Health and Fitness
Melt Visceral Fat Fixing Growth Hormone Deficiency with Three Tips.
We might be deficient if our waistlines grow despite healthy eating and exercise when we experience libido loss, anxiety, or depression.
The Importance of Growth Hormone
Hormones play a critical role in gaining and losing fat. Excess visceral fat is a critical health risk. Therefore, I wrote several articles on the intricate effects of various hormones on fat loss.
I mainly highlighted cortisol, insulin, and leptin resistance, which significantly impact fat metabolism, cause metabolic syndrome, and lead to obesity.
I also emphasized the importance of reducing visceral fat and increasing brown fat using healthy lifestyle habits.
In this article, I emphasize the importance of growth hormones and provide three practical tips to naturally increase this vital hormone that might contribute to fat loss sustainably and improve lean muscle mass and bone density.
Growth hormones can build and maintain healthy tissues and repair damaged tissues, especially after an intense workout or injury.
Created by the pituitary gland and released into the blood, growth hormone is essential for children's growth.
However, adults also need it for various reasons, such as building muscles, reducing fat, and making bones denser. Therefore, growth hormone deficiency can be a health risk for both children and adults.
Healthcare professionals can identify the deficiency via blood tests.
They may order tests for growth hormone (GH) serum test, GH stimulation test, GH suppression test, and test for insulin-like growth factor-1.
Well-known deficiency symptoms are a growing waistline despite healthy eating and exercise, reduced libido, and mental health issues such as anxiety or depression. Fixing deficiency might bring many health and fitness benefits.
My Exciting Journey to Boosting Growth Hormone Naturally
Growth hormones grabbed the attention of bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts for a few decades. Initially, it was seen as a panacea, and manufacturers produced the synthetic version.
However, even though some people gained immediate benefits, studies identified significant risks for the exogenous use of growth hormones. The health risks concerned the consumers. Therefore, the focus changed to boost this critical hormone naturally.
I started methodical experimentation years ago after learning the importance of growth hormones for fat loss and healthy weight management.
The critical mechanism encouraging me to experiment was the catabolic effect of growth hormone on lipolysis.
In simple terms, growth hormone stimulates hormone-sensitive lipase and inhibits lipoprotein lipase allowing better fat metabolism for fat tissues, especially those stored in the abdominal area.
My first action was to get my growth hormone checked. Ironically, until I mentioned and requested it to my family doctors, they never ordered this test for me, even though I was at the onset of diabetes and showing metabolic syndrome symptoms with a growing waistline.
Not to my surprise, the test results showed a relatively lower marker. I wanted to fix deficiencies and optimize the levels.
As I learned about the risks of supplemental use, my second option was to find ways to increase it naturally. So, I reviewed hundreds of scientific papers and read many articles from the fitness communities.
Even though the information was overwhelming, it all boiled down to three major lifestyle factors that I briefly touched on in this article. Two of them are easy and do not require any effort.
One of them requires effort but can bring many other health benefits. All of them are natural, revolving around lifestyle habits.
After making some adjustments to my lifestyle, I significantly increased my growth hormone levels, which contributed to effectively losing visceral fat.
In addition, these simple habits also contributed to making my body more insulin sensitive reducing the risks of metabolic syndrome. Therefore, I want to pass along this experimental knowledge backed up by science without going into scientific details.
1 — Restorative and Adequate Sleep
One of the best findings from the literature was the increase of growth hormone during restful and restorative sleep.
Understanding the role of circadian rhythm in releasing growth hormones was an eye-opener. As sleep is free and effortless, this was my first choice to optimize my growth hormone.
As pointed out in this study, “the nocturnal growth hormone surge was largely sleep-dependent.”
Another paper confirmed that “altered hypothalamic activity associated with the initiation of sleep resulted in a major peak of growth hormone secretion unrelated to hypoglycemia or cortisol and insulin secretion changes.”
Since I posted numerous articles about insulin and cortisol within the sleep and fat loss context, I will not repeat them.
Instead, I provide practical tips to improve sleep quality, ensuring we get enough deep, rem, and light sleep each night based on my experience.
1 — I reduced caffeine on afternoons and gave it up fully later.
2 — I meditated and rested, slowing down in the evenings.
3 — I turned down the lights gradually and refrained from electronic devices at night.
5 — I made the bedroom dark, cool, and quiet during sleep.
6 — I went to bed and woke up at the same time each day.
7 — When I couldn’t fall asleep, I got up and read boring books.
As I mentioned in a couple of articles, After Fixing Sleep Issues, Frederick Lost 44 Pounds in a Year, and Charlotte Lost 40 Pounds of Visceral Fat After Winning the Battle Against Chronic Fatigue and Stress.
2 — Time Restricted Eating and Water Fasting
Reading a paper in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in the late 1980s about the effects of fasting on increasing growth hormone levels sounded too good to be true to me.
Then, I reviewed many articles confirming this finding.
I couldn’t ignore fasting as it offered many other great benefits, such as autophagy, which naturally clears the body’s garbage like bad proteins, damaged cells, harmful bacteria, and viruses.
I started fasting intermittently, consuming my food within an eight-hour window and staying fasted for 16 hours. After a few months, my body got fat adapted.
Besides, I was on a ketogenic diet and a fast mimicking diet. As mentioned in the scientific papers, my growth hormone level significantly increased.
However, I intensified my experimentation with two to seven days of fasting for several months. The levels significantly increased.
My family doctor teased me about whether I was on steroids or something. I teased her back by saying, “as far as I know, growth hormone is not a steroid but a peptide hormone.”
She knew and called me “Smart Alec, “ a friendly phrase in Australia, where I live.
Here are the practical tips that I used to start time-restricted eating.
1 — First, I cut snacks eating only three main meals a day.
2 — Second, I skipped breakfast for several months.
3 — Third, after being fat-adapted, I reduced to one meal a day.
For many years, I still eat only one meal a day. As a result, my growth hormone levels were three times more than two decades ago.
In addition, time-restricted eating reduced inflammation markers significantly and improved my brain chemistry, especially boosted BDNF due to ketosis, allowing me better mental health with cognitive flexibility and emotional maturity.
3 — Resistance and High-Intensity Training
Several papers (e.g., this and this) indicated the favorable impact of resistance training on increasing growth hormone levels. There was substantial evidence about high-intensity interval training too.
So I tried weight lifting, calisthenics, and a short burst of cardio regularly. The key lesson in my experimentation was recovering after a workout as they created tremendous stress in my body.
Like sleep and time-restricted eating, intense workouts also brought me many benefits, improving my physique and giving me the mental clarity I needed when experiencing chronic stress, mild depression, and brain fog.
Here are the tips that helped me incorporate resistance training and HIIT into my fitness regime.
1 — First, I started with five kilos of dumbells to increase the strength of my arms and shoulders.
2 — Every third day, I did leg exercises to improve the strength of my lower body.
3 — I started with ten push-ups and gradually increased to 100 push-ups a day, allowing me to strengthen my arms, chest, and shoulder.
4 — Besides, I planked every day, starting from three minutes, increasing to 30 minutes a day.
5 — I started with one pull-up increasing it to 20 pull-ups a day in six months.
6 — I jumped one minute fast on a trampoline and rested for three minutes repeating five times and gradually increasing to ten repeats.
Initially, at the end of one minute of intense cardio, my pulse reached 150 bits per second, later reduced to 100 giving me a better cardiovascular profile.
In addition, resistance training helped me keep my lean muscles and constantly burn stored fat. I also do around 10,000 steps of moderate walking a day for other health reasons.
Let’s keep in mind that the primary function of growth hormone is to build and maintain healthy tissues and repair damaged tissues, especially after an intense workout or injury.
Final Thoughts
Growth hormone is critical for children to grow and essential for adults to have healthy muscles, bones, and fat profiles.
Unless we have underlying health issues, we don’t need supplementation of growth hormone. As there are significant risks of supplementation, exogenous growth hormone is highly regulated in many countries.
Based on the review of medical and fitness literature and my personal experimentation, I believe that we can significantly increase the growth hormone release and optimize it with these three simple and healthy lifestyle habits.
The market is full of hype, offering myriad supplements. I also reviewed some supplements but did not try any except for arginine. However, after my customized diet, I also stopped taking arginine as my diet includes it in abundance.
Moreover, arginine is a remarkable amino acid essential for children and conditionally essential for adults, as pointed out in this paper.
Having adequate and quality sleep, skipping snacks or a meal, and performing intense exercises can naturally increase growth hormones.
However, we must be cautious with fasting and intense workouts as they can create significant stress, especially for beginners.
In addition, fasting and intense exercising might also be detrimental to some health conditions. Therefore, it is wise to consult qualified healthcare professionals before starting time-restricted eating and intense workouts.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
Here are my perspectives on hormones in general.
I see life as a miracle on this planet. During a long-term fast, I obtained a vision of humanity winning the battle against debilitating diseases in the 33rd century in a lucid dream.
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