Lose Belly Fat Fast

Weight training – it may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of weight loss exercise, but it is never the less very effective for that purpose. The reason weight training doesn’t jump as the exercise to do to lose weight is because there are many exercise you can do, all of which would be referred to as weight training but not all of them are effective for burning fat. So people might be thinking of different things when they hear the term.

I remember reading a quote from some Chinese philosopher along the lines of: “People would solve half of their problems if they learned to call things the same name” and it couldn’t be more true in this case. For example someone doing bicep curls would most likely say that they are doing weight training, as would someone who’s trying to bench press an enormous amount, as will someone who’s doing circuit training with weights. Yet those exercise have a completely different purpose and produce different results.

So, what makes weight training good for weight loss, and what kind of exercise should one do if losing weight is the goal? Well, as I’ve mentioned several times throughout this blog cardio exercise have a limited usefulness time window during which they are very effective (read: Cardio Exercise – the good and the bad ) After your fitness gets to a certain level you will have to spend more and more time doing cardio to maintain results.

Now if you don’t want to spend half a day on a treadmill (and who does?) you have change something – you need to do exercise that are harder for you to do. One way to do this is to do exercise at high(er) intensity levels – like interval training. the other way is to use weight training. Also, weight training also accomplishes a side goal of looking muscular, so that’s nice as well.

In my next post I’ll touch on which weight training exercise are effective for weight loss, and which aren’t, so be sure to check it out!

Should you do cardio work outs like jogging or ridding a bike if your goal is to lose weight? One one hand jogging, running on a treadmill or taking a spin class are done by many people who want to lose weight or stay in shape. On the other hand you can’t help but wonder if slowly running on a treadmill for an hour is really the best way to spend that time when it comes to working out. I’ve touched on those topics in previous posts: Running to lose weight and Effective weight loss exercise But this one is going to look at it from a bit different perspective.

The Good

Cardio exercise bring a number of other benefits which makes them a must have for any work out program. Running or biking improves your stamina, heart and the general cardiovascular system as well as the general fitness level of your body. Cardio also forms a foundation that is required for all exercise that have any sort of speed element to them. After all, if you can’t slowly run for half an hour, doing exercise at a fast pace will just do more harm than good.

The Bad

While there are some pluses to working out at a moderate pace as far as weight loss goes. It should be obvious to anyone that working at a higher pace equals working harder which results in more energy spent and more calories burned. Running as fastas you can for 10 minutes, you will burn much more calories than if you slowly jog for the same 10 minutes. So sadly, cardio exercise do not produce the best results as far as weight loss is concerned.

The Ugly

Come on, you knew this one was coming There isn’t really anything about cardio that could qualify for the ugly section. However since I was too tempted to add the “the ugly” I have to put something here! I would say that general awareness of the good and the bad of cardio is very lacking, which somewhat qualifies it for this part. A lot of people don’t seem to realize that there are better exercise for weight loss than running or biking. And while running is an excellent exercise, running 5 days a week for an hour or more at a time really isn’t the best way to spend your time, if your goal is weight loss.

That’s about wraps it up. Cardio is great and a must for any work out program, but it’s not the be all that some people make it out to be. As always, a healthy mix of exercise is the best.

Dark chocolate is indeed good for you. Surprised? I know I was somewhat surprised. I mean, it’s chocolate, dark or not I’d assume that it is about as good for you as a any other candy bar. Apparently I was wrong, according to an article that was recently posted on Yahoo news titled “25 ridiculously healthy foods” dark chocolate made #25. Here’s the part about dark chocolate:

“25. Dark chocolate
Thank you, dark chocolate, for making us feel good—not guilty—about dessert. Dark chocolate is filled with flavonoid antioxidants (more than three times the amount in milk chocolate) that keep blood platelets from sticking together and may even unclog your arteries.It may also help with weight loss by keeping you feeling full, according to a study from Denmark. Researchers gave 16 participants 100 g of either dark or milk chocolate and two hours later offered them pizza. Those who consumed the dark chocolate ate 15 percent fewer calories than those who had milk chocolate, and they were less interested in fatty, salty and sugary foods.

Try a chocolate with 70 percent or more cocoa. Two tablespoons of dark chocolate chips with fresh berries as a midafternoon snack or after-dinner dessert should give you some of the heart-healthy benefits without busting your calorie budget.”

You can read about what other 24 foods made this lis by following this link: 25 Healthy Foods

Of course one must always keep in mind the fact that while theoretically the foods listed in that article are good, the reality may not always be that way. But that is a subject for a later date.

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.