Lose Belly Fat Fast

Archive for October, 2009

Everyone knows that soda (Pepsi, Coke etc.) is bad for you. Doesn’t really take a genius to figure that one out, I mean just looking at the label you can see that it contains sodium, carbohydrates and lots of sugar, while not containing anything good. You might as well pour sugar into water and drink that (which is what soda really is anyway. Unfortunately the reality is that soda is even worse than it looks, when it comes to weight loss.

As I had pointed out in the diet basics post, the food and the way it is prepared has progressed a lot, while human’s digestive system is mostly the same as it was thousands of years ago. And soda is one of the most obvious examples of how this affects people in their every day lives.

Did you know that human body does not recognize calories contained in liquids? That means that you could drink 2000 calories worth of soda and not feel any less hungry than you did before? Just think how much you would likely eat if doing so did not satisfy your appetite? Probably lots more than you currently do. So, why in the world does human body not recognize calories contained in liquids? As pointed above, because we still have the same digestive system that humans had thousands of years ago, yet the food preparation has changed a lot.

The reason our bodies do not recognize calories in liquids is because the only naturally produces liquid that contains calories is milk. Milk that is designed to be consumed by a baby (that needs all the calories it can get) and has an obvious natural limit since a mother only has so much milk in her breasts. As such our bodies simply didn’t need a mechanism to recognize calories in liquids, and unfortunately food preparation has progressed at a much faster rate than our bodies are able to adapt.

There is of course nothing that you can do about this, but it is something to be aware of. When you drink your coffee, energy drink or soda, no matter how many calories they contain your body will not recognize them and you will feel just as hungry as you did before. As such you should try to eliminate most of the calorie containing liquids from your diet. Drink your tea or coffee without sugar, cut back on energy drinks and obviously completely eliminate all soda (diet or normal doesn’t matter.) It’s not easy (I love soda) but it is a necessary step to achieve fast weight loss results.

PS: What do you know, I make this post and 2 days later I read this article on yahoo’s front page Soda is bad for you where it is explained in more scientific details why sodas are very, very bad for one’s health.

Diet – many people have a love/hate relationship with this word. But why do you even need to diet in the first place? Shouldn’t our body (which is pretty smart about other things) self regulate and stay healthy on its own? Yea, that would be nice, but there are two problems here because of which that will never happen.

First and rather obvious is the ability of our bodies to store extra calories as fat, which can be burned in the future for energy. Of course, this worked a lot better a few thousand years ago where food was scare and people might’ve gone a few days between eating. In today’s world with plenty of easily available food (for the most part) such built-in mechanism isn’t of as much use as it used to be.

The other problem, and it is the reason why one must diet is that human body simply hasn’t adapted to the way food and food processing changed. Think about it, the way food is being processed changed drastically in the last hundred years, yet our bodies are the same as they were back then. The food contains elements today that our bodies simply can’t deal with – from high fat foods to foods with lots of cholesterol etc etc.

For example a watermelon contains lots of sugar – but since it’s a natural food, made by nature, you would be hard pressed to eat enough of them to get any illnesses. On the other hand candy contains lots of sugar but is a processed food, the kind of food that didn’t exist even a few hundred years ago, as such our bodies aren’t able to deal with its contents. eating candy you can easily get diabetes. In fact I herd a story of a guy who ate 10 pounds of candies over a week (don’t ask me why in the world he did that) and got a diabetes. Something like that would be nearly impossible with a natural food.

As such the basics of a diet would dictate that one should try to stick to natural food (foods found in nature) and try to avoid anything processed. Of course a diet like that is too extreme for most people (I certainly know I am not going to be able to stick to a diet like that) but it’s still a great guideline for a diet.
As such you should try to include as much fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds as you can in it, of course lean meat and none bottom feeder fish is great too.

This post was inspired by something I read on some weight loss blog not long ago. How do you handle your diet during holidays? With Halloween coming up and Thanksgiving not far away this is a popular topic. Trying to resist all that candy on Halloween isn’t easy. And saying “no, no thank you, I am on a diet” when someone tries to hand you a plate at the table during Thanksgiving will be even worse.

So, how should you deal with it? In my opinion you should have at it and enjoy yourself! Come on now, chances are you are still going to eat some candy or what have you during a holiday, it’s just too tempting not to. So instead of trying to stick to your diet, failing then feeling all negative about that, why not take a break from your diet and eat what you want for a day? Obviously don’t go completely crazy with the food but it’s ok to have some sweats and there is no need to beat yourself up about having a slice of a cake.

In fact a number of people advocate having one cheat day a week, where you don’t need to follow a diet and can eat what you want. Doing so will make sure that you won’t have any pent up craving for some none-diet-friendly food. Obviously you still have to control how much you eat and trying to win a pie eating contest is not advised.

So go ahead, take a break from your diet for a day and eat some candy, have some cake and fill yourself with stuffing – it’s alright to do it. In fact it’s probably better to do it this way compared to losing control and going on an eating binge!

Who wouldn’t want to get a great work out in under 15 minutes? I am sure we all would love to be able to get a nice work out in such a short time. And that is exactly what interval training allows one to do! (you may want to read my previous post on Interval Training.) Interval training is of course more of a methodology and less of a work out program, as such you can use just about any type of exercise for it.

Although you can use just about any exercise for this purpose, body weight exercise are probably best – you can do them fast with relatively low chances of injury. Where as say trying to do Olympic lifts at fast pace would compromise technique and increase the chance of an injury. But let’s get a bit more specific and actually list a few quick and simple exercise you can use for amazing work outs:

1) Probably the easiest of them all but amazingly effective tabata squats – do as many squats as you can for 20 seconds, then rest 10 seconds, 8 intervals. (by the way, Tabata was the name of the scientist who did a lot of research on interval training if I recall correctly) The goal is to get the highest total number of squats. What makes this exercise so awesome, aside from its effectiveness is that it doesn’t require any equipment and can be done anywhere, at home or in a hotel room.

2) Running is a great exercise, but if you want to get a great work out without spending a lot of times you can use sprints to do just that. Go to a track field (would look kind of weird if you did this on the street) run a 100 meter as fast as you can, take a short break (up to a minute or so) then run another 100 meters. Do it 5 times and you’ll burn so many calories it’s unreal. not only that but the entire thing will only take you about 6-7 minutes!

3) Getting a bit bored? Why not combine a few different exercise – you can do squats and push ups where you do an interval of squats for 20 seconds, 10 seconds break, push ups for 20 seconds, break etc. for 8 rounds total, so 4 rounds of push ups and 4 rounds of squats. Same as in example 1, the goal is to do the highest number of push ups and squats. Now not only do you have a fun and effective work out but you are working on different muscle groups as well!

Those are just a few examples of how you can combine simple exercise with interval training to get a quick and effective work out. Better yet, no matter how fit you are, interval training will always be effective – it’s just a fit person will have higher numbers. Which makes it one of the very few work out programs that can work well for both unfit people and pro athletes.

You should do a warm up before interval training though (as well as a cool down) and I would also recommend that you get your stamina to a certain level before trying interval training as it does push your heart rate etc up. If you can run for 30 minutes at a moderate you should be good. But do go slow(er) the first time.

Interval training – it’s been a buzz word for a while now it seems. And there is a good reason for it, whether you want to burn fat, gain muscle or improve your stamina interval training works great. What makes it so good? We’ll get there, but first a quick over view of what interval training is: as the name suggests it’s a work out routine where you do exercise in intervals, usually very short (from 20 seconds to about 3 minutes depending on work out) followed by a quick break, then exercise, then break.

There are several reasons why this method is very effective. Firstly it allows you to go at or near maximum effort – something that isn’t possible with a flat work out with no breaks, the rest periods in between allow you to keep going at that maximum level for longer amounts of time. Why is doing exercise at maximum effort matters? Well, just think about two athletes running a 100 meters. One is a sprinter that runs it at a sub 10 seconds, the other is a long distance marathoner who runs it at high but sustainable pace of 6 meters per second. The sprinter can only run 100meters at that speed, marathoner can run for hours. Which one do you think will burn more calories and have a more effective work out? Of course the sprinter. (read: Running to Lose Weight)

Interval training allows you to do exercise at maximum effort which produces much better results than exercising at 70% or some such level of your maximum in the same period of time. Time is the second part that makes interval training so great. At some point you reach a level where your fitness is so good that doing exercise in aerobic regime (sustainable level) hardly produces any results unless you do it for hours. But doing them at maximum level with short breaks in between allows you to get a great work out in a short period of time.

While interval training becomes a necessity for high level athletes (except marathoners) it is a good program for an average Joe or Jane as well. The fact that you can get an amazing work out in just 5-10 minutes is very appealing to many people. Not only that but you can use body weight exercise, combined with interval training you can get an awesome work out in less time than it would take you to get to a gym!