Here’s one of the curious things I notice about men in my 45+ age bracket:
Men who are in otherwise decent shape sporting a massive belly.
These are guys with a trim, athletic, even muscular frame, who if you saw them from the dead front would look like an ordinary healthy guy.
Then they turn to the side and its BULGE.
The dad-gut is more than an offense against the senses.
Visceral adipose tissue, as the nerds in labcoats call it, is linked with all manner of health and metabolic problems, not to mention the extra limits on basic physical movement.
Trendy dad bod memes aside, it ain’t a good look and we all know it.
Question is, why does this happen, and what can be done about it?
Fat tissue is not just a dead lump of flesh. Like muscle, fat is active and involved with the rest of your body.
That belly-flab sends and receives chemical signals that affect most everything, starting with energy balance and immune function.
How much you eat and what you eat influence fat stores and WHERE it is stored.
The hormones and other chemical signals are the reason that guys put it on around the waist and chest, where the ladies tend to store it in their legs and bee-hind.
For my money, here’s three things that have removed and kept off the gut-flab on Yours Truly:
1) Keep the carbs in check. You can go keto if you want (I don’t care for it). Aim for under 150 g of carbs most days, and get most of that from quality, meaning non-sugar and non-processed, foods.
2) Stay active. Move around as much as you can. Walk for an hour a day, even if you have to break that up.
3) High intensity cardio. This is less important if you’re carrying a lot of flab. The leaner you are, the more that sprints and interval training helps to slim the fat tissue.
Here’s a bonus tip (and the real king-maker):
Don’t eat so many damn calories.
Obvious? Yes.
But, as we often say around here, fat can’t store calories that you don’t put in your mouth.
Those three tips skew you toward a negative energy balance, which is where fat is released from your gut and burned for energy.
Not only that, they have the knock-on effect of helping to keep your appetite in check. Few things make you hungrier than eating sugar-fat junk food. Cut that out and watch how your desire to over-eat almost vanishes.
There may be positive effects on insulin sensitivity, too, which helps steer calories away from fat and toward more productive uses.
But that’s all downstream from the total tally in the Energy In column.
A mild calorie deficit plus working to keep insulin sensitivity in your favor translates to a shrinking dad-gut.
Is this a problem you’ve experienced? Do you know someone who has?
If you’d like my gentle guidance in stripping away the dad-bod suit, you’ll need to be on my email list for those coaching spaces.
Use this link:
Matt Perryman