 The best diet to lose belly fat. Eat this. Not that. Okay, the truth is you cannot choose which area of the body that you can lose fat from. But what you can do is tackle the cause behind why fat may be accumulating in the belly area. Now I've said for years that fat in the gut you are out of luck. Fat on your ass you're good to last. And I really mean that. Fat in the gut is an incredibly good indicator of bad gut health. Why? Well it turns out 80% of all of our white blood cells, our immune cells, line the walls of our intestine or in the fat in our abdomen. And if you've got leaky gut, if you're slicing your gut open with razor blades in the food you eat like lectins, like gluten, then there is a war going on inside your abdomen. And that war requires fuel for the troops, your immune cells. And there's very strong evidence that I've written about in most of my books that this abdominal fat is actually the fuel depot, the ammo depot for your immune cells that are fighting a battle in your gut. That's why fat in your gut you're out of luck. So one of the best ways to actually lose abdominal fat is to support your gut health. And there's some easy steps that I use in my clinics to support this. First and foremost you've got to eliminate the foods that contain lectins. Those are those little tiny proteins that act like razor blades when you eat them. And they literally poke holes in the wall of your intestine, which allows these proteins which are foreign to get across the wall, allows bacteria and bacterial particles to get across the wall. And strangely enough allows normal healthy food that would normally be fully digested before it's absorbed to actually get across the wall of your gut. And your immune system recognizes it as foreign. Can you imagine I actually have patients who their immune system thinks broccoli is a foreign substance because they have leaky gut and they eat a lot of broccoli. Number two, we know that your gut microbiome is your major defensive line against lectins getting into you. And yet for most of us our gut microbiome has been destroyed by the amount of antibiotics that we personally take. And probably just as importantly, if not more so, the amount of antibiotics that have been fed to our animals to fatten them up for slaughter. So you got to be careful with the animals you eat. You got to find organic, grass-fed, grass-finished, pastured or wild caught seafood. Don't let organic fool you. Most of these animals are fed organic corn and soybeans which are loaded with lectins. And as you've heard in other lectures, not only you are what you eat but you are what the thing you're eating ate. And they will pass that trouble on to you. Secondly, if you want the gut to repair itself, you actually have to ask it to have some downtime, some rest time. That's why time restricted eating or intermittent fasting where you compress your eating period to say 16 hours a day, you give the gut rest the rest of the time. And it's during that rest period that repair work can be done. Many people say, well I'm just going to repair my gut with gut repair supplements. That's fine. I even make several gut repair supplements. But if you keep swallowing razor blades, every time you repair the wall of your gut, it gets sliced open again. So the first thing you got to do is get those razor blades out of your diet. Now, why should we concentrate on belly fat? Well, because it is a sign of inflammation. And inflammation is the root cause of almost everything bad that's going to happen to you. But remember, belly fat rarely shows up on a scale. So measurements of your weight and even your BMI body mass index are not good indicators of health. What's really important is visceral fat. And in fact, there's strong evidence that skinny obesity is an incredible health problem in this country. As I mentioned in unlocking the keto code, 50% of normal weight individuals have metabolic inflexibility, have insulin resistance, 50% of normal weight individuals. That's why the scale may lie to you. Now, there are ways of finding out what your belly fat percentage is. Certain scales have a setting for belly fat percentage. And I talk all about this in episode 184, where I'm joined by the CEO and CSO of Bello, the world's first portable belly fat scanner. It's fun. It's easy to use. And it makes it easy to track what's the most lethal fat in your body. And that's the fat in your belly. So remember, fat in your gut, you're out of luck. The next episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast is waiting for you now. Fermentation is a very effective way of diminishing the lectin content of any food.