---
title: 'The Only 5 Things That MELT Visceral Belly Fat After 40'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ml7b1xH1Rk8'
video_id: 'Ml7b1xH1Rk8'
date: 2026-09-20
duration_sec: 1441
channel: 'Dr. Mindy Pelz'
---

# The Only 5 Things That MELT Visceral Belly Fat After 40

> Source: [The Only 5 Things That MELT Visceral Belly Fat After 40](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ml7b1xH1Rk8)

## Summary

This video explains why women over 40 experience increased belly fat, citing a study of over 5,000 women that found a 52% higher rate of central obesity and 78% higher rate of visceral obesity in postmenopausal women. The creator, Dr. Mindy Pelz, outlines five lifestyle steps to prevent or reduce belly fat, focusing on insulin sensitivity, muscle building, intermittent fasting, stress management, and metabolic flexibility.

### Key Points

- **Study on Belly Fat in Women Over 40** [00:12] — A 2020 study in BMC Endocrine Disorders on over 5,000 women found that by the time women reach postmenopause, they have 52% more central obesity (belly fat) and are 78% more likely to have visceral obesity (fat around organs).
- **Estrogen Decline and Insulin Resistance** [01:54] — After 40, estrogen declines, leading to increased insulin resistance regardless of fitness level. This makes food choices more critical; ultra-processed foods that were tolerated in your 30s will not work after 40.
- **Estrogen and Belly Fat** [03:09] — Hormonal changes cause fat to move to the center. HRT may help some women but is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Tracking hemoglobin A1c (aiming below 5.8) can indicate if estrogen is at risk and if you're moving toward insulin resistance.
- **Eat Less, Move More Doesn't Work** [05:08] — The common advice to 'eat less and move more' is ineffective for women over 40. The creator emphasizes that this approach will not help lose belly weight and should be abandoned.
- **Stress and Cortisol's Role** [06:12] — As ovaries wind down, the adrenals take over estrogen production. High stress impairs this, lowering estrogen and increasing cortisol, which is stored in the belly. This creates a 'double whammy' for belly fat accumulation.
- **Step 1: Focus on Fiber** [09:57] — Aim for 30 grams of fiber daily. Fiber slows glucose absorption, improving insulin sensitivity. Use apps like MyFitnessPal to track intake. Adding fiber is the first step, not removing foods.
- **Step 2: Build Muscle** [11:12] — Muscle is the body's greatest metabolic organ. Resistance training 2-3 times a week for 20-30 minutes helps use glucose, preventing it from being stored as belly fat. A 2022 Sports Medicine study showed resistance training alone reduces visceral fat.
- **Step 3: Intermittent Fasting with Protein Pacing** [14:57] — Combine intermittent fasting (13-15 hours) with 30 grams of protein per meal. This combination is effective for losing visceral fat. Aim for 1 gram of protein per pound of desired body weight, but only with resistance training to avoid storing excess as fat.
- **Step 4: Protect Your Nervous System** [17:32] — Manage stress by moving your body when stressed. Cortisol is a hormone of action; if you don't move, it gets stored in the belly. Use stressors as triggers for movement (e.g., walking, jumping jacks, squats).
- **Step 5: Metabolic Switch** [19:51] — Ask yourself: 'When I eat, do I get energy or feel sleepy?' and 'When I don't eat, do I feel dizzy or brain fog?' These indicate metabolic inflexibility. Clean up your diet and practice fasting to rebuild metabolic flexibility, which improves menopause symptoms and body composition.

### Conclusion

Belly fat after 40 is not a curse but a signal from your body to change your lifestyle. By focusing on insulin sensitivity, muscle building, fasting, stress management, and metabolic flexibility, you can effectively reduce belly fat and improve overall health.

## Transcript

Okay, I get it. You're over 40. Maybe you're in your 50s and 60s. And all of a sudden it felt like all the fat in your body moved to your belly. There's a reason for this.
I want to talk about a study. It was done on over 5,000 women. It was out of the BMC Endocrine Disorders Journal. It's back in 2020. And what they found is that by the time a woman goes from 40 all the way into her perimenopausal,
years. So that journey caused postmenopausal women to land in those years with 52% more central obesity, fancy name for belly fat, and 78% more likely to have visceral obesity. This is the one
I'm concerned about because that's fat around your organs. So in this video, I want to break down exactly why this happens. And I want to walk you through five steps that you can start applying
right now, no matter where you are in this journey, so that you can start to either prevent belly fat or unwind belly fat, because it's lifestyle. This is where everything changes.
Lifestyle might have not affected you at 20, but it affects you at 50. And if you change things in your lifestyle, like when you move and how, when you fast and what you eat, these are all things
we're going to talk about here. I promise you that belly fat will start to go away. And remember, we are doing as a community in my Reset Academy, something called a Fat Burner Reset. I'll leave
a link below where I walk you, everything I'm about to teach you, you can walk through and experience with me if that's a venture. Here we go. After 40, estrogen starts to decline.
When estrogen goes down, I don't care who you are, it doesn't matter if you're an elite athlete or you're a couch potato, you become more insulin resistant. So the first thing I want you to
understand is that the foods you eat matter more now than ever. So if you are eating more ultra-processed foods, these are highly refined flours and sugars and bad oils, you might have
gotten away with it in your 30s, but you will not get away with it after 40. So my first recommendation is we want to have you start to focus on whole foods. These are foods with fibers.
These are many plant-based foods, but these are also yummy carbohydrates like potatoes and sweet potatoes. We want to get you off the box stuff and get you on to the whole foods. That is the
number one thing when we look at belly fat through the lens of insulin resistance. But there's another piece here that I want to talk about, which is the estrogen breakdown.
So now everything's moving to the center. That's a hormonal issue. And there are many different theories on this. Some people think get on HRT, hormone replacement therapy, and bring those estrogen levels up and the belly fat will change.
For a lot of women, that doesn't work. That's not a solution. For some women, that works. But we have to start to remember after 40, when hormones change, there's no one size fits all.
But estrogen does have an environment that she thrives in. So when we're trying to maximize our age-appropriate estrogen, what we want to do is start to track a blood number called hemoglobin A1c.
And hemoglobin A1c tells you how your glucose and insulin system is doing. You go look at your blood work right now. The last time you had blood work, I'm sure it's in your email or on your phone.
Go look specifically at hemoglobin A1c. If it's up closer to 5.8, then your estrogen has the possibility of being in jeopardy of being lower than it needs to be for your age.
and you are moving towards insulin resistance. So when we look at belly fat through the loss of estrogen, we look at it as how can we live a life that keeps our estrogen up
and how can we eat to keep ourselves insulin sensitive. If we don't do that, then what will end up happening is you are going to start to see that belly fat accumulate quicker.
So I want you to start to think belly fat means I need to get insulin sensitive. I need to start to cater to estrogen so she stays at her height.
Again, HRT can be helpful, but I'm here to teach you lifestyle. What most women do when they go into this time period is they think, oh, I just got to eat less and move more. This is what we've been taught, right, forever.
We've been taught eat less, move more. I'm here to tell you that I have done thousands of videos built off of thousands of research studies and the Eat Less, Move More, especially for women after 40 is not going to help you
lose belly weight. That is not the solution. So if there's anything you learned from me in this video, I want to take that thought out of your brain so that you stop doing a behavior thinking you're going to get
the result you got at 30 it doesn work after 40 okay the second trap that happens to women after 40 is that we don realize the impact that our stress has on our belly fat or on our whole metabolism At 40 as estrogen is
starting to go down and your ovaries are winding down and moving into retirement, they have to hand the job of making estrogen over to another organ.
Because the ovaries are like, peace out, I'm done. I got some eggs, I'm going to make them, I'm going to release them. And then like, I've been doing this for a while, I'm going into retirement. So the adrenals have to pick up the slack and make estrogen for you.
If you start to go into your 40s and you are completely stressed out, then you're going to have a lower estrogen level that's going to cause more central obesity than is needed or is
required. What I saw in clinical practice, what I see with my Reset Academy members, what I see with you all here on YouTube is that so many women go flying into their 40s and their blood sugar
balance is off, their hemoglobin A1c is high, and their adrenals are maxed. And so all of a sudden that estrogen level is incredibly low, lower than it should be, and the menopause symptoms are high,
and the belly fat is growing. So I want to show you how to work on these two pieces. If you're not familiar with my nervous system questionnaire, I left the link in the notes. It's a free
questionnaire you can take to see where your nervous system is at and it's combined with food ideas, exercise, breathing, all kinds of things to help you for your nervous system state. Your nervous system state matters more after 40 and it matters tremendously with belly fat
because if you are in a state of stress, your adrenals can't make as much estrogen and your adrenals are making more cortisol. So now we have a double whammy because we have low estrogen making
more central obesity and we have cortisol. And where is cortisol stored in the body? It is stored in the belly. So I think the bigger the belly, like you could put, line up 20 women right here
in front of me and I could tell you based off of everybody's belly size if they are insulin resistant and if they've been under a tremendous amount of stress. Those two things really matter.
This is why, whether you're 45 or 55, getting on the treadmill and torturing yourself to work even harder is not a solution. This is why skimping on sleep is not great for that belly fat. This is why
stress becomes a target that I really want you to help help you see that if you can bring some tools into the picture to help with your stress it's going to help with your belly fat the other
thing I've seen a lot of women do at this age is they start to just throw all kinds of gimmicks at it so they will take some supplements they'll try a fancy biohack some of you are even going into
the obesity drugs. I personally think that belly fat after 40 is like a mirror showing you what you need to work on. You need to work on insulin resistance and you need to work on your stress
loads. That's the target. Keep your eye on that target and I promise you this will start to change for you. Here are your five steps that you can follow right now to change it. The first is you're
going to start to make insulin sensitivity a daily focus. What does that mean? Well, first, we want to eat foods that are high in fiber. Fiber acts like a net. It slows down the absorption
of glucose into your bloodstream. And the question I would have for you if you were sitting across the desk from me here would be how many plants are you eating in a day? The first step to becoming
insulin sensitive isn't taking something away. It's actually adding something in. I want you to start adding fiber in. What the research is showing is it's showing 30 grams of fiber a day.
Find an app like MyFitnessPal or one of the tracking apps and just track your food for a couple of days and see where your fiber is at. 30 grams. If you're not focused on 30 grams of fiber,
then you could, it could be making you more insulin resistant. So I'm not telling, I'm not taking anything away from you. I'm asking you to add something in and I want you to add in fiber.
Step number two is I want you to start to look at building muscle like it's the greatest belly fat tool you have ever had. And here's why.
After 40, you've become more insulin resistant. The more insulin resistant you are, the lower estrogen is, the more it moves back to that central section. But there is one organ in your body that can start to help you use the glucose, use the excess that is being stored in your belly and start to use it for energy.
And that is your muscle. Your muscle is your greatest metabolic organ that your body has when you have a lot of muscle when you have muscle what happens is your body when glucose starts to go up which is naturally going up during after 40 during perimenopause and menopause
that glucose has to be used. It has to go somewhere. So your body would prefer to put it in muscle. So you want to start to look at how do I use muscle? Because if you don't use muscle,
then the muscle is like, hey, I don't need the glucose. Don't worry about it. Go ahead and put it in the belly fat. So you want to start to use muscle. It might be push-ups you do every day. It might be squats you do every day. I've done a lot of videos. I'll leave them in the notes on
visceral fat and what the research is showing right now is the best trick to overcome visceral fat is resistance training two to three times a week 20 to 30 minutes resistance training is like
those bands those like stretch bands like like these kind of things they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes um a push-up is resistance training because you're having to contract your
muscles through a full range of motion. Squats are resistance training. Lunges are resistance training. This is not fancy equipment. You don't have to buy a lot. But what I want you to do is
you have increased fiber. Easy, right? We're adding that in. We're going to track it. And then the Second thing is we're going to start to do more building of muscle.
If you're like, God, I don't want to go to the gym, start doing 25 push-ups when you're making your coffee in the morning. Maybe you do them on the side of your countertop.
Do 25 squats after every meal. This is not like time consuming, but building muscle and using muscle is going to be key because now your intelligent body is going to be like, okay, we're going to move all
this glucose to the muscle instead of to your belly. So resistance training, we are looking at like two to three times a week for 20-ish minutes.
It's not that difficult. There was an interesting study, for those of you who are like, oh, I don't know much about resistance training, that resistance training alone, without any diet changes, significantly reduced body fat percentage, fat mass, and visceral fat in healthy adults.
That was from a journal, Sports Medicine 2022 journal. So I continue to preach resistance training here on my channel. Step number three. I brought you all this video.
And I told you, if I wanted to lose visceral fat, belly fat quickly, I would do this combination. It's intermittent fasting with protein pacing.
So intermittent fasting can be as little as 13 to 15 hours a day. I've done a lot of videos on that. I've written a lot of books. Fast Like a Girl is the most famous book where I show you how to fast according to your hormones.
Intermittent fasting can be as simple as 13 to 15 hours. Then when you look at your eating window, what you're doing is that you're going to start to look at 30 grams of protein at every meal.
The original protein pacing was done years ago, said every two hours you would want to add in another dose of protein. I think this is great.
That's a great way to look at it. When you go to open up your eating window and you're doing your first meal, let's make sure there's at least 30 grams of protein there. And then two hours later, can you try to get another 30 grams?
This can be eggs. You could do hard-boiled eggs. You could do beef sticks. I have some of my favorite beef sticks, and I'll leave links below, is Paleo Valley has these beef sticks that I munch on all the time.
You could do beef jerky. You could do cottage cheese. Instead of reaching for the chips, reach for protein. You could do a deli meat rolled up around cheese.
There's so many creative ways to get protein in as a snack. So, like, look at that as your protein pacing. Every meal should have 30 grams of protein.
And ideally what they say is one gram of protein for every pound of body weight that you want to be. So if you want to be 130 pounds, you do 130 grams of protein. But you want to make sure, by the way, that you are working out and lifting weights and doing resistance training.
because if you eat that much protein and you're not doing resistance training, what can happen is you'll be stored as fat. So we're working on our fiber.
We're working on building muscle. We're intermittent fasting. Wow, we're protein pacing. Those are three solid ideas. Now we're going to look at how we can actually start to up our fasting game.
I've done a ton of different things around fasting, and I want to say that the best type of fasting for overall weight loss is alternate day fasting. So if you are already an avid faster, you're already doing 15 hours,
I want to have you try doing alternate day fasting. I'll leave links to that video below. Step number four you going to start to protect your nervous system I think it really interesting how the menopause conversation has just exploded in the Western world over the last couple of years And so many women have
especially in the Western world, especially here in America, have horrible menopause symptoms. And I honestly think that a large reason is because our diet's so bad, we're not moving our
body and our stress levels are through the roof. So when you feel stressed, what happens is you make a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is made to make you move. It is a hormone of action.
When you get a stressor, if you don't move, then cortisol can't be put into action. So cortisol will be stored. And where it goes is your belly.
So now we have low estrogen signaling to move everything to the belly. We have every insulin resistance causing everything to go to the belly. And we have cortisol having everything to go into the belly.
This is why so many women over 40 are really struggling with belly fat. So what do you do? well personally I love to look at every time you have a stressor you move use that hormone the way
that that nature intended it to be to be used if you are on your computer you hit something stressful if you're talking to somebody something stressful hits you and you don't move your body
then what will end up happening is you'll store that cortisol so let's make sure that stressful times means that we are starting to move our body. Okay, step number five. There's something I taught
you in Fast Like a Girl called a metabolic switch. And this is an inquiry you can ask yourself right now, which is when I eat food, do I get energy or am I sleepy? If the answer is you're sleepy,
we got to clean that food system up. So this is where fiber comes in. This is where protein comes in. This is where getting off the ultra processed foods will really help you start to stabilize that.
The second question to ask yourself is, how do you do when you don't eat food? Do you feel like you're going to pass out? Do you feel like dizzy? Do you feel brain fog? That is a signal that your
body is you've trained it to eat food every two hours every four hours whatever it is that is just a training that you have given your body I'm gonna maybe you haven't heard this but you were designed
to go long periods without food read fast like a girl I map all at six different rates fast I map all the science out in that and you will see that primarily you were designed to go out
without food. But what's happening in our culture right now is that we're eating these foods that spike our blood sugar and then our blood sugar crashes and we crave sugar or something more
carbohydrates, more ultra-processed foods and it spikes again and then it crashes. And so what ends up happening is the thought of going without food is horrific. So clean up your
sugar burner system and then let's start practicing this fasting a little more and get this metabolic switch going. Rebuilding metabolic flexibility after 40 will give you every single thing you're
looking for in your body. Everything you hate about your menopause symptoms, everything that you hate about how your body looks will be improved with metabolic flexibility. But it's a process to train
yourself. Again, if you need help, come find me in my Reset Academy. This is why every couple of months we do a Fat Burner Reset to teach you all how to train yourself to be metabolically flexible.
The link is in the notes. Now, there are the results. Again, go look. I ask everybody here on my YouTube to put results in that they've gotten from watching my videos. And many of you
have done incredible with that. So if you have been watching my videos, you've gotten results, put in how much weight have you lost? Put in the comments like what you've learned about belly fat going away from all the videos that I've done on this. Because if you're new to my channel,
I just want to say, and you're in disbelief, I want to say this stuff works. And it works over and over, give it a try and see what happens. Here are your three action steps you can do
immediately. One, we're going to focus on eating more fiber and we're going to focus on eating more protein. Action step two, we are going to start to work to compress our eating window so we're not
snacking all day long. And step number three, every time we get a stressor, we are going for a walk. a big stressor or we're going to get up and do a jumping jack or we're going to do squats,
but we are going to start to move our bodies. I'm telling you, it's not a curse. It's not genetics. It's not because you got the wrong doctor. It's because you need a new strategy and that's what
happens after 40. So put in the comments, let me know if that helps. Let me know if you've gotten results with this and if you need more help, join me in my academy. But most importantly, please don't give up on yourself because this belly fat isn't something that just is
cursing you. It's your body asking you to do something different. As always, I hope that helps. If you like this video, you're definitely going to want to check out the next one.