The Holistic Health Warrior

Posts Tagged ‘Belly Fat’

from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit

There are a lot of gimmicks and infomercials around about how to get rid of that pesky, unflattering belly fat. While there’s no “magic bullet” that will target abdominal fat in particular, this article will explain what causes an expanding waistline, and how you can make the extra baggage go away.

Steps

1. Exercise for weight loss. Aerobic/Cardio exercise will facilitate fat loss all over your body, including your belly. You can’t “spot-burn” belly fat, but it’s usually the first to burn off when you exercise, regardless of your body shape or size.[1][2] Just be sure that you focus on calorie-burning exercises, rather than just sit-ups or crunches. If your abdominal muscles are covered in fat, no strengthening of those muscles is going to change that. Aerobic exercise is key.[1]
2. Add resistance training. A 2006 study published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism suggests that combining cardiovascular (aerobic) exercise with resistance training is more effective than cardiovascular training alone in getting rid of abdominal fat[3] You can do resistance training with free weights, exercise machines, or resistance bands.
3. Reduce your calorie consumption, and swap out certain foods for others. Unless you restrict your calorie intake, you’re not going to lose belly fat. There are some tactics that might help do away with belly fat faster, but only when you’ve already consistently restricted your calorie intake. For example, eating a bag of chips with guacamole dip isn’t going to help you get rid of belly fat–in fact, it’ll probably make the problem worse!
4. Switch out refined grains for whole grains. (But eat grains in moderation, due to the fact that they are commonly contaminated with mycotoxins; a byproduct of fungus and mold. ) In a scientific study, people who ate all whole grains , in addition to five servings of fruits and vegetables, three servings of low-fat dairy, and two servings of lean meat, fish, or poultry lost more belly fat than another group that ate the same diet, but with all refined grains. A diet rich in whole grains changes the glucose and insulin response in your body, which hastens the melting of fat, and visceral fat, that deep layer of fat, is easier for your body to burn than the subcutaneous fat under your skin (the fat that you can see and grab).[1]
5. Eat the better fats. Studies suggests that a diet with a higher ratio of monounsaturated fats (MUFAs) (avocados, nuts, seeds, soybeans, chocolate) can prevent the accumulation of both types of belly fat.[4] Some experts argue, though, that it’s not that these fats specifically target abdominal fat in any way; it’s that anyone will probably lose weight on a lower calorie diet (regardless of where those calories come from) and as discussed earlier, belly fat is usually the first to go.[1]
   • Trans fats (in margarines, crackers, cookies–anything made with partially hydrogenated oils) seem to result in more fat being deposited in the abdomen, so avoid these as much as you can.[5]
6. Get more fiber in your diet. Soluble fiber (apples, oats, cherries) lowers insulin levels, which, as mentioned earlier, can speed up the burning of visceral belly fat.[5]
   • Add fiber to your diet slowly. If you are currently getting 10 grams of fiber a day, don’t jump to 35 grams of fiber the next day. You need to give the natural bacteria in your digestive system time to adapt to your new fiber intake.
   • Leave the skin on! Incorporating more fruits and vegetables into your diet will add fiber, but only if you eat the skin, because that’s where all the fiber is. So don’t peel those apples before you eat them, but DO wash them extremely well.  If you’re eating potatoes, try to leave the skin in the dish (such as if making baked or mashed potatoes) or if you peel them, make a snack out of them, such as baked garlic Parmesan peels. It’s also worth knowing that keeping the skin on potatoes when you cook them will help keep more vitamins and minerals in the flesh. Just don’t eat any parts of skin that are green.
   • Eat more split pea soup. Split peas is a fiber “power food”. Plus just one cup of them contains 16.3 grams of protein!
7. Motivate yourself by understanding the risks associated with belly fat. Losing belly fat doesn’t have to be solely a cosmetic goal; understanding the health issues linked with belly fat can help motivate you. Belly fat is linked with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer. Specifically it’s the deepest layer of belly fat–the fat you can’t see or grab–that poses health risks. That’s because these “visceral” fat cells actually produce hormones and other substances that can affect your health (e.g. increased insulin resistance and/or breast cancer risk).[2] The fact that they’re located right next to and in between organs in your abdominal cavity doesn’t help. For example, fat next to the liver drains into it, causing a fatty liver, which is a risk factor for insulin resistance, setting the stage for Type 2 diabetes.[6]
   • Wrap a tape measure around your waist at the level of your navel. A measurement of more than 35 inches (women) and 40 inches (men) is considered to be unhealthy.[2][1][6]

Tips

• An additional benefit to exercising is that it reduces stress and insulin levels, which reduces the presence of cortisol, a hormone that leads to more belly fat deposits.[5]
• Since cortisol leads to more belly fat, and cortisol is linked with stress, anything you can do to cut stress in your life will also indirectly cut (or at least prevent more) belly fat.
• The way your body distributes fat is largely beyond control (heredity, menopause). What is within your control is your level of body fat overall–if you keep that low, it won’t really matter where the fat goes, because there won’t be much fat to deposit in the first place.
• Many women start gaining more weight in their belly as they get older, especially after menopause. The body fat distribution changes–less fat goes to your arms, legs and hips, and more of it goes to your midsection. Some people even find their waistline widening while their weight remains the same![2] Nonetheless, the above steps will help to do away with belly fat.
• If you don’t have weights for resistance training, you can by lifting anything heavy (with care!) or you can use gravity as resistance: Do pull ups and push ups.
• An easy way to burn more fat is to walk everywhere within a reasonable distance. You save money on gas, and also save wear and tear on your vehicle. And you might save parking charges and/or cab, bus or subway fares. All you need are comfortable shoes (take your dressier shoes with you if necessary) and walk, walk, walk. Pick up the pace as you get fitter to make those short journeys even quicker and smile at all the traffic traveling bumper to bumper in the rush hour.
• Eat smaller dinners. Large dinners tend to hurt a fat loss process because most people aren’t very active after dinner. This is the basis for advice along the lines of “don’t eat anything within a certain number of hours before going to bed”. The claim that your entire dinner is stored as fat isn’t entirely true. The process is more complicated than that, but the fact you don’t move after dinner is enough to hurt your cause. You can offset this by eating a larger lunch or snacking healthily before dinner.
• If you get lots of sweet cravings, replace sweets and sugar with fruits. The sugars in fruits are digested differently than the empty calories of white sugar that are in most candy and processed foods. The fiber in fruit also slows the absorption of the sugars so you don’t get as high a sugar rush (and as low a crash).
• At times, for lack of anything better to do, some people snack. This is usually due to a craving, rather than hunger. When you find yourself wandering for food, try to do something that’s not food-related to hold your attention.

Warnings

• Doing only sit-ups and crunches can actually cause the appearance of more belly fat, as the abdominal muscles grow in size and shape, they will push out against the fat, making it appear larger and thicker.
• If you’ve lost weight or been pregnant, you may have excess skin in the belly area that won’t disappear no matter how much fat you burn. You will only know how much excess skin there is, though, if you get rid of all the fat first. It is also possible that your skin will tighten up again once you’ve lost the belly fat.

Related wikiHows

• How to Start Your Own Exercise Regimen and Stick to It
• How to Lose Weight
• How to Get Six Pack Abs
• How to Be Healthy
• How to Exercise While Watching TV
• How to Have a Healthy Nutritional Balanced Diet
• How to Start Walking for Exercise
• How to Burn Fat on Men

Sources and Citations

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/the-truth-about-belly-fat
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/belly-fat/WO00128
3. ↑ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17136940
4. ↑ http://health.msn.com/weight-loss/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100185417
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 http://www.newsweek.com/id/168129/page/2
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96922213

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Lose Belly Fat. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

More Thoughts from Mellisa McJunkin – Health and Wellness Advocate

Question: What are you without an immune system?

Answer: You are dead.

As morbid as it may sound, it’s true. When your immune system is weak you will get sick. When your immune system completely fails you will die.

If I could show you a way to boost your Natural Killer Cells by up to 437%, would you be interested in hearing more? Of course you would.

Get Healthy and Wise with  Extreme Health 4Life

How to Spot Reduce and Burn ONLY the Fat Off Your Stomach…
By Nick Nilsson

I’ll share with you my top-secret technique for burning ONLY the fat off your stomach. This is spot-reducing at its best…you can even apply this technique to ANY other specific areas you want to tone up!

Yep, it’s exciting and I know you’re curious so I’ll get right into it!

To perform this technique, you’re going to need a roll of duct tape, 3 double cheeseburgers, a set of jumper cables and a housecat…

Ok, you’re going to hate me for this…

The truth is there IS no top-secret technique for spot reducing and burning only the fat from your stomach. I made that headline up in hopes that you would at least read far enough into this article to learn the TRUTH about how your body burns fat and WHERE it burns fat from (and I’ll try to keep it entertaining so you actually want to read the whole thing 🙂 ).

And honestly, this type of question is one of THE most frequently asked questions I’ve gotten in all the years I’ve been answering questions online…

“How do I get rid of fat from just my [insert area here]?”

Bottom line is, you can’t. And even those stupid creams and lotions won’t do it (one of these days I swear I’m going to get one of those creams and put it only on the left side of my abs and not the right and see what happens…I’m sure I’ll have a ripped 3 pack within days).

To lose fat from any one specific place in your body, you’re going to have to lose it from EVERYWHERE ELSE, too. There’s really no getting around it.

I like to use the analogy of a swimming pool (I “borrowed” this one from fat-loss guru Tom Venuto)…

When you’re filling up a swimming pool (the pool is your total amount of body fat), the deep end fills up first, right? Then the shallow end fills up as the water level rises.

Generally speaking, the deep end can be compared to the areas where you put on fat FIRST. The shallow end is where you put on fat LAST.

When you go to lose fat, look at the swimming pool again…when you drain the swimming pool, you can’t drain water from just the deep end! It drains from the whole pool at once…the shallow end shows it first, THEN the deep end last.

So basically (and fairly depressingly!), the fat you want to get rid of FIRST is the fat that’s going to come off pretty much LAST. To burn just stomach fat (or thigh fat or back fat), you’d have to figure out a way to defeat the entire system your body uses to store fat.

Sticking a vacuum into your belly with surgery is one way to do it – taking useless pills like Acai Berry definitely WON’T do it, no matter how many “simple rules” you follow (in that case, the simple rule is “give us all your money so you can’t afford food anymore” – I guess that one actually WILL work).

And that’s not even all your options for losing stomach fat…Here’s a few more…..

1. Starvation dieting – this is THE best way to lose weight…of course, it’ll be mostly muscle, which will send your metabolism into a nosedive, which will make it harder to continue to lose weight, which will make it easier to REGAIN weight, which will keep that lovely stomach fat firmly where you left it, even though the precious scale shows a smaller number…oops, somebody changed the calibration on it…you actually weigh more now…never mind.

2. Diet pills – pretty much all of these will work for you, especially the ones that say you can eat anything you want and still lose weight (just make sure you’re never more than 15 feet from a bathroom). You know the manufacturers are only interested in your success and well-being, after all! And don’t forget, the heart is a muscle and the faster it goes, the more calories you burn, right! Who wouldn’t want to have their heart-rate up in the “training zone” while they’re sleeping…talk about efficiency!

3. High Impact Aerobics For Beginners – the good news is, soft tissue injuries require a LOT of calories to heal up, so bust out those Step Tae Bosu Dance tapes and go nuts!

Okay, let’s move on to some of the more “radical, unproven” stuff ;)…

1. Eating natural, wholesome foods – what a crock! The only thing anybody has ever lost from eating this garbage is fat. Oh wait…

2. Weight training – even more useless than good nutrition, weight training is something to stay away from. All it will do is build muscle and increase your metabolism. Same with interval training…it’s the worst.

3. Supplementing with multivitamins, minerals, fish oil and protein – I know…I can’t make this stuff up! Some people actually USE these things to support their nutrition while eating natural foods and training with weights for fat loss. I guess their quack doctors wouldn’t write out a prescription for Orlistat or Xenical or Gottapoopital.

So bottom line, fat loss isn’t rocket science…just don’t eat anything, take a lot of pills and thrash around for hours on end until you hurt yourself.

——————

Nick Nilsson has a degree in Physical Education and Psychology and has been innovating new training techniques for more than 18 years. Nick is the author of a number of bodybuilding books including “Muscle Explosion! 28 Days To Maximum Mass”, “Metabolic Surge – Rapid Fat Loss,” “The Best Exercises You’ve Never Heard Of,” “Gluteus to the Maximus – Build a Bigger Butt NOW!” and “The Best Abdominal Exercises You’ve Never Heard Of”, all designed to maximize the results you get for the hard work you put into your training.

Be sure to grab your FREE copy of Nick’s 30-day “Dirty Little Secret Program for Building Muscle and Burning Fat FAST,” available at BETTER FIT U!

More Thoughts from Mellisa McJunkin – Health and Wellness Advocate

Question: What are you without an immune system?
Answer: You are dead.

As morbid as it may sound, it’s true. When your immune system is weak you will get sick. When your immune system completely fails you will die.

If I could show you a way to boost your Natural Killer Cells by up to 437%, would you be interested in hearing more? Of course you would.

Get Healthy and Wise with  Extreme Health 4Life