Why do men gain belly fat after 40?

It really works. What are you talking about? You got a big head of hair. My brother's hair is actually thicker. That being said, there's no quick fix. Out there and the social media small bullet-sized windows, you hear of information from celebrities saying do this or do this, or even from an equipment perspective, here's a piece of equipment that's the latest and greatest. It'll burn three times the number of calories from anything that you used before. It's all BS, because in order to burn those extra calories, you have to put that amount of effort in to do that, to turn the machine and so on. The people demonstrating these machines. They probably didn't get fit by using these brand new pieces of equipment that they're demonstrating and selling to you. Normally it's your weakest moment, at two in the morning, when you can't sleep. That's right.

Right, they give up, they stop, they give in, I guess, to that mental stop sign, right, and I'd love to just hear your thoughts on that, to just go a little bit deeper, on the psychology of why we dislike fitness, but also why we won't continue if we know it's going to do something good for us in the long term. Just on that part. As I said earlier, if you ask a lot of people, they will never say they dislike. Right. That's a problem. That's a problem in itself. You've got to understand that. It is challenging to do on a consistent basis. And so why is it? And the more we understand things, the more it will resonate with the cognizant mind.

It's not just simply adding more weight to your frame, it's actually creating some internal conflict if not dealt with over time. So, while BMI can be helpful, it should be used with other measures and professional health advice for more accurate picture of individual's health. One of my favorite things is DEXA scans and these are scans and I've shared on social. I typically go. I usually go once a year and it's basically a full scan of your body and it will tell you how much body fat you have and it will even tell you where it's distributed on your body, how much lean mass you have, your bone density. It's really really cool. And then it gives you a report based on all these DEXA scan machines all around the world and it gives you a more accurate how are you doing for your age, your gender, right? So I can see.

Up to that point, I was able to pretend that things weren't as bad as they were because I wasn't looking the problem in the eye, deny Facing up. However, I broke down in tears. I never felt so low in my life. At that moment, I experienced an epiphany. I didn't like where my life was going and I hated the person I saw in the mirror. I got really honest really quickly and I began to own my daily choices and actions. I knew that I enjoyed life. At least I had enjoyed it before and I wanted to once again. I faced a simple choice I could remain this way forever or do something about it. I hit the library and I poured over books on health, nutrition and fitness. I started eating a little less and moving a little more. I started slowly with walking daily, then mountain biking.

I started slowly with Walking Daily, then Mountain Biking. I strapped on my cassette player yeah, I know dating myself again with a tape playing on Endless Loop A went to side B, wynch went back to side A, and so on. I'd ride until I had exhausted both the tape and myself. Only then would I ride. I had more and more daily activity, incrementally, eventually joining the gym. Over 14 months, nearly 18 months, I was transformed. This time, adolescence itself was on my side as I shot over a 6'1" it's a big growth. Sport that definitely helped me burn more calories. My weight didn't change that much just to qualify that, but I did see body fat melt away as new lean muscle mass appeared. Now with a better understanding of the science and biology of health, I know that my physical changes came from a combination of cardiovascular and resistance training.

I'm a good boy, I'm a good girl, whatever the labels people use for themselves. And then Saturday things go great. Hey, wire, you can do the same with your biofeedback, the same with your circumference measurements, and I get very data driven, but I don't make it complicated.

I've talked about me being hospitalized through burnout and then also discovering I have an autoimmune condition. And just you know, there's been some pretty big health scares. But you know I look at them as more as wake up calls. They were these moments bringing my awareness to something that I obviously wasn't paying attention to. And as soon as I started paying attention to it and started changing certain things changing certain foods and how I moved, how I recover things slowly corrected itself. And this is the one thing I want to really hammer home today is that as soon as you decide to start making some changes, you'll start making some changes. It seems rather simple and almost idiotic how simple it is right. You're probably yelling at the thing yeah, duh, duh. Well, yeah, duh duh.

That's creating a little bit of anxiety and it shows with this HRV and this is what I discovered about myself was my cortisol was doing that Because my chronically poor cortisol level. I was retaining fat around my subcutaneous fat, around my mid drift, especially around the belly button region. So I had this killer four pack. But I couldn't seem to lose the weight around the bottom too. And the big reason why is this? Chronic stress. And this isn't just affect me. This is very common in men and women alike. If you're carrying a little bit of extra fat around that mid drift and it's like gosh, it just feels like it's constantly inflamed there and just always feeling a bit off. It doesn't matter what I do, it's just always the same.

Not evenly. Arms and legs are roughly what they were. It is the waistband. You open the document, read the same paragraph four times, and go and make a coffee. You spend the day being patient and professional and the person who gets the leftover version of you is the one you would most like to be good to. This is the tell, and it is the one that finally makes men do something. Any one of these means very little. Five at once is a pattern, and the pattern has a name. Partly, and I want to be careful here because this gets oversold constantly, including by me in older writing. The mechanism is real. Cortisol released under stress affects where the body stores fat, favouring the abdominal cavity, and visceral fat is the metabolically dangerous kind. It is the fat associated with insulin resistance and cardiovascular risk, not the kind you can pinch.

Each attempt confirmed the same story: I know what to do, I just cannot make it stick. That story is wrong, and the DadBody project exists to prove it. He does not lack knowledge. He lacks a structure small enough to survive his actual life, and other men to answer to while it does. I have been in the fitness industry since the late nineties. I owned gyms, I trained hundreds of clients, and I watched the same pattern repeat until I could not unsee it. A man would arrive motivated, train hard for six weeks, hit his goal, and then slowly return to exactly where he started, plus a few pounds and minus some confidence.

I still think that is true and I now think it is close to useless as advice, because it describes the destination and not the road. Here is the road. You change the defaults, one at a time, and you wait. Protein at breakfast for a month until it is not a decision. Then fat at every meal. Then the evening cutoff. Each one takes about four weeks to stop requiring thought, and the compounding is what does the work , not the intensity. I have watched this play out with enough men to be confident about the timeline, and the honest version of it is that the first six weeks feel like nothing is happening, and then the fourth month is when someone asks you what you have been doing. Does eating fat make you fat? Not in the way the low-fat era claimed.

Ask a man over 40 how many times he has started again and he will usually laugh before he answers. Five. Six. He owns the equipment. He knows what to do. FIG. 01 A man who gets six weeks in and stops is telling you about the fuel, not the engine. Ask a man over 40 how many times he has started again and he will usually laugh before he answers. Five. Six. He has lost the same fifteen pounds three times. He owns the equipment. He knows what to do. He has proven, repeatedly, that he can do it for six weeks. That last part is the interesting part, and it is the reason I do not believe this is a discipline problem. A man who cannot do something never gets six weeks in. A man who gets six weeks in and then stops is telling you something about the fuel, not the engine. Because the thing that got you started is not a thing that can keep you going.

I'm looking for 4 more dads to beta-test a program that I've developed over the past 3 years. The #DadBodyProject. As a dad, husband, brother, friend and community leader, I know all too well how challenging it can be to try to fit it all in. As men, we're often pulled by careers, family, community, and our own dreams and ambitions. That's life. And it's beautiful. And yet. We often have a tendency to put our health and wellbeing, our self-care, on the back-burner of life. Not just the physical, but the emotional, psychological, and spiritual parts that make us who we are. We focus much of our energy on the external world, helping others before helping ourselves, becoming a martyr, sacrificing ourselves and in the process becoming a fraction of what we set out to be. In our 20's we were headstrong and had a metabolism to match.

Your body cannot tell the difference between a predator and an unread email from your boss, so it holds the allocation system open and keeps making the same trade. Energy now, maintenance later. Run that for a decade and later arrives. That is the fatigue. It is the interest payment on ten years of borrowed energy. Gallup's most recent global workplace data puts 40 percent of employees experiencing a lot of stress on any given day, with only 20 percent engaged in their work. Those two numbers together describe a very specific exhaustion: high activation, low meaning. It is the most draining combination there is, and it is the water most of the men I coach have been swimming in since their early thirties. Nobody arrives at a coaching call saying they have chronic autonomic overactivation. They arrive with a pile of separate small complaints they have never connected.

Most men who tell me they are exhausted are not sleep deprived. They are running a stress response that never gets switched off, and the body has quietly downgraded them to save power. FIG. 01 The part nobody photographs. I have had this conversation with more men than I can count. It usually arrives about ten minutes into a first call, in roughly the same words. I'm not unhealthy. I'm just tired. All the time. Then comes the list of things they have already tried. Going to bed earlier. Cutting coffee after noon. A sleep tracker. A blood panel their doctor called unremarkable. Sometimes a second panel, from a private clinic, because the first one felt like it missed something. Here is what I have learned from twenty years on my side of that call. Most of these men are not sleep deprived in the way they think.

And why most timelines lie to you. Thirty years of coaching, one cohort of twenty-three men, and every number I have, including the ones that do not flatter me. FIG. 01 The unglamorous part nobody photographs. The honest answer to how long it takes to get back in shape is this: you will feel different in about two weeks, you will be measurably stronger in about six, and you will look different somewhere between weeks eight and twelve. If you are over forty and you have been out of it for years, put those numbers at the slower end and stop reading the ones that promise otherwise. Every "six week transformation" you have seen is measuring the wrong thing at the wrong time. It measures the photo. The photo is the last thing to change. That gap, between the day the work starts paying and the day it becomes visible, is where almost every man I have coached has quit.

I am Dai Manuel. I have coached in this city for close to thirty years, and for most of that time I was not a very good personal trainer. Good at the training, bad at the business of it, and the reason for that is the reason men over 40 come to me now. FIG. 01 Dai Manuel, Vancouver. If you searched for a fitness coach in Vancouver, you have probably already tried the usual route. A trainer, three sessions a week, a good first month, and then life happened and the whole thing quietly unravelled. That is not a character flaw. It is a design flaw. Three hours a week with a trainer means 165 hours a week without one. The gap is where every result is decided, and it is the gap the entire personal training model politely ignores, because its revenue depends on you needing it again next year. I coach men over 40, mostly dads, mostly men who are successful at everything except this.

DadBody 28 is the shorter option if you would rather not wait. Still not answered? Read every question or message me directly and you get me, not an assistant. One hundred fifty episodes on movement, stillness, reading, nutrition, mindset and recovery. Search the transcripts or listen from the archive. Browse episodes Start here: the whole library Apply for one of twelve 0 of 12 places filled Every result above is a real man who will tell you about it himself. Named with permission, and shortened at their request.

Actuaries quantify lives. That is a real job and a useful one. I am in the other business, which is helping people qualify theirs. The question is not how many years you get. It is what is in them. The two questions I have been asking men since about 2016 are these. How do you want to spend the last twenty years of your life? And how will your health affect that? No one has ever answered either of those with a weight. “No one has ever answered either of those with a weight.” In 2016 I wrote that the fitness industry is broken, and I have not changed my mind. On any given day the industry will tell you a fat-reduced diet makes you skinny, that abs come in three minutes a day, that anything less than an hour five days a week is pointless, and above all that a particular body shape will make you happy.

I will not tell you what you are not allowed to eat. And I will not pretend that any of this is complicated, because it is not. It is small, boring, and repeated, and the only genuinely hard part is deciding that you are worth two percent of your own day. Most men I meet have not decided that yet. That is the actual work, and it is the reason I am still doing this after thirty years. Applications are open for the next MERGE60 cohort. Twelve places, application only.