Belly Fat Cure
Belly Fat Loss
THE ULTIMATE BELLY LOSS METHOD
A daily run is great for your heart, but cardio workouts alone won’t do much for your waist. “You need to do a combination of weights and cardiovascular training,” says Sangeeta Kashyap, MD, an endocrinologist at Cleveland Clinic. Strength training increases muscle mass, which sets your body up to burn more fat. “Muscle burns more calories than fat, and therefore you naturally burn more calories throughout the day by having more muscle,” says Kate Patton, a registered dietician at Cleveland Clinic. Patton recommends 250 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or 125 minutes of high-intensity exercise a week. (50 mins per day for 5 days per week).
The wrong fats
The body doesn’t react to all fats in the same way. Research correlates high intake of saturated fat (the kind in meat and dairy) to increased visceral fat, says Patton.
On the other hand, monounsaturated fats (the kind in olive oil and avocados) and specific types of polyunsaturated fats (mainly omega-3s, found in walnuts, sunflower seeds, and fatty fish like salmon) have anti-inflammatory effects in the body, and if eaten in proper portions may do your body good. But Patton warns that eating too much fat of any kind increases your calorie intake and could lead to weight gain, so enjoy healthy fats in moderation.
Your workout isn’t challenging enough
To banish stubborn belly fat, you have to ramp up your workouts. In a study published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, people who completed a high-intensity workout regimen lost more belly fat than those who followed a low-intensity plan. (In fact, the low-intensity exercises experienced no significant changes at all.) “You need to exercise at full intensity because the end goal is to burn more calories, and high intensity exercise does just that,” says Natalie Jill, a San Diego, Calif.-based certified personal trainer. High intensity workouts mean you’re going all out for as long as you can. If this sounds intimidating, think of it this way: you’ll burn more calories in less time.
The starting point for bringing weight under control, in general, and combating abdominal fat, in particular, is regular moderate-intensity physical activity — at least 30 minutes per day (and perhaps up to 60 minutes per day) to control weight. In a study comparing sedentary adults with those exercising at different intensities, researchers at Duke University Medical Center found that the non-exercisers experienced a nearly 9% gain in visceral fat after six months. Subjects who exercised the equivalent of walking or jogging 12 miles per week put on no visceral fat, and those who exercised the equivalent of jogging 20 miles per week lost both visceral and subcutaneous fat.
You can lose visceral fat relatively quickly when you get regular exercise, says Harvard. Moderate aerobic activity, such as that required when riding a bicycle or an exercise bike, is a key component of a visceral fat-burning program. To get the benefits of your activity, you will need to ride your bike for at least 30 minutes on five days each week for a total of 150 minutes of weekly exercise. To increase the fat-burning capacity of your regular exercise routine, engage in weightlifting or some other form of strength training two or three times each week.
Hopping on your stationary bike and pedalling while you watch the evening news isn’t just a way to keep yourself occupied as you hear the stories of the day. This exercise is an effective way to burn fat in several parts of your body, including the fat around your stomach. Stationary bikes are suitable for people of varying fitness levels, and regular workouts can result in hundreds of calories burned as you wage war on your excess body fat.
Riding a stationary bike can be part of the answer to reduced stomach fat, as long as you also improve your diet by cutting out high-calorie items. It’s difficult to burn fat without dietary changes. This form of exercise, however, cannot solely burn the fat around your stomach. No specific exercise can target fat anywhere in your body. Burning stomach fat requires regular exercise and a low-calorie diet that leads to overall fat loss.
One of the keys to using a stationary bike in your fat-burning workout is to work out regularly. Your workouts don’t all have to be high intensity, but repetition is the key. A standard exercise guideline for fat loss is 300 minutes of medium-intensity cardiovascular exercise per week, but if you can maintain a vigorous pace, aim for 150 minutes on the bike every week. Try to meet this guideline in no more than five days, to allow a couple of recovery days.
Pedalling a stationary bike can help transform your body. This workout isn’t just a way to burn your stomach fat; it’s also a way to strengthen your muscles, improve your stamina, build a healthier heart and lower your risk of developing a wide range of diseases. Stationary bike workouts are ideal because of their minimal joint impact, which is less than cardio activities such as jogging and dancing. It’s impossible to discount the convenience of stationary bikes — unlike outdoor workouts, you don’t have to worry about traffic or poor weather.
Reasons for Using an Exercise or Recumbant Bike
a) Cycling will use fat from wherever in the body you have stored it. More so, cycling helps to eliminate abdominal fat. Abdominal fat, is not necessarily just the little pouch you see but also thick solid fat packed tight around your organs. This is called visceral fat and it smothers your organs and is a leading cause of heart disease, diabetes and other diseases. If done right, cycling will start melting the deep visceral fat even before you can notice a change in how you pants fit.
b) It is often advised at least 30 minutes a day. I think that is too little because when you start, you burn sugars and it takes a while to turn on the fat burning furnace. So one hour is much better than half, not just twice as good. On the other hand, once the fat burning furnace is on, you have a period of 20 to 30 hours where your metabolism is still burning fat in high after cycling, regardless of what you are doing.
Don’t bother with any additional exercises as long as you keep cycling regularly. But doing some basic easy stretches would be fine.
To lose weight you need to reduce the amount that you eat and exercise 5-days a week
Avoid ‘rewarding’ yourself with a high calorie ‘pleasure meal’.
The most important thing is to understand that losing weight will take a long time, so don’t get discouraged after a few months.
There are four easy ways to get rid of belly fat:
– Hello, fiber! A combo of apples, pears, peas, beans, oatmeal, and strawberries can give you 10 grams of soluble fiber a day — just what you need to chase away belly fat.
– Greetings, 100% whole grains! Three servings a day of whole grains (e.g., oatmeal, two slices of 100% whole-wheat bread) — and no refined grains — could shrink belly fat by 10%.
– Welcome, sweat! A daily, 30-minute fast walk, bike ride, or swim burns off fat. Do it for a month, and then add 20 minutes of strength training to fuel the fat-burning fires.
– Howdy, slumber! If you get 7 to 8½ hours of sleep a night, you’re twice as likely to burn the fat and keep it off as someone who snoozes 2 to 3 hours less each night.
The top way to get rid of belly fat is:
Eat plenty of fiber. In fact a study done in 2011 showed that for every 10 gram increase of fiber in a person’s diet their visceral fat went down by 3.7% over 5 years. Visceral fat is the fat located deep inside your abdomen and is more dangerous than subcutaneous fat. The latter fat is the kind of fat you can pinch. Visceral fat can increase your chances of heart disease. Fiber is also great for regulating your insulin level. Fiber helps to slow down digestion so that it takes your body more time to digest the food you have eaten. Because fiber slows down the digestive process, it can help regulate insulin in the body, as well as overall glucose levels. Extra belly fat can be linked to high insulin levels. Eat foods high in fiber like beans, whole grains (brown rice, quinoa, oatmeal) and vegetables (broccoli or carrots).
The fat pads on a man’s buttocks greedily gobble up testosterone and turn it into estrogen. Estrogen stimulates fat cells, which turn more testosterone into still more estrogen. And since a man’s body is losing testosterone while it is making estrogen, it also is losing muscle mass and burning fewer calories, thus leaving more calories to be stored as fat. Some of these calories start getting stored along the dormant milk ducts in a man’s breasts so that he gets man boobs, aka moobs, in addition to lard-butt and beer belly.
If your body is burning fat, then drinking beer in and of itself won’t give you the beer belly that creates the lard butt and man boobs. What’s more important than not drinking beer, is not eating too much or exercising too little.
Soy foods counteract the effects of hops. Soy contains some chemicals that “jam the lock” for which 8-prenylnaringenin is the key. Soy phytoestrogens turn off the enzymes that make excess fatty acids pour into fat pads over the abdomen and over the buttocks. They can stop the accumulation of belly fat and buttocks fat.
A man’s digestive tract can only absorb the phytoestrogens from just 15 grams (about half an ounce) of soy food per day. That’s a few edamame (green soybeans boiled or steamed in their pods), or maybe a couple of bites of tofu.
Foods to beat middle-age spread
• Cruciferous vegetables. such as broccoli and spring greens contain a nutrient called indole-3-carbinol which has been shown to help reduce the body’s load of excess oestrogens. Try to eat 2-3 servings (21/2 oz or 75g when cooked) a day. Other cruciferous vegetables include asparagus, cauliflower, spinach, Brussels sprouts, celery, beetroot, kale, cabbage, radish and turnip.
• Citrus fruits contain d-Limonene, another substance shown to help with oestrogen ‘detoxification’. Eat one serving a day or substitute 175ml/10fl oz of fruit juice once every other day.
• Boost your intake of insoluble fibre. Although soluble fibre is good for you (it regulates the flow of waste material through your digestive tract), in this context insoluble fibre is better still because it binds itself to extra oestrogen in the digestive tract and carries it out. Increased fat can have serious health consequences. Good sources include wholemeal bread, barley, couscous, brown rice, whole-grain cereal and wheat bran, seeds, carrots, cucumbers, courgettes, celery and tomatoes. Eat two servings of insoluble fibre such as 1 slice bread or 1 oz seeds a day.
• Sprinkle ground linseed and sesame seed on salads and vegetables, and switch to flaxseed oil. The friendly bacteria in our intestines convert these foods into substances with weak oestrogen-like activity. According to Dr Randolph, when the body is oestrogen dominant, these ‘new’ plant oestrogens bind to your body’s oestrogen receptors, reducing human oestrogen activity. Add 2-3 tablespoons a day of ground flaxseed, sesame seeds or oil to smoothies, yoghurt or salads, or stir into cottage cheese or sprinkle over steamed vegetables.
In addition to these recommendations, Dr Randolph suggests adding a portion of protein to every meal (a high-protein diet can help increase the amount of a hunger-fighting hormone known as peptide YY, so aiding weight loss). And keep up your consumption of calcium-rich foods (such as yogurt, cottage cheese, cheese, baked beans, skimmed milk, almonds) to preserve bone health; eat at least one other portion of fruit a day (to boost fibre and nutrient intake); drink eight glasses of water; and use heart-protecting olive or rapeseed oil rather than vegetable oil for dressings and cooking.
Foods to avoid
• Those high in saturated fats (such as bacon, sausages, ham, chips, crisps, butter, biscuits, pastries) have been linked to higher levels of oestrogen circulating in the blood.
• Refined or processed foods (anything containing white sugar, flour and rice) raise blood sugar levels and stimulate the release of the hormone insulin to mop up the excess sugar. This in turn negatively impacts hormone balance. Enlarge
• Caffeine – studies show that two cups of coffee a day can increase oestrogen levels.
• Alcohol – oestrogen is not efficiently broken down by an overtaxed liver. Dr Randolph believes the liver is affected after two drinks a day.
• Soya products – according to Dr Randolph these natural plant oestrogens can compound an underlying hormone imbalance.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent Fasting refers to a nutrition pattern that combines regular eating times with fasting intervals. It is important to understand that intermittent fasting as such is not a diet as it only tells you when eat, not what to eat. That said, intermittent fasting is often used in conjunction with a specific diet to stimulate the desired processes within the body. The exact best method depends on the goals and the unique features of every individual (more on this later).
Types of Intermittent Fasting
There are probably infinite variations of intermittent fasting. Here are the most popular ones:
Full 24+ hour fast (usually done once or twice/week)
Reduced eating window: usually 18/6 or 16/8 (up to 7 days/week)
The second is more common and in my opinion somewhat more apt for a modern lifestyle. It consists of a fasting period (16-18 hours, or more), followed by a time when you are allowed to eat (6-8 hours, or less).
For example: on a 16/8 regimen, eat dinner at 9 pm and have your next meal at 1 pm the following day (aka 16 hours later); alternatively, eat dinner at 8 and have lunch after 12. Exact numbers are not important but serve to give you an idea of how intermittent fasting works.
Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent Fasting Benefits
The 3 main reasons why you might be interested in trying out occasional fasting are:
Fat loss
Health benefits / longer lifespan
Decreased dependency on food / healed relationship with hunger hormones
The above outcomes are not mutually exclusive. However, if fat loss is the/a goal, intermittent fasting should be a used alongside an appropriate diet & exercise regimen (discussed below). If certain mechanisms within your body aren’t in place, fasting might still benefit you in a number of ways while doing absolutely nothing for your fat-burning ability.
The downside of Intermittent Fasting
There is no point in me telling you that fasting is all rosy. Fasting can and will make you hungry, and we all know what can come along with that. On the bright side, most intermittent fasting practitioners swear that side effects – fatigue, grumpiness, and homicidal instinct – are decreased and often reversed as one becomes used to functioning in a fasted state.
Intermittent Fasting for Fat Loss: How it works
Fasting can accelerate fat loss by creating a favourable metabolic environment for the mobilisation and burning of fatty acids. Such environment is characterised by lower insulin (the “storage” hormone) and higher growth hormone levels. In addition, exercising in a fasted state can further enhance the fat-burning effect.
NOTICE: A favourable metabolic environment means you have the potential to burn fat. The degree to which you actually do depends on a number of factors, including your body’s ability to run on fat rather that “sugar” (or glucose, the preferred source of energy).
To get the most out of from intermittent fasting, you might want to complement it with a diet that helps you become a “fat-burner”. This would be a low carbohydrate diet that acts by keeping insulin levels in check while allowing for occasional “cheating” to prevent metabolic slowdown (our favourite diet is called ‘carb cycling’; you can also learn more about Paleo diet in our article: What is This Whole Paleo Thing?!). You might also look at improving your insulin sensitivity by eliminating sugar and other processed/high-glycemic foods. Also, just having a Green Smoothie in place of a meal (of for health reasons try and have one every day or every other day). Or you can do a 5-7 day LSD fast to kick-start your weight loss (up to 4kg lost in a week), followed by a 1-2 day LSD programme each week.
As a bonus, you will most likely stop being a wuss and discover that you can actually live quite well without having to chew something every few hours. This in itself has a number of advantages, including lower risk of junk food overload during travel.
Choosing The Right Form of Intermittent Fasting: Important Considerations
It is worth saying that the best course of action is the one that suits your personal traits and lifestyle. If you love breakfast too much, it simply won’t be wise of you to cut it out. We are all different and some of us can handle fasting much better than others.
On the other hand, some people are initially intimidated by fasting, but once they try it they find out it’s easier than they thought. They rediscover a healthier relationship with food and hunger and change their lifestyle and eating patterns for better. Where a self-evaluation can be a helpful step in deciding what’s right for you, making untested assumption can be an inferior choice.
In any case, if you do decide to give it a go, we recommend that you ease into it. Consider skipping breakfast once or twice a week and see what happens. Don’t even schedule it: simply pay attention to what your body tells you and if you are not truly hungry, don’t eat and carry on till lunch. You’ll also discover how much more enjoyable this will be.
Biggest Mistake You Can Make with Intermittent Fasting
When something becomes popular, people start doing all sorts of crazy things. With intermittent fasting, you can observe this phenomenon in people trying to get ripped by skipping meals while doing no exercise and sticking to their high-garbage diets.
Not only do they get further away from their goal: they also put at risk the safety of others by turning into ambulant zombies obsessed with food. And this is the best-case scenario!
So stop dreaming and understand that the first thing you need to do is to fix your helthyt diet and get moving.
Summary and conclusions
Practicing intermittent fasting has numerous benefits, including but not limited to accelerated fat loss.
The degree to which intermittent fasting works for fat loss depends on your body’s ability to use fat for energy.
You can improve this ability by switching to some form of ketogenic/low carb diet (we recommend carb cycling).
Intermittent fasting will work differently for different people – trying it is the only way to know if it’s right for you.
It’s always better to ease into fasting and gradually increase the frequency and/or length of your fasts if that feels right. Jumping straight into it is likely discourage you and inhibit progress.
Remember that intermittent fasting is an accelerator, not an engine for fat loss. You will get nowhere without a clean diet and exercise to start with.
This method is a lifestyle change so that you can get to your target weight without a big flabby belly and with no visceral fat which compromises your health.
Drinking smoothies will also help your condition – find out more about smoothies
Find out about herbal medicine for treatment of this condition or telephone Alan for free advice 0800 0834436 (free call in UK)
Other remedies that can help:
SleepMore
WeightLess Tonic
LSD fast for weight loss
Total Detox
LiverDetox
LymphCleanse
SkinClear
Stevia – herbal sweetener
MoveMore1 (gentle laxative)
MoodStepUp
EnergyMore
WindLess (for flatulance)
