The Science To Burning Body Fat Explained | Shawn Stevenson

0:00Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter? Right? And the best part? They accept Discover. Accept Discover? In a little place like this? I don't think so, Jennifer. Oh, yeah, huh. Discover's accepted where I like to shop. Come on, baby, get with the times. Right, so we shouldn't get the parachute pants? These are making a comeback. I think. Discover is accepted at 99 % of places that take credit cards nationwide. Based on the February 2025 Nielsen Report. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:40Is there a way you think I'll ever be able to burn belly fat for good?

0:45Shawn Stevenson:There's a component, of course, with genetics. Now, we know that the leading science right now and what's really beginning to finally explode and become a popular part of the lexicon is epigenetics. and things that are above genetic control. Now, with that said, I think the first thing is having an understanding and an association with what fat actually is. Most folks have no idea. Fat can be broken down into essentially five different categories at minimum. A couple of these folks might have heard before, but we're going to go even deeper. So the first type is subcutaneous fat. This is a fat that's just below your skin.

1:19Shawn Stevenson:If you think about fat on your arms or your thighs, your butt, you can also have some subcutaneous fat on your belly, but that's the stuff you can pinch. The other type of fat is visceral fat. It's also known as omentum fat. And omentum fat is the kind of deeper recesses of your abdominal cavity, right? So this is the fat that's really kind of around the organs. You know, if you have a lot of visceral fat, putting stress on your pancreas and on your kidneys and just everything in your core, this is the most dangerous type of fat. This is the fat that's most correlated with heart disease, with Alzheimer's, with type 2 diabetes.

1:54Shawn Stevenson:You know, it's just putting stress on your core, everything, which there's so much around there. Digestive tract, your organs, your liver, your stomach, everything. This is the stuff, it's a little bit more firm to the touch. It's a little bit harder to get your hands around. So these are both still two types of white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Okay, so your body's storing energy. And before I go on, let me preface by saying this. Our fat is actually amazing. It's one of the most important things that have made us the humans that we are today, is our ability to store energy and to go back and utilize that energy.

2:27Shawn Stevenson:Our fat is programmed to do what we've taught it to do. It's just doing what it's programmed to do. It's very good at it, though. And it can be a little bit clingy, you know, so you have to give the right messages. And that's part of the issue. We tend to think it's like scattered droplets of cells or unhappiness throughout our body. but it's really an organ itself that has this interconnected communication. And being that it's an organ, it produces its own hormones, producing more hormones that encourage more fat storage if it gets out of hand. So there's another type of fat in the white adipose tissue camp that a lot of people don't know about.

3:03Shawn Stevenson:It's called intramuscular fat. This type of fat really works on site to provide energy to your muscles. Now, when I went to school, my conventional education, I really was indoctrinated with an idea that fat and muscle, they have this dichotomy. Like they're two different things. They're separate, but they actually work together. And intramuscular fat really provides. And just to think about what it looks like, if you think about the marbling of a steak, that's your intramuscular fat. Now that can get out of hand too. And you can get what we refer to as chubby muscles. So there's too much white adipose tissue storage on that particular fat community.

3:40Shawn Stevenson:So these three are white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Now, here's what's really amazing. And a lot of folks might know about this next one. We also have body fat that burns fat. So they're not storage fats. These are fats that contribute to the burning of energy. The first one that's becoming a lot more recognizable is brown adipose tissue or brown fat. The reason that it's brown is that it's so dense in mitochondria. Mitochondria are really the energy power plants of ourselves, really producing the energy. When we talk about having energy, these are the power plants creating that energy.

4:14Shawn Stevenson:And mitochondria is where your fat actually gets burned. We're taught these diet paradigms, like how does it work? Where does the fat go? How does it get burned? They actually track the path of fat getting burned throughout the body and track how it actually is eliminated. In our culture, we tend to think of burning fat, if there's a visual of it, it's sweating. Like we're at the gym, we're sweating it out. but in actuality about 84 percent of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing so fat burns in the body and then it goes what into your lungs it's like transporting through the lung cavity and then you breathe it out it's it's an eliminatory organ you know we don't think about that we tend to think about like our gastrointestinal tract our bladder's eliminatory organs your lungs and so you breathe about 84 percent of the fat that you lose comes out via your breath.

5:07Shawn Stevenson:And about a third of that happens while you're sleeping at night. How much fat do we burn through our lungs? It's all the metabolic processes that take place to create the metabolic kind of offshoots. It just comes through the mouth. Right, through the breathing. You also do eliminate some of body fat through fluids. You know, somewhere around the ballpark, about 15%, 16 to 14%, sweat, urine, tears. All of these things are eliminating products. So we tend to think that fat cells, we're trying to, quote, kill fat or burn fat. But that's not really how it works, actually. Your fat cells are storage containers.

5:43Shawn Stevenson:When you're born, you have a certain allotment of fat cells. You can't just indiscriminately kill them. They get filled with more and more energy. It makes the fat cell expand. So what we're trying to do is to get the fat cell to let go of its contents so it can be used as fuel. Right. And so there are two enzymes that are really the head ushers that push fat contents or triglycerides into the fat cell, or they usher them out when it's time to leave. So one of its hormone-sensitive lipase is the one that comes and gets folks out of the theater. Lipoprotein lipase takes the triglycerides and ushers them into the theater.

6:17Shawn Stevenson:And then there's organs that kind of dominate and regulate what those enzymes are doing. Your pancreas is like the mother of two brothers who have two different roles. One of them is insulin, and the other one, its brother, is glucagon. When you think of insulin, what do you think of, though? Eating sugar? Yeah. Insulin spikes in the body when you eat sugar, right? Yeah, and most folks think of diabetes, too. It's like tied into that lexicon. Insulin is so important for our survival. We need it. Yes. You absolutely have to have insulin. And if you're born, you know, in a condition where you have type 1 diabetes, and the beta cells in your pancreas aren't even making insulin, you can die.

6:54Shawn Stevenson:Your cells won't get energy. Now, here's the thing. Insulin's job is to store energy and to encourage all those enzymes to do their work as well. So when it's out of hand, when insulin is too active, it can be a problem. It's storing too much fat. Yeah. And it can get to a point where there's so much activity with insulin, it's getting overrun and stressed out that it stops doing its job properly. That's where you get insulin resistance. So you've got insulin doing its job of fat storage or energy storage. Glucagon does the opposite. it. It encourages your cells to let go of their contents to be used as energy.

7:27Shawn Stevenson:But glucagon cannot do its job unless his brother sits down somewhere. Insulin? Yes. So how do you get insulin to stop doing its job? That's what it's all about, man. That's what it's all about. But we don't want it to stop. We just want it to be efficient. Efficient. We do know that, as you mentioned, sugar is a big driver of insulin, carbohydrates in general. Breads, pastas, right? Yeah. But protein does as well. It incites the activity of insulin at a lesser degree, for sure. And even fat in a kind of backdoor way does drive insulin function too, or even contributes to potentially insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance.

8:01Shawn Stevenson:So it's not just this one thing, but we do know that in our culture, you know, on average folks are eating like 150 pounds of sugar a year, you know, so that abnormal amount of exposure is chronically creating this overactivity of insulin to the point that we have insulin resistance. The life expectancy increases every year it seems like. We're eating more and more bad things but we're able to live longer whereas before we weren't. That's the misnomer though. We're not necessarily living longer we're dying longer. We're getting sick and being able to stay alive. Yes. The goal is not to live as long as you can and be sick and miserable.

8:38The goal is to live as long as you can healthy, flexible, abundant, not with chronic pain and then die quickly.

8:46Shawn Stevenson:We don't just want lifespan. We want healthspan. Beige fat is really, really remarkable in that it can actually become brown fat or white fat based on your lifestyle inputs and your nutrition can determine whether it's turning into a fat-storing type of fat or a fat-burning type of fat. And the browning of this fat, coffee has been found to encourage your beige fat cells to become brown fat cells. And one of the studies found that there's about a 3 % to 11 % increase in metabolic rate from having caffeine. Now, there's a U-shaped curve of benefits, right? Some is good. Once we get to a certain place, we can mess ourselves up.

9:29Shawn Stevenson:And also, we get in the conversation of what is that coffee coming along with? Is it coffee? Are you consuming coffee with... Donuts and... Coffee creamers with all these synthetic chemicals. That's not good. And even the coffee itself. Are you getting a piping hot cup of coffee with pesticides and herbicides and rodenticides? And these toxicants that damage these hormones related to fat loss and fat storage and create kind of dysbiosis in the gut. So there's a big conversation there. We dive into all these pieces to see, like, there's so many wonderful things that we have access to. But in our culture, we've been a little bit led astray.

10:05Shawn Stevenson:It's not that coffee is inherently good or bad. It's been utilized by humans for centuries. but it's the quality and how you're going about it that can make all the difference in the quantity probably and yeah yeah and so just going back to your original question when we're targeting that you know the belly fat specifically and this is something that is not talked about enough it's really about encouraging and optimizing the hormones related to fat storage and fat burning and this gets into the conversation of calories because we tend to be very calorie focused as far as we're trying to lose weight or we're trying to lose belly fat.

10:40Shawn Stevenson:And it's not that calories don't matter. I want to make that clear. I want to preface with this. It's a measurement of energy in food, just like a meter is a measure of energy in distance. But that meter is consistent. If we measure this room consistently, it's going to be the same meters. It's the same distance. However, calories are different. Completely ignore, when you're talking about a measurement of energy, it ignores the complexity of human digestion and human hormones and neurotransmitters and cellular function. It's going to be different every day, the calories that you consume and what effects it has on your body.

11:12Because our hormones are changing, our bodies are changing, our timelines are changing. What we used to eat when we were 12 may not affect us now when we're 40 or 50. Exactly.

11:22Shawn Stevenson:Let alone you versus another person. And this is where we get in these situations where a diet works for one person, but it doesn't work for someone else. And I'm sick of it, man. Wow. Because people keep thinking there's something wrong with them. And they're not getting these very fundamental principles.

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13:13Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

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