example of engineering on the planet. Before I kind of get into what you should eat, I also wanna draw attention to what we drink, those liquid calories. I think it’s easy for people to kind of know what they should, and shouldn’t be eating right, like fried foods and processed foods and cookies and candy. But a lot of times those liquid calories don’t get factored in. And what I tell patients is pretty much anything other than water has some kind of calorie associated with it. We call it a beer belly for a reason.
Click the link to hear more about losing the fat around. It’s an informative conversation. https://www.facebook.com/BlackDoctor.org/videos/2037954919745267
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