Connected Body Podcast With Laura London

Conquering Belly Fat and Cellulite: Hormones, Detox, and the Power of the Four F's with Laura London

• Laura London • Season 2

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Struggling with stubborn belly fat and cellulite can be an uphill battle, but I'm here to arm you with the strategies you need to conquer it! As your fitness and nutrition specialist.

I will delve deep into the perplexing world of body fat, the hormonal whirlwind of menopause, and the truth behind cellulite. Get ready to learn how stress hormones like cortisol can be your waistline's worst enemy and how simple lifestyle pivots can restore hormonal harmony. Plus, I'll guide you through detoxifying your life - from the food on your plate to the products in your beauty cabinet - to help shed those extra pounds and boost your overall well-being.

This episode is a goldmine for anyone aiming to smooth out cellulite with the power of the four F's—fat, fiber, flow, and firm. Discover the nutritional shifts that can lessen fat deposits and how massages and skin brushing can strengthen your body's fibers. I'll also introduce you to some surprising activities, like rebounding on mini trampolines, that ramp up your body's detox pathways.

 And we're not stopping there—I'll reveal how high-intensity cardio and interval training can firm up those muscles and combat the dimpled skin. You're not alone on this journey; join me and take a step towards a healthier, more vibrant you.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Connected Body Podcast.

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Speaker 1:

You're listening to the Laura London Fitness Show with your host, laura London. Hi everyone, I'm Laura London, your weight loss, fitness and nutrition specialist and author of the Hot and Healthy Body. Today we're going to be talking about three questions I get asked very, very often. They're super important and I want to go over these things with you. The first one is about belly fat why we have it and things we can do to get rid of it. The second topic is menopause and weight loss. What are some things we can do, maybe change that we're doing now to help us through menopause and make weight loss easier? And the third question I get all the time is about cellulite how, what it is and how we can get rid of it, what to do about it. So really super excited to be sharing my tips with you today. So first let's talk about belly fat, why we have it and things that we can do to get rid of it, because all the exercising in the world cannot get rid of belly fat. So I'm going to share these tips with you.

Speaker 1:

First of all, stress. Stress is one of the biggest, biggest reasons that we store belly fat. Our stress hormones are insulin and cortisol and when they are out of whack. We are going to store belly fat. Other things that can throw off our imbalances are if we're going through menopause or hormonal imbalances, say, in younger people. These can be things like a poor diet, taking in a lot of toxins in the air and our beauty products and our cleaning products. I think people don't think about that enough. More things that can throw this balance off are poor digestion, not drinking enough water, not hydrating our bodies, vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies If we're off in what our body is getting, these are going to throw off our hormones and stress out our bodies also. And also another thing is a lack of oxygen oxygen that we breathe and oxygen to different parts of our bodies. So how do we reduce these cortisol and insulin stress hormones? We need to balance our progesterone and our estrogen and what we can do is start taking out toxins.

Speaker 1:

Like we said, stop eating processed foods, stop getting those packaged foods. They're frankenfood. You know I talk about this all the time. Your body does not know what to do with those things. Those are chemicals that are created in a laboratory In your body. It just does not compute what to do with it, so it's going to store that as extra fat. You're actually stressing out your body when you're eating Twinkies and ho-ho's and garbage. So another thing we can do is, like I said, take out all the other toxins from your life, meaning your beauty care products in your house. There are are so many things I think people don't realize. Average person leaves the house every day with more than 200 chemicals on their body, from their shampoos to their toothbrush, toothbrush, toothpaste, um, to beauty things. So really start reading your labels and I'm not saying to throw everything away at once. If you can, that's awesome, but slowly start switching out. Read your labels, read your ingredients.

Speaker 1:

Another way we can reduce cortisol and insulin, those stress hormones, is getting stress out of our lives. We live in a very fast-paced world and sometimes we forget that we just need to slow down. Take some time to yourself, let your body rest and recharge. Turn off those electronics. Take it like an electronic free day. Don't go on the computer, don't go on Facebook. Don't go on the computer. Don't go on Facebook. Slow it down.

Speaker 1:

Another thing you can do is kind of stay away from people who are toxic in your life. That's going to stress you out too. Shoot up your stress hormones and you're going to be storing belly fat. You don't realize these things. Other things you can do are exercise and we do not need to beat ourselves up at the gym every day and you know, take these crazy hardcore workouts. That causes stress on the body. So if you're doing that, it might be counterproductive. If you're not losing weight and you're not losing that belly fat, try some things like yoga or Tai Chi, different things that are not as stressful on your body, and see if that makes a difference. And another huge thing is stressing out over our food choices. Everybody you need to to relax.

Speaker 1:

You intuitively know what to eat, but I think everyone has so much misinformation. You know floating around out there. You open up a magazine or you see the headlines as you're standing in the grocery store the new diet, the new pill, the new diet, the new pill, the new supplement. But truly you know what you need to do. You need to tune into your intuition a little bit more and I always give people this example about a piece of chocolate cake, because I like chocolate.

Speaker 1:

If you're going to eat a piece of chocolate cake, or whatever it is that you like, I want you to eat it and eat it with pleasure and gratitude and accept it. Because this is what happens. If we look at that piece of chocolate cake and we say, oh man, I shouldn't be eating this. This is, you know, it's going to go on my butt, it's going to go on my stomach. I'm bad. You are putting your body in a low-level state of stress. The body does not understand stress from bad thoughts in your head or stress from being chased by a tiger. It's stress on the body and what that does is it shuts down your digestion. So if you're going to have that piece of cake, you say, gee, I really love it, I'm gonna enjoy it. Maybe I gee, I really love it, I'm going to enjoy it. Maybe I'm just going to have half of it, but I'm going to enjoy every bite because I deserve it. Do you see how different that feels in your body? It's huge, and most people have never, ever been told that. So those are my tips to help you reduce your belly fat.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so the next thing we're going to talk about is weight gain and menopause, and I realize not everyone here is going through menopause, but if you're a woman, it's going to happen. So listen up. Here we go. Are the things that you're doing no longer working for you? Well, that's because your body is changing. Your estrogen and your progesterone are out of whack due to just natural aging and hormonal fluctuations. But it's not your fault, so don't beat yourself up about it. There are things that you can do if you know about them. When you're going through menopause, you are becoming more insulin resistant and stress reactive. So remember, we talked in the tips before about reducing your stress. That's really huge and super important when you're going through menopause. So here are some things that you can do to help your body Eat nutrient-dense foods.

Speaker 1:

I'm talking green smoothies. I'm talking up that nutrition in your diet. This is not the time to say, oh well, I'm just getting older and things are happening and there's nothing I can do about it. That is not the case here. So what I want you to do, get your green smoothies, each of great, your salads and vegetables and fruits and really, really be intuitive to what you're eating and how your body is responding. For instance, if you're finding that you're eating fruit and you're not losing weight, cut back on some of the fruit. Eat some fruits that are not as high in sugar Bananas and grapes. They're very, very high in sugar. So switch those out for some green apples. Add lots of lemon and lime to your diet. Those are natural detoxifiers and those are great Berries, strawberries and blueberries and they have super high antioxidant in them to help your body.

Speaker 1:

We talked about excessive workouts, doing cardio. Oh, this is a big one though. Cardio, cardio, cardio. People think if they do cardio, if they do cardio did I say cardio If they do more and more and more and more cardio, that's going to be the solution. No, it's not. Take that thought and kick it to the curb. What you really need are more productive workouts. We need workouts that are going to do a few things at once. They're going to use more than one muscle group, they're going to get your heart rate up and you are going to be burning more fat. Cardio is great and I don't want you to say, don't do cardio, but hours of cardio are not going to work for your body anymore. You need to find some nice gentle circuit workouts that are going to work out that body differently. Another thing you can do is change up your exercise routine, and I'm really big, a big proponent about this. You know, if one day you want to use balls and bands. One day you want to do weightlifting. One day you want to do a dance class, a bar ballet, whatever it is. Change up your workouts.

Speaker 1:

I know some of us just get stuck doing the same thing day after day, week after week, and what you did in your twenties is not going to be the same as what you did in your thirties, and what you did in your thirties is not going to be the same as what you need in your forties. And then, going from 40 to 50, you really need to change it up and again, not stress out that body. So those are my tips on how you can go through menopause and help your body reduce stress, reduce the weight, and it's not as hard as you think. It is Okay. So those were my tips for helping you go through menopause or any type of time in your life when your body is going through a change. You can implement those tips and see what you need to tweak to help you lose weight. Our body is always changing, so it's important for us sometimes to change what we're doing.

Speaker 1:

Okay, here we are on our third topic, which is a big topic, and it's cellulite and what we can do to get rid of it. So first I want to talk about why we have cellulite. Why we have cellulite. So it's a different kind of fat than the fat that we put, you know, on our abs or just in general on our whole body. So we have alpha receptors in our cells and beta receptors in our cells. The alpha receptors help to accumulate fat, they're like fat stores, and then we have the beta receptors, which help burn the fat and get rid of it. So people who have a high amount of cellulite have more alpha receptors. The more of their alpha receptors are turned on than their beta receptors. But there are things we can do to kind of change that around and start getting rid of that cellulite.

Speaker 1:

Now, men and women are different. We know that Men have different fibers in their bodies than women do. We have different collagen fibers. So men's are more kind of together and dense and they hold everything down, and women's are a little bit wider apart and things kind of start to puff out. And that's when we see those dimples.

Speaker 1:

And a lot of times you'll, you know, you're told that cellulite is because of the toxins in our system. Well, that's true. The more toxins we have, also the body's going to want to take those toxins away, away from our vital organs and store them in our fat cells. So if we have more of those alpha receptors turned on, the body's very smart and it's saying oh man, she's eating bad food again, she's using all those toxic lotions and potions on her body. Let's protect the lungs, the heart, our organs and store them as far away as possible here, here, here on our body, to protect. Does that make sense? Because I think that's a huge missing link for people. So we want to upgrade our diet, taking out those processed foods, adding in more fruits and vegetables, hydrating the body with more water. I have some great water recipes beauty water that you can find on my website and we can do different things like that.

Speaker 1:

High intensity cardio is really good because what happens is we're going to get our heart rate up, bring it down. Get it up, bring it down, which is going to bring more oxygen to our body. So I digress. Let me first start here, the things that we can do. We want to increase blood flow. A lot of times when we have cellulite, especially on our bodies, it's from being restricted. Those cells are not getting enough oxygen. So we can not wear tight clothing. Tight clothing restricts those cells to get oxygen. We want to bring more oxygen to those areas. So deep breathing. That's why I said high intensity exercise, because you're going to be bringing more oxygen into your body. More oxygen, more airflow.

Speaker 1:

Other things we can do are dry skin brushing. Have you ever heard of dry skin brushing? You take a natural bristle brush and you just brush your body up toward the heart and up here on your arms, always toward the heart. What this does is it stimulates the skin and it brings more airflow and oxygen to what's lying underneath the skin to help stimulate those areas that are not getting enough oxygen. We can also do some infrared saunas. Have you ever done that? Oh my gosh, that's delicious, but that helps you to detox your body. So detoxing the body is really huge when we want to get rid of cellulite.

Speaker 1:

Another thing we can do is foam rolling. Foam rolling is really good. You've never used a foam roller. You just roll your body over the foam and again, it's stimulating that area Rebounding. Do you ever see the little mini trampolines? Those are great. You have to jump up high, but just a little bouncing up and down that's going to stimulate our lymph system, which is our body's detoxing system. It's kind of like a fishnet and it helps to move all the toxins out of our body. And one other thing that I use is red light therapy. Red light therapy is a very healing therapy and you can read more about red light therapy, but I really like that.

Speaker 1:

So here are the four F's that I want you to remember when it comes to reducing cellulite, cellulite, fat fiber flow and firm Fat is increasing the amount of nutrition we are getting in our bodies reducing the amount of high starchy carbohydrates, eating more vegetables, low glycemic fruits. Fiber those fibers in our body. We can help them with deep tissue massage, with dry skin brushing, red light therapy flow. We want them to flow better. So what can we do that? The sauna, that infrared sauna, is great to get everything flowing. Hot tubs, rebounding.

Speaker 1:

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention. If you ever seen these oh my gosh, I can't remember the name of this the shoes that you bought Kangoo Jumps, that's what they're called. I love them. It's like it's the same as a trampoline, except they're these shoes that you wear. Those are really really fun and will help to stimulate that lymph system. Those are really really fun and will help to stimulate that lymph system. And the last F is firm, and what I mean by that is switching up your exercising, getting in some high intensity cardio workouts and interval training, where we're going to be working more than one muscle group. More than one muscle group, we're going to be getting the muscles toned and they're going to help fill out those areas while at the same time we're reducing the fat and we're reducing cellulite in our body with those tips. So those are my tips for you and I hope they're going to help you. I know they will if you put them into practice.