Epic Mini: Your Gut, Stress, and Midlife Belly Fat

In this episode of the Menopause Disruptor Podcast, host Mary delves deep into the intricate link between stress, gut health, and visceral belly fat as experienced during menopause. 

Mary explains how chronic stress impacts gut microbiota, inflammation, and fat storage, and highlights the gut-brain axis's role in this process. She leans into the experts in the field include Dr. Tara Swart and Dr. Stacy Sims to explain why stress and a hormone-changing woman's body responds to stress and fat stores, emphasizing the value of sprint intervals and heavy resistance training over steady cardio to manage cortisol levels and improve body composition. 

Mary offers actionable advice on gut-friendly nutrition and stress-regulating practices that she shares with several clients that she has coached which can help you mitigate belly fat. 

Resources:

• Dr. Tara Swart
• Dr. Stacy Sims
• 5 Clinically Proven Remedies to Tackle Gut Heath Issues
• How to make L.Crispatus Yogurt
• 
  

Sign up for a free resource: The Midlife Belly Fat Reset: A 7-Day Gut–Hormone–Workout Plan.

In this plan, you will get:

• A week of gut-friendly, hormone-balancing meals that lower cortisol and feed your good bacteria.
• Two sprint interval workouts and two heavy resistance sessions—simple, structured, and designed for midlife women.
• Daily stress-reset rituals you can do in under 10 minutes to calm your gut-brain axis.

Start shifting belly fat at the root cause and by working with your body. Sign up today. https://subscribepage.io/bellyfatreset

Transcript

Hi lovely listeners, welcome back to the show. Today, we’re diving into something that so many of us feel but don’t often connect the dots on: the link between stress, gut health, and that stubborn visceral belly fat that often shows up more around menopause.

I’ve addressed this topic previously in a blog post, you can read on my website, Emme Elle Coaching dot com

And I’ve talked about it in a previous episode, Menopause and Inflammation. You can go back to June 2024 to have a listen. And now, I am circling back on this topic again because it is perhaps the most common comment, observation and even complaint I get from clients and class participants. They acknowledge how energized, strong and more muscular they are, but if only they could get rid of the muffin top.

And my answer - that excess belly fat you’re fighting is stress.

The very fact women are overly concerned i.e. stressed about it is a stressor itself. A perpetual vicious cycle, the hamster wheel you can’t get off. What resists, persists, as the saying goes!

Let’s unpack this

Most of us think of stress as something in the brain—like the never-ending to-do list, finances, family dynamics and demands, that flurry of texts, emails and messages on our device, or simply, a restless night’s sleep. But stress doesn’t just live in your head. It actually shows up in your gut—and your belly FIRST—long before you consciously notice it.

Here’s why. Your gut— IS the “second brain” AND PERHAPS THE MOST SOPHISTICATED and Sensitive one. It is in constant conversation with your actual headspace brain through what’s called the gut-brain axis. This is a two-way communication system powered by nerves, hormones, immune signals, and even gut microbes.

One of the main highways in this system is a nerve that runs directly from your gut to your brain. That highway is called the vagus nerve. This thick cable of neurons carries loads of bidirectional information, allowing the gut to send signals to the brain and vice versa. When stress hits, your brain sends signals down the vagus nerve and shifts your whole body into “fight-or-flight” mode. Blood is pulled away from digestion, and you might feel that stomach ache or butterfly sensation. But it doesn’t stop there.

Chronic stress literally changes your gut—and in turn, it changes how your body stores fat.

Here’s how it works:

1. When cortisol—the stress hormone—stays elevated, it loosens the tight junctions in your gut lining, leading to leaky gut. That sparks inflammation and blood sugar swings, both of which push your body to store fat around the belly. Cortisol weakens the gut lining.
   
   
2. Stress lowers your good bacteria—like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria—that help regulate mood, metabolism, and inflammation. When harmful microbes take over, it actually promotes fat storage, especially visceral fat in the midsection. Your microbiome shifts.
   
   
3. Leaky gut plus microbial imbalance keeps your body in a constant low-grade inflammatory state. Inflammation rises and that drives up insulin resistance, which makes it even easier for calories to be tucked away in belly fat.
   
   
4. Our neurotransmitter production drops. With less serotonin being made in the gut, cravings go up, mood regulation goes down, and stress eating becomes almost inevitable.
   
   

And here’s the kicker: in menopause, with estrogen declining, your body is even more sensitive to cortisol. That’s why midlife belly fat often shows up seemingly out of nowhere.

Renowned neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart who has been featured extensively including the podcast Diary of a CEO with host Steven Bartlett, explains how stress makes us fat from a neurological perspective. Cortisol is a natural pro-inflammatory that circulates throughout the blood and the body to tell the brain there is a threat so that we can rise to meet that threat. Chronic inflammation caused by ongoing high levels or cortisol that don’t flush out of the body however will stay accumulated around the heart - one reason why stress can cause heart attacks (even with the absence of smoking, high blood pressure, poor nutrition). Dr Swart further explains that human bodies were designed to register cortisol spikes as a threat (mainly to food sources and ultimately to our survival and so one of its first responses is to store fat in abdominal fat cells long enough until the threat is gone and humans can go back to being hunters and gatherers of food sources.

Pretty ingenious but the problem - we aren’t living in the days of wooly mammoth and sabre tooth tigers. We live in a culture of continuous high stress cycles and that cycle never gets a fair chance to close. So the fat stores keep increasing with exposure to high cortisol.

How are we to tackle belly fat ?

The solution? It might surprise you- it’s not about “eating less and moving more.” It’s about balancing stress and the gut-brain axis.

Let’s unpack this further.

And this is where exercise comes in. Here’s where I lean into my education as a Girls Gone Strong certified women’s coaching specialist and as a student of Dr. Stacy Sims, Menopause 2.0.

A lot of women double down on steady-state cardio—what’s often called zone 2 training—to try to burn off belly fat. But here’s the problem: too much of that kind of cardio actually keeps cortisol elevated. Remember—cortisol is what drives fat storage around the belly.

Instead, research highlighted by Dr. Stacy Sims shows that the real game-changers for midlife women are two things: sprint intervals and heavy resistance training.

Why? Because they do the opposite of long cardio sessions:

• They actually help blunt cortisol.
  
  
• They switch on hormones like growth hormone and adrenaline that encourage your body to burn fat—especially belly fat.
  
  
• They also build lean muscle, which keeps metabolism strong as you age.
• And… these forms of exercise - much like long cardio - increases the "feel-good" neurotransmitters like dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin, which elevate mood while simultaneously lowering cortisol. This creates a positive feedback loop where exercise signals the brain to release beneficial chemicals, improving the nervous system's overall balance and increasing the capacity for managing stress. You just don’t need long hours of cardio to reap the same mental health results.

So if you’ve been pounding the treadmill for hours and still struggling with belly fat, it’s not because you’re doing something wrong—it’s because your body needs a different signal. Short, intense bursts of effort and lifting heavy are far more effective for managing hormones, gut health, and body composition in midlife.

We can also consciously and intentionally implement other adaptive practices to address stress targeted directly where it happens first - the gut. 

When we pair exercise with stress-lowering, gut-healing nutrition strategies, we’ve got a formula that actually works. Here’s the formula:

1. Feed your microbes. Eat fiber-rich prebiotics like oats, garlic, greens, and berries.
   
   
2. Rebuild with fermented foods including kefir, sauerkraut and Yogurt—better yet, your own homemade yogurt. It’s cheaper, healthier, and packed with trillions of live cultures and you can listen to my episode with Dr. William Davis or check out my L.Crispatus yogurt youtube video to learn more.
   
   
3. Cut back on ultra-processed foods and artificial sweeteners. They fuel harmful bacteria and spike cortisol.
   
   
4. Use breath and mindfulness. Even a few slow breaths before meals can switch your body into rest-and-digest mode, lowering cortisol and helping your gut absorb nutrients.
   
   
5. Get early sunlight. This resets your circadian rhythm and naturally regulates cortisol.
   
   
6. Walk after meals. It helps balance blood sugar and keeps digestion smooth.

And to top it all off, combine smart movement and wise nutrition with stress regulation practices that stimulate the vagus nerve. When you stimulate it, you tell your body: “It’s safe. You can rest, digest, and heal now.” This lowers cortisol, improves digestion, and even helps regulate belly fat storage.

How do you do that:

Research shows, including the work of Dr Swart, that journaling (highly cathartic); writing or listing off things you are grateful for daily; meditation, nature walks, yoga, somatic practices such as tapping, humming and chanting, and breath work, can have a positive effects on your nervous system - putting you back into rest, digest, restore. The parasympathetic state is where the body does all its restore work including setting melatonin levels that aid in proper sleep cycles which is where the real cellular repair and cleansing work happens.

The bottom line? You can’t out-exercise or out-diet chronic stress. Belly fat in menopause isn’t solved by deprivation or more hours of cardio—it’s solved by fueling properly to support gut health, moving the body in a manner that works with your shifting hormones, not against them, and turning up the gut-brain axis superhighway of communication with meditation, breathwork and other practices that lowers cortisol whilst elevating oxytocin.

Your gut is your mood’s—and your metabolism’s—first responder. When you calm the gut-brain axis and shift the type of exercise you do, you’ll notice not just better digestion and less belly fat, but also better mood, energy, and clarity.

So if you’ve been frustrated by stubborn belly fat, consider this your permission slip: stop punishing yourself with endless cardio, and start supporting your body with stress-smart nutrition, gut-healing habits, and the kind of training that actually works in midlife.

Thanks for listening today. If this resonated, share it with a friend who’s navigating the same challenges. Together we can change the narrative around menopause, stress, and belly fat.

Wait, before you go, I am creating a free resource just for my listeners: The Midlife Belly Fat Reset: A 7-Day Gut–Hormone–Workout Plan.

In this plan, you will get:

• A week of gut-friendly, hormone-balancing meals that lower cortisol and feed your good bacteria.
  
  
• Two sprint interval workouts and two heavy resistance sessions—simple, structured, and designed for midlife women.
  
  
• Daily stress-reset rituals you can do in under 10 minutes to calm your gut-brain axis.
  
  

It’s everything you need to start shifting belly fat at the root cause—not through endless cardio or calorie restriction, but by working with your body.

Sound like a plan for you? Sign up today. Get on the list. The link you will find is in the description below. Your freebie will be in your inbox by early November - just in time to tackle the upcoming Holiday Stress Mayhem and fortify your gut-brain axis with tools that work. Your belly will thank you.