Lose Belly Fat Fast

Archive for October, 2009

Want to lose some weight? One of the first ideas that comes to mind is running to lose weight. It is after all a very popular method to stay fit and healthy. But is it the best way to go for someone who just wants to drop a few (or quite a few) pounds? The answer may surprise you!

A while ago I remember reading an article on this subject that came to a conclusion that running is bad for weight loss. The reason for such an interesting conclusion was the fact that running (like any exercise) makes one more hungry than usual, and these caused people to eat more, so much more in fact that they would not only make up for the calories lost during a run, but even go over that – in effect making them gain weight compared to if they did not run.

The problem with that conclusion is of course that it’s based on a silly factor – that people who exercise don’t follow a diet. Well, as I mentioned in Weight Loss Is Simple But Not Easy exercising without a good diet is most often a total waste of time – No matter how many calories you burn, you can always eat more. This study however does highlight the importance of a diet when it comes to losing weight.

But back to the topic at hand, how well does running to lose weight work? Assuming your diet is in order and you aren’t going to eat a box of donuts just because you ran a few miles, it works pretty well. How well? Depends on your level of fitness. If you haven’t worked out in years then running will be an awesome weight loss exercise. You’ll burn lots of calories and it won’t take too much time (10-30 minutes should make for a nice work out.)

However as your fitness improves you will find that running for the same 30 minutes no longer produces the same results it used (read: Why Do I Lose Weight So Slowly?) What happened is that your body adapted and you now need to either increase the time spent running or increase speed at which you run, or a combination of both. Which is why I can’t help but be amused by the people at a gym who run on a treadmill for an hour five days a week for years and then wonder why they aren’t losing weight. Doing that might’ve been a great way to burn fat when they first started, but by now their body has adapted and hardly burns any calories.

So if you like running but find that you aren’t getting the kind of weight loss results you used to in the past, it doesn’t mean that you have to quit running to lose weight. It just means you need to increase your speed and/or run for longer periods of time. Although as your fitness gets better and betters you might come to a point where doing other exercise will give you better results than running.

It still works though and should be used as it is a great exercise to keep one self fit and healthy, but you would likely want to reduce the frequency down to about once or twice a week for longer runs.

Are you trying to lose weight and are appalled by how slow your weight loss is? can’t help but wonder: Why do I lose weight so slowly? Well, you aren’t the only one, in fact it’s a very common question to ask. After all, most people want to drop their weight fast and slow results are both annoying and discouraging. So much so that you might be tempted to stop just because you don’t see much progress.

Well, quitting isn’t an option if your goal is to lose weight and look great. However slow progress isn’t that good either. So let’s address why you may not be getting the sort of weight loss results you were hoping for. There are actually a number of possible reasons for this, depending on your situation and where you are in your journey to a less fat you.

If you are just beginning with a good diet and exercise then the reason for a slow loss of pounds is that your body needs some time to adapt. It could take a few days or even a week or two before your body decides that it needs to adapt to the changes you’ve made (ie. lower calorie intake with increased physical activity.) I like to think of it as trying to move a large stone that’s been sitting in a place for a long time. You push and push and it doesn’t even budge, but eventually it starts to move, slowly at first then faster and faster, eventually it reaches a point where you just have to give it an occasional shove to keep it rolling. it’s a similar situation when it comes to losing weight.

The other possible reason is that your body has adapted to your work out routine, and the exercise that used to burn fat really well aren’t nearly as effective now. This situation is likely for people that have been trying to drop pounds for a while. You can read more about what makes for an effective weight loss exercise here. If that’s the case then you need to change things up and improve the amount of calories you burn during work outs by either spending more time or doing something more effective.

The last likely reason for slow (or none existent) progress is something that is often experienced by people who are trying to lose the last few pounds or those who only have a few extra pounds to lose. Usually at this point your levels of fitness has improved to the point where most pure cardio work outs are nearly worthless as far as fat loss goes (unless you fancy a 3 hour long run) and so you had to switch to interval or weight training. The thing about it (especially weight training) is that unlike cardio work outs it will build muscle. And since muscles weight more than fat, you can run into a situation where the scale actually shows an increase in weight.

This isn’t really a problem – you lose fat and gain muscle. But if your only measure of progress is weight scale, then it can be rather annoying when you don’t understand what’s happening. The first email you get when you sign up for Weight Loss Boosters Newsletter will explain what other measurements to take in addition to weight to track your progress.

But an easy way to do it is to see how well your clothes fits, muscles are smaller than fat (with the same weight) so if the scale shows the same result but you lost 10 pounds of fat and gained 10 pounds of muscles, your clothes should fit differently.

There might be other reasons for a slow weight loss, but the above three are the most common and the most likely answers for a question “Why Do I Lose Weight So slowly?” So don’t get discouraged and stick with it, if you do the right things you will lose weight!

You hear it every where – the key to losing weight is diet and exercise. But which exercise exactly are effective weight loss exercise? There are so many work out programs with completely opposite advice – some tell you to do lots of cardio, others tell you to hardly do any, some tell you to use weight training, others tell you to stay away from it. There is enough information out there to make your head spin, and yet after spending hours you won’t be any closer to the answer you are looking for than you were when you started.

So I figured explaining what makes for a great, effective weight loss exercise is a good place to start. Now you are probably waiting for me to list a bunch of exercise and claim that those are the best ones to do. Well, I am afraid you will be disappointed as I am not going to do it. Instead I will explain what makes a given exercise effective and why they differ for different people, or even for the same person over a period of time.

An exercise (or a combination of several) can be considered good for weight loss if it gives you a great work out. What do I mean by a good work out? A work out when you feel pretty tired and one where you burn a lot of calories. However, this obviously depends on each person and their levels of fitness, what might be a great work out for one person may not even be a good warm up for another. And that is the reason why there isn’t the best exercise or the best work out routine.

If you are carrying a hundred plus extra pounds, then just about any exercise will burn a ton of fat. Going up a flight of stairs is an exercise in itself, go up 10 times as fast as you can and sweat will be pouring from you like it’s raining. Yet as your level of fitness improves and your body adapts, doing the same 10x going up a flight of stairs won’t do much for you at all. And eventually you will reach a point where it does practically nothing at all as far as losing weight goes.

That’s actually one of the problems with running for weight loss – your body adapts and you end up having to run for longer and longer periods of time to get the same results. And who wants to run for 3 hours?! The solution for having a good work out that doesn’t take hours is increasing intensity and getting closer to maximum effort. In other words as you become more fit you will likely want to look at interval training and weight training, as well as sprints or other similar exercise.

However the same interval or weight training that is great for a fit person trying to lose some weight isn’t all that good or even harmful for a person with a low level of fitness. Interval training will cause more problems than you care to know about, and weight training doesn’t give the best bang for the time spent when running a few hundred feet is “hard” and makes for a good work out.

I hope that you found this informative and that it clarifies the seemingly conflicting advice that different weight loss programs give. You should also use this information to adjust your own work outs. As your body adapts and your fitness level improves, the work out routines that were once great will become less and less effective. You need to adjust and change things up or you will find yourself spending more and more time to get the same results.

It may sound a bit surprising, but losing weight is very, very simple. It’s not however easy to do. And because it’s not easy many people will run around the simple weight loss methods and instead try to find a short cut that is both simple and easy. But people who want to get results without putting much if any effort into achieving them is a subject for another discussion. What I’d like to do in this post is discuss why weight loss is so simple.

It’s simple because it’s not the type of rocket science that weight loss companies seem to want you to think it is. Weight loss, or gain is a function of a human body. It works in a very straight forward, none complicated way – when you have excess amount of calories your body stores them as fat. When you have a lack of calories your body burns fat to get the extra calories (energy) you need. That’s all there is to it.

But no, people want to complicate it, bring in metabolism and what have you into the equation without addressing the underlying fundamentals. For you to drop pounds your body must burn fat, but for it to do so there must be a calorie shortage. No shortage – no reason to burn fat – no weight loss. As such you must create a calorie shortage to force your body to burn the extra pounds.

How do you do it? Simple your get less calories than you spend, in other words you eat less and exercise more. It is possible to do just one thing either diet or exercise, but the best results come when you do both, doing both will also have the most positive effect on your over all health. Trying to do create calorie shortage by working out more without a good diet is often a total waste of time – no matter how many calories you burn during a work out you can always eat even more.

And trying to diet without exercising sounds like a good idea, but it doesn’t actually work. What happens is when you switch to a new, low(er) calorie diet your body puts up a red flag and instead of burning the fat it starts to conserve as much energy as possible. By working out you can over come it and force your body to get the extra energy by burning fat, which is your goal.

This is of course where we run into the “not easy” part. Following a healthy diet means you have to stop eating your favorite junk food. And exercising means that instead of watching TV or playing video games or what ever, you have to go to a gym and exercise. And that can be very difficult, especially if you don’t have the right mind set for weight loss. However, this is the part you should focus your efforts on.

So instead of asking “How can I lose weight?” ask yourself “Am I willing to do the things required to lose weight” If the answer is yes then you will. If the answer is no, well, good luck in your search for that magic pill!

Mind Set – perhaps a somewhat unusual subject when it comes to weight loss. I mean, everyone is so concerned about their diet and work out program, what diet pills or vitamins to use etc etc that no one seems to even think about the mind set one must have to lose weight. That’s right, there is a certain mind set that you need to have to lose weight. Without it all the diets and work outs in the world won’t get you the lean body you want.

So, what kind of mind set does one need to lose weight? Well, for once you need to change your thinking about weight loss from something you do to lose weight, then go back to what you were doing before, to a permanent change in your life style. Changing your habits is of course not easy. So you have to be prepared to make those changes that may be difficult, especially at first. But above all you need to realize that those changes are good for you – eating healthy (and avoiding junk food) and exercising often – those are good things.

You also need to decide whether losing weight is important to you or not. I mean, anyone who is over weight would say that getting rid of the extra fat is important to them. But their actions sure don’t seem to reflect it. Sitting on a coach eating junk food and talking about how you’d like to lose some weight and get a nice toned body isn’t going to do anything. If you want to drop pounds then your actions need to reflect that desire.

If you say that you want to lose fat, you better start doing things that will result in you losing weight. And you have to be prepared to take those actions and to do things. The person sitting on a coach watching TV isn’t prepared to take the actions required for them to drop belly fat, no matter what they say about wanting to lose belly fat.

What are the actions one needs to take? Well, weight loss isn’t exactly rocket science, the things one needs to do to lose weight are well known – follow a good diet and exercise frequently. it’s of course a good bit more complicated than that, especially with the multitude of diets and work out programs. But still the mind set is much more important – it is the difference between those who lost weight and those who gave up after a few weeks on a diet, or after they didn’t lose as many pounds or as fast as they were hoping to.

The right mind set will keep you going even when you want to give up and quit. So before you even start with your fat burning work outs and diets, you have to realize that certain changes to your life style will need to be made, and you have to be prepared to make them. If you don’t want to make those changes, and try to find some work around, you will just set yourself up for a disappointment when a “magic solution” you found will fail as they always do.

So, get your weight loss off on the right foot with the right mind set! And if you haven’t yet signed up for the weekly newsletter do so – the first email will contain some of the tips on how to start your weight loss the right way and avoid some of the mistakes people often make.