Inflammatory Fat: The Hidden Culprit Behind Stubborn Weight Gain and How to Get Rid of It

Have you ever tried to lose weight and no matter what you do it just will not come off? Could it be inflammatory fat? Today, we will discuss what inflammatory fat is and how you can get rid of it. Hey brown beauties Welcome to live in inflammation free with me Andretta Robison, your functional nutrition health coach, and I’m Aaqila Harvey, we are Your mother daughter hosts bringing two different generations together bi weekly to give you easy actionable steps to help rid your body of chronic inflammation.
Welcome to live in inflammation free today, we have a hot topic, one that will probably resonate with many of you, especially as you age. I think we all can relate to that. But to remember the time yeah, that’s talking remember the time Michael Jackson’s remember the time you know what I remember the time. Okay, when you could eat anything and you never had to worry about gaining weight? I remember. I mean, usually that’s in your 20s
maybe sometimes your 30s Yeah, but I remember it very well. In fact, let me tell you a backstory that just I don’t know why this sticks with me. Aaqila but I was 21 years old.
And I was walking around you know, we used to have all these family reunions down in Florida. I was strutting my stuff my little like a little peacock camouflage shorts on walking across and not a peacock. Oh Shall I was reading my stuff in front of all my cousins and my aunt. And one of them looked at me and said forget this. She said you fine now but when they you gonna find out that is far harder to stay fine as you age not as hate.
You know that’s this is called that. No, that was Kayla’s hate that was
she said and she said you find now girl but you just usually as well I can hear that our family behaved on us like isn’t saying,
Well, today we’re gonna talk about inflammatory fat, which could be the reason you know, it’s easy, you need to get to the root cause of why it’s difficult to lose the weight that you want to lose. You know, I know people that go to the gym too, and sometimes twice a day in an effort to try to lose weight, and it works short term. But if you want something long term, you got to get rid of the inflammatory fat. So when we come back, we’re going to talk about and we’re going to break it down a little bit for you.

Brown women wellness mission is to empower brown women and their families through education and products to help improve their family health and wellness through a lifestyle of easy and actionable steps. I’m Andretta Robinson functional Nutrition Wellness Coach. In 2008, I was diagnosed with an early stage of cancer. My doctor wanted to remove my womb as a cure. But I was determined there had to be another way. After lots of research I found a curable alternative, forcing my doctor to treat it without any surgery. And in 2018 I was visiting my aunt in Atlanta after having lost my mother to heart disease, and saw her health was in distress with high blood pressure and all things related. A visit to the health food store to formulate herbal teas which is now called brown women wellness, anti inflammation tea and a diet and lifestyle change turned my aunt’s health around. I knew I had found my calling. We bring you healthy lifestyle information through our brown and wellness website, our brown and wellness Facebook group, emails, Instagram and other social media websites and our wEll honestly podcast find us you’ll be glad you did. It’s no secret that the higher rates of obesity and related health problems in the black communities are higher than any others. Could inflammatory fat be the reason? What is inflammatory fat? Do you know what that is? Aaqila stubborn fat.
You’re right. And honestly, you know how you could tell if you’ve got inflammatory fat is of around the stomach at the tummy. You know, if you are carrying most people carry the excess weight right around their waistline. And that is actually inflammatory fat. And they call it visceral fat, which is a fat that accumulates around your abdomen. And it goes around your organs, your liver, your pancreas and your intestines. And this type of fat is metabolically active and can release hormones and other chemicals that contribute to inflammation. And we’re all about inflammation here. So that’s why we want to talk about this. So that explains why so many of us have protruding stomachs. I used to always say stuff like, Man, I got two stomachs. I used to always say that I go, Oh, I see two stomachs here. And but you know, and you see it all the time, a lot of times what men to, we used to tease and when we say carry a lot of visceral fat, yeah, we used to say some men we sell that man looks like he’s six months pregnant, or we say four months pregnant. That was a joke that we had, you know, for men. So but today, we want to talk about the root cause. Why is that?

So the root cause of inflammatory fat is not really understood, but is believed to be
connected to genetics, your lifestyle and environmental factors, which explains, you know, when you start talking genetics, and lifestyles, you know, our community lifestyles and our genetics are totally different from everybody else. And so one of the things lifestyle factors is if you got a diet in high processed food, which has all the added sugar, low physical activity, and chronic stress, all of those contribute to inflammatory fat. So in your genetics, your genetics can determine where your fat is stored in the body. It’s funny you said that
the fat that’s around your waistline kind of disturbing the fat area where the inflammation is. But I noticed that like for me, genetically speaking, my what I’m what I can’t lose weight, my stubborn inflammatory fat is typically like in my upper body, so like around my back, and my shoulders and my arms and the worst place you want any kind of fat to go first. That’s where my genetic kind of stubborn, inflammatory fat is located. I never really had like a pooch, per se, unless I was just like, just completely out of weight, or overweight all over. But yeah, it were it stored as your genetic makeup. And for me, I think mine started showing I love forget my heaviest I was in my 40s, my early 40s. And I go back and look at some of those pictures of me and I look like a whale. Oh, it was like, Oh, my goodness, I remember we used to carry a clothing line called Mina. And we used to wear these big flowing outfits. Man, we was hiding all that inflammatory fats.
And but you know what I mean, the reality is you don’t like anytime you have stubborn inflammatory fat, typically, you’re not liking what you’re seeing. So the natural thing to do is to cover it up or dress in a manner in which, you know, is flattering, although now, you know, people let it all hang out. And it doesn’t matter. The world has changed. But
you sometimes I’ve noticed that if you get if you if you buy clothes that are like in bigger sizes, sometimes you don’t even realize like I’m getting bigger and bigger and bigger, just because you’re accommodating the size that you are at. And if you don’t like it, you’re not doing anything to rectify it. Yeah. And I know, it’s easier said than done to get rid of the inflammatory fat, you know, but one of the reasons that we started this podcast and we started Brown, I’m a wellness and very soon we’re gonna start our community is because we want to give you easy, actionable lifestyle ways to do things. Not we’re not talking about eating rabbit food. And we’re not talking about being in the gym twice or three times a day. You know, we want to give you some easy actionable steps that you can do. And sometimes you have to take baby steps. Sometimes you just take one little thing, but one of the things we want you to do, and you’re going to hear this and you hear the same thing we say, and you hear it all the time, you just got to change the way you eat. Excuse me, you need to incorporate a healthier, healthier diet, incorporating more in anti inflammatory foods into your diet, such as fruits and vegetables, whole grains, lean protein, all those things can help help reduce inflammation. And the biggest one that we’re all and the biggest, biggest biggest violator of them all is processed food, because we have become a nation of eating out. You know, we’re fast moving nation now we move quick. We can’t we don’t have time to cook. We don’t have we want to go and I’m gonna tell you something. I was listening to some stats the other day. Did you know that in the African American communities that we get twice the amount of processed food chains than anywhere else?
I mean, they are actually they target the African American community with processed food. We’re also we get out so you know sugar. We’re going to always get a lot of sugar and saturated fats.
Also, you got to get rid of some of that out your diet to help reduce the inflammation.

And then the other thing is exercise man trying to get that exercise in. See, again, we’re fast moving, we’re fast moving nation right now, we don’t have time to do this, that and the other, let alone exercise. But you know, it doesn’t necessarily mean you got to go to the gym. I mean, so many ways to get physical activity in. I mean, if you could just jump rope outside view, whatever it is you’d like to do, I just started doing pickleball.
I know, right, I don’t even know what that is. Pickleball is a combination of it looks like tennis, and badminton.
So it’s in the middle of actually tennis and playing badminton. And honestly, I’d be honest with us, the older people that you know, my baby boomers are playing pickleball. So, I mean, oh, hey, we’d be having fun. I’m sure y’all do, they do. I mean, you know, chasing that ball. But that’s what my point is, that’s a form of exercise. So whatever you need to do, if it’s walking, going for a bike, bike riding, swimming, you know, just find some type of way to release physical exercise during the day, because what if you don’t use an Old adage, if you don’t use it, you’re gonna lose it.

The third thing you could do to get rid of the inflammatory feet, fat, I’m sorry, is getting enough sleep. And this is, this is another one that we take for granted. You know, I mean, I’m talking about real sleep, I’m not talking about that kind of sleep where you’re not really sleep. And I noticed that the older that we get, the harder it is to sleep. And let me just tell you what we found out again, you know, being a certified health coach, and, and working with a lot of functional medicine, doctors, what and a lot of the stats, trust me, we try to make sure that everything we tell you is evidence based, one of the reasons people are having problems falling asleep is because there’s a lack of magnesium in the diet, magnesium, magnesium, I had no idea that magnesium was so low in 80% of people they have tested have below magnesium. So if you have to take that supplement, you should take it, there are a lot of you need to go this means magnesium will definitely help you establish a regular sleep schedule, and it will support your healthy sleep patterns. So you know, because all these other sleeping aids that are out here are band aids, you really need to find something that’s going to help you get a restful, so I started taking a magnesium. And I’ll put a link in the show notes to the one that I take it actually contains, there are three types of magnesium and the actual has all three in there. So now can I just say, as a person who has taken magnesium before? And maybe I, you know, I have a tendency to overdo things, sometimes. I’m wrong. Ah, I noticed that magnesium, if it’s taken too much, can be a laxative, and I’m gonna just leave Oh, well, yeah, I’m gonna leave it there. Please take the recommended just be sure to watch it as well, there are three kinds of magnesium is too. So you have to make sure you’re taking the right one there.
So and we’ll come back later and talk about magnesium. But if you just do a little research, you’ll see that there are several types. That’s why I take the one that I take because it has all three of those. I didn’t know that there were three types. I was always taking one particular one, that’s probably one that probably was my problem. And anything that you take too much of it’s not good for you. Okay.

And then there’s a fourth way to get rid of this inflammatory fat. And you guys probably guessed it is probably real simple. It’s another one, this is easier said than done. It’s managing your stress, stress, chronic stress can can contribute to inflammation and weight gain. What is chronic stress? Chronic stress is over a long period of time or a long period of time constantly stressing, never finding time to relax, breathe and relax and let things out. You know, and you gotta You can’t just stress and figure it’s gonna go away on its own. You got to do stuff. Yes. You know, one of my ways of handling stress is meditation. Same and also I also do a lot of deep breathing that same way. Okay. And then you know, you could do things like yoga and all those things to help overall your stress.

And then of course now we got one more thing if you’re smoking cigarettes. Here’s another fact that I just found out that I did not know but I’m not surprised that 80% of the advertisement for cigarettes is aimed at the black community. Because we’re still one of the biggest people still smoke cigarettes. People still smoke cigarettes. You’d be surprised. And in they were smoking I don’t even know how much site it’s like $80 a pack. Price
Have 100 other people who smoke smoke, you know? So it’s it’s a hard habit to kiss a very well it’s very addictive. Yes. All right, yeah. Okay.

And then the other one is excessive alcohol consumption. And notice I use the word excessive. You know, I mean, you know, you know having a glass of wine every now and then or drink out with your friends. That’s different. But you know, but if you got to be one of those people that and I remember when I first discovered drinking wine man, I never knew a whole bottle of wine because everybody when I say everybody has that realization at some point when you first started drinking wine, you next thing you know, especially if you drink it at home, next thing you know, you’re drunk, you’re drunk, you’re drunk, the whole bottle ease. And it’s almost scarily easy. How ridiculous that is sit there you could be you know, relaxing, watching television eating. Next thing, you know, they lay on the couch. And you didn’t even realize that you got late, and you knew that we were friends. There’s a solo dolo enjoying a little show? Yeah. And you wore bottles out? Yeah, those were the days and so that contributes to inflammation. Okay, so again, you know, you got to try to quit smoking and limiting your alcohol consumption will help reduce inflammation and promote weight loss.

Let me just say that I I find having a routine and all of this is key. So like, you know, it’s easy for us to say, these are the five things you need to do. Right? And then you just, hey, I’m gonna do it, right. But then most time, that’s not how life works. Right? Right. So come up with whatever your life looks like that plan to incorporate all of these things into your life. I’ll give you a prime example. So I decided last week that I was gonna set give myself a bedtime. Okay, and because I don’t have a bedtime, I am a night owl, Andretta, can attest that I will call her at like 10 o’clock. And I’m talking about work when she’s already been tried to shut down and now yeah, no, I didn’t get started a little early. Right. And but because of that my sleep patterns are terrible. I won’t go to sleep until
at worse 3:30 4 o’clock in the morning, and then I’m no good and woke up and I’m no good throughout the day, but I’m getting woke up at 8:30 Because you know, that’s when the work that’s been normal, right? Working, right. So it’s, it’s starting to become that’s something that I used to be able to handle when I was in my 20s and early 30s. Now that I’m in my middle 30s I am noticing the effect of the lack of sleep is having on my life. So I say okay, something has to be done. Even taking like CBD and out all the sleep aids. It’s not working, I’ll fall asleep, but I’ll wake back up. And sometimes I don’t even fall asleep because it’s just not working anymore, right. So I said to myself, something’s gotta get now first of all, I am going to get more magnesium. But incorporating things like a structured wine down to bedtime routine will help cut at least half of the stress that you have on your body out tell yourself set an alarm, I set an alarm. I started winding down at 10:30 I need to be realistic. Which means why now for me tea instead of having wine.
Now we’re going back into another part of the five things instead of having wine I’ll have my tea and then I will take myself to the bedroom. So sometimes normally I just fall asleep on the couch working or looking at TV or whatever. Take it into the bedroom with my tea. I even made my sleep aid magnesium whatever. And then at 11:30 No I’m sorry that 11:30 at 11 I’m done scrolling. So we talking social media social media. Social media. Tik tok I don’t know about anybody else tick tock is amazing. I’m avoiding tik tok was sucked in let me say and you will see. You can learn you can discover you can get mad you can get Happy. Sad, but it’s short short form content that just sucks you in and you go down rabbit holes. I enjoy Tik Tok you can look it actually tick tock is not a bad thing. It’s all in what you what you curate and what you make. However, tik tok Can you can look up and you can be in a three hour binge on just all types of different tik tok it has happened to me many times that I care to admit so then you started to lose track of time. So for me I’m done at 11 o’clock we’re scrolling everything Instagram Tik Tok whatever and then I’ll put on my ambient music in the background. So I’ll put on YouTube and I put on my you know frequency music or deep sleep music you know it’s all you gotta do is put in the search 1000 of those come up and then if if that’s not working because I’m not the type that can just like sit there and go to sleep like I have to fall asleep. So then then it’s people reading a book or putting on a boring show maybe or then put on the ambient music and I wait awaited I have a weighted pillow, putting a pillow over my face. I don’t know why but just knocks me out. I say all this to say a routine can help y’all incorporate all these things and next thing you know you’re getting up and going to the gym earlier or whenever you can and then you’re helping that stubborn fat just become less and less and less through routine so I can’t stress that enough well that’s a good point okay law and routine is definitely something you want to check out. There are so many things you could do um you know my favorite thing and I told Aaqila the other day is I wear a sleep mask on my eyes because it blocks out all lights I found I’m about to get out and then I found another little trick I put castor oil on my around my eyelid I don’t have lashes on right now so I can’t do that my lashes. Oh yeah, but I put Castol around and I put that I put sleep mask on top of it and I sleep like so I don’t get you know.
You don’t put it close. Yeah, right. Oh my lashes. You know cast all caps your lashes grow. Yeah, but like, I never had that problem. So anyway, these are just some suggestions, some ideas to help you get rid of I mean, some suggestions and ideas to help you, you know, with this inflammatory fat. Hopefully if you guys come up with something else, or if you tell us tell us let us know what some of the things what do you do? Yeah, um, real quick before we go. I’ve tik tok tik tok will teach you something. A lot of women are having this very issue. And a lot of women are going to doctors and getting like bloodwork ups to see where their cortisol levels are. Okay. And every single one, they’re high. There’s they’re extremely high and there was one particular girl she disappeared for a while she came back she looked lighter, pounds wise, she looked more energetic. She didn’t look so like how we all look bloated and frustrated. And she found out that her cortisol levels were extremely high. So she put magnesium and some other things she said to her routine, and it helped so if all else fails, if you feel like you’re stressed, but you don’t know like, oh, I don’t know what to do. Go get blood workup and see where your cortisol levels is nothing like seeing a number right in front of you. That puts all of this that we talked about into gear sure never never fails.

All right, well that’s it for today’s episode. We hope that you enjoyed it and remember to we’re not doctors so we want you guys to don’t sue us okay? All right. Want you to make sure that you know we are health coaches but want you to fall always follow your doctor’s advice. And as usual, we want you guys please please please download us and please please please like us and make some comments out there you guys we want to know you’re out there you guys we got a Do you notice this episode 99 number 92 I can’t believe we’re on episode 92 My goal my dream was to get to 100 there were all I will feel accomplished. Well, I feel accomplished that 92 If you want I don’t 100 was my goal. So I’m dead set. So anyway, thank you guys again. And we’ll see you in a couple of weeks. Remember, we we do these every other week and we’ve downloaded new episodes. See you then bye.

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