Reset Your Hormones to Beat Belly Fat By Dr. Natasha TurnerNaturopathic doctor and author of The Supercharged Hormone Diet, The Hormone Diet, and The Carb Sensitivity ProgramGet Dr. Turner’s recipes that will help your hormones work with you on your weight-loss goals instead of against you. Dr. Oz's 3-Day Detox Cleanse One-Sheet Eliminate harmful toxins and reset your body with this detox cleanse from Dr. Oz. All you need is 3 days, a blender and $16 a day! Tony Horton’s 3-Step Diet Plan Creator of P90X Tony Horton is a fitness superstar whose workouts are trusted by everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Michelle...Vanity might be enough to motivate men to lose a beer belly, but good health is reason to lose extra weight, too. According to David Katz, MD, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, shedding that extra layer of belly fat can have a profound impact on how you look, feel, and perform in all areas of your life.

Here are just a few ways that belly fat can mess with your health, as well as reasons why taking it off can help make your RealAge up to 3 years younger. Losing Belly Fat Can Enhance Your Sex Life That's right: Losing weight will improve your sex life. Researchers found that obese people were 25 times more likely to report sexual problems than normal-weight folks. "Being heavier is going to interfere with self-esteem and the comfort of sexual activity," Katz says. Being overweight can also cause erectile dysfunction. Losing weight and exercise can help restore your libido and sexual function. Belly Fat Can Lower Testosterone We don't want to say that all those extra pounds make you less of a man, but obesity is linked to low levels of testosterone -- the sex hormone that puts hair on your chest, power in your muscles, and oomph in your sex drive. Low testosterone can also wreak havoc on your energy levels, motivation, and overall sense of well-being. Belly Fat Promotes a Couch Potato Lifestyle, and Vice-Versa Though it's possible to be fit and fat, 80% of people who are overweight or obese are not, says Noel Bairey-Merz, MD, director of the Preventive and Rehabilitative Cardiac Center at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute.

The couch potato lifestyle can make reaching for the remote feel like an endurance event. Your muscles go flabby, and your heart and lungs can't deliver enough blood and oxygen to your body. More important than going on a diet to drop a few pounds, Bairey-Merz says, is exercising regularly. Do that and the weight will come off. Losing Belly Fat Helps Relieve Joint and Back Pain Obesity and inactivity can lead to and worsen back pain, achy joints, and arthritis. Art Deco Mirror With Chain"Imagine putting a pack on your back and lugging it around," Katz says. Patio Furniture Fabric Replacement Slings"It wears you out. Ikea Curtain RodsIt hurts your back and your joints. That's what that excess weight is doing." If you lose weight, the pain will clear up.

Luckily, small losses add up to big benefits. Losing just 1 pound of weight will take 4 pounds of stress off your joints. Losing Belly Fat Helps Prevent Heart Disease and Diabetes Belly fat is an independent risk factor for death from heart disease. What that means is, even if you get A's on the rest of your health report card, belly fat alone increases your risk of dying from a heart attack. Unfortunately, men who are prone to belly fat are also more likely to have more plaque in their arteries, inflammation, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, abnormal cholesterol levels, and/or heart disease, or to suffer heart failure. Losing weight, not smoking, exercising, and eating right can save you from that fate. answered "yes" to just one or more of the above questions but if you answered yes to all ten questions then you more than likely may have low testosterone but before you panic… Most of the questions above may have nothing to do with low Look at these to increase your testosterone…

42 way to Curb your cravings How He Lost 22 Pounds in 23 Days He Used This Rule to LOSE 122 Pounds!Refer 3 new people and get 20 units of BOTOX for free!Recently, it was announced that Australian researchers started the world’s first study that aims to help men lose weight and prevent diabetes by giving them testosterone.Sponsor: This podcast is brought to you by Shari’s Berries. Be sure to use the code “Get Old” when you order. Offer ends 2/13/2013.That’s right–testosterone is not just something that professional football players, bodybuilders, baseball players, weight lifters, and guys like Lance Armstrong can take to maximize sports performance. For both men and women, low testosterone, in addition to being something that can cause you to gain weight, lose motivation to exercise, and have lower sexual function, is also closely associated with type 2 diabetes and poor blood sugar control.So, here’s the question. Should you take testosterone to get fit or to stay healthy?

Find out in this episode and learn whether or not you can lose fat, gain muscle or increase performance quicky without taking testosterone. You’ve no doubt heard about the Lance Armstrong doping fiasco, in which Lance admitted to taking a variety of illegal, performance-enhancing substances, including testosterone. In a recent newsletter, I acknowledged the fact that even without the use of drugs, Armstrong had some great genetic advantages. These include a higher than normal VO2 max; extremely efficient, slow-twitch muscle fibers; a very high ability to buffer lactic acid; and high, neuromuscular recruitment of his leg muscles.So why would someone like Lance Armstrong, or any number of other athletes, take testosterone? Or, for that matter, why would the Australian researchers look at how testosterone can help men get more healthy?One reason is that testosterone increases the size of individual muscle cells. A bigger muscle cell pulls harder, so you can gain strength that way. In addition, testosterone encourages muscle cells to build more muscle cells. 

So you not only get bigger cells, but you have more of them. And that means you can contract your entire muscle stronger. (is this last sentence right? seems to be missing something or should be plural?)But high testosterone goes beyond just getting bigger, stronger muscles or better curves. In both males and females, testosterone also:Makes you feel more energetic and activeIncreases your libido and sexual performanceIncreases motivation and competitive driveRaises emotional well-beingLowers or controls body fat levelsIf your testosterone level is low, this can contribute to:Decrease in bone strengthLoss of competitive driveSo with all these benefits of high testosterone and drawbacks to low testosterone, why would it be banned in (should we say professional sports?) sports, or given a raised eyebrow when it comes to supplementation as a hormone replacement therapy?The answer for sports is two-fold:If an athlete is using testosterone, it may create an unlevel playing field – especially since hormone replacement therapy can be expensive or hard to properly manage with dosing and testing.

This means using it may not be logistically or financially available to all athletes. This is a polarized topic, especially since there are amateur sports, such as triathlons, in which some individuals are taking testosterone for health reasons, but also competing. (Listen to this related interview for a good perspective on this conundrum).The use of a powerful, performance enhancing drug such as testosterone sends a message that skill and hard work can be replaced with drugs, which is an especially damaging message to send to young athletes.If testosterone is being used for health reasons, things get a bit more tricky to understand. After all, if you’re not competing in a sport that has banned its use,, why not just take it as a health enhancement to lose fat, gain muscle, control blood sugar, or become healthier or more motivated to exercise?The risks of using a testosterone cream, injection, or patch are basically this: each of these forms of testosterone enters your body in free and “unbound” form, often times in significant amounts.

When your pituitary gland, which is normally responsible for making the hormones (particularly one called “LH”) that would cause you to churn out more testosterone, senses this high level of testosterone, it shuts down production of your body’s own testosterone stimulating hormones.In addition, since all your cells operate on what is called a “negative feedback loop,” the more testosterone you have circulating around in your bloodstream, the less sensitive your cell surface receptors become to the testosterone’s action, so you need more and more testosterone to get the same effect. When you finally do stop taking testosterone,you experience a significantly lower amount of naturally generated testosterone and a depressing withdrawal effect, whichcan last for many months.Now that you know the potential downside of using testosterone hormone replacement, here are some ways you can naturally increase your body’s testosterone, without the use of fancy pills, herbs, or supplements.

Any time you eat sugar and starch, your pancreas releases insulin, and high insulin upregulate aromatase activity (which means more testosterone gets converted into estrogen) and also cause an increase in Sex Hormone Binding Globulin(SHBG), which binds to circulating testosterone and renders it ineffective. So stay away from processed sugar, candy, soda, and even high amounts of things like pasta and bread.When you’re stressed out, you release high amounts of your body’s “flight and flight” hormone: cortisol. A precursor to cortisol is called pregnenolone. Unfortunately, pregnenolone is also a precursor to testosterone – so the more cortisol you make the less testosterone your body can make. A good place to start controlling stress is with simple breathing exercises, which you can learn more about here.In the same way that insulin can lower testosterone, inflammation from lack of recovery, inadequate sleep, poor dietary habits, environmental toxins and pollutants, and many other common triggers can increase levels of  “cytokine” molecules, which cause reactions similar to those experienced when  eating a high sugar diet.