How to Get Rid of Belly Fat

How to Get Rid of Belly Fat in a Week

Belly fat reduction does not need to be a long drawn out process, but if you want to know how to get rid of belly fat in a week, then you better be ready to endure a bit of discomfort.  Assuming your physique is in a place where you don’t have a lot of belly fat to lose, a week may be sufficient to trim down and get ripped quickly, but you’ll need to make significant short term lifestyle and diet changes for it to happen.  However, if you have more than 8 to 10 lbs of belly fat you may need to take more time.  That is not to say that you can’t lose that kind of weight in one week, but it will be unsustainable and you’ll gain it back just as fast.

I’d normally encourage a client working toward sustainable weight loss to include 3 days of resistance training in order to build and maintain lean muscle mass, which is key in maintaining a high metabolism.  But with only a week to get rid of belly fat one should forego this training and instead focus on high intensity interval training.  Diet and intense cardio should be the focal point of a fast fat loss program, and I’ll discuss what each aspect entails below.

How to Get Rid of Belly Fat in a Week with Intense Interval Training

The focus of your training should be on high intensity fat burning workouts.  These should not be long sessions.  They should however be frequent and very tough.  For most people, 15 to 25 minutes is more than enough time per session.  This should be performed at least once a day, every day of the week.  In order to obtain the best results, don’t do the same workout two times in a row.  Use a variety of interval training methods like kickboxing, a treadmill or elliptical routine, or rowing.  For those new to interval training I provide more details on program construction in How to Get Rid of Belly Fat with Interval Training.

How to Get Rid of Belly Fat in a Week by Altering Your Diet

Now we all know that the backbone of weight loss is calorie reduction.  You need to eat less to lose weight.  By consuming fewer calories each day than your body requires you’re bound to make up the difference with stored belly fat.  Conveniently, very few of us eat well.  We eat a lot of the kinds of foods that keep weight on, and not a lot of low glycemic complex carbohydrates and lean proteins that maintain muscle and encourage fat loss.  So for 90% of the people out there, making a few simple dietary changes is enough to allow you to get rid of excess belly fat in just a week.  These changes are:

• Replace simple sugars with complex carbohydrates.  This means that you don’t eat ‘white’ carbs like sugar, bread, pasta, rice, etc.  Instead eat whole grains and vegetables.
• Eat breakfast everyday.  Make sure your breakfast contains complex carbohydrates and protein.  A breakfast of oatmeal and a couple eggs is perfect, but perhaps not so tasty.
• Eat every few hours, but just enough to stave off hunger.  If you are not hungry, eat anyway, your body needs the energy, but keep it small and balanced.
• Eat no carbohydrates other than salad or a small bowl of steamed vegetables for dinner, along with either fish or chicken.
• Reduce fat consumption, oil use, and calorie containing drinks like alcohol, coke, or juice. 
• Drink a lot of water.

For those desperately wanting to know how to get rid of belly fat in a week, follow these rules to a T, and you’ll hit your target.  Train hard, eat right, and be smart about it.

How to Lose Belly Fat by Touring Budapest

After a gluttonous week of travel through Prague and Budapest last week I accidentally lost 5 to 10 pounds of belly fat. Now I don’t usually carry that much extra fat on me, so that should tell you how accidental it was. And upon reflection I realized that lifestyle is an essential piece of the belly fat puzzle. Playing the tourist for a week caused me to lose weight, while playing the office worker, more often than not, is a prescription for belly fat. Why?

A huge number of people are concerned with how to lose belly fat. My guess is that most of these people are sitting behind a desk all day and snacking sporadically on high carb, high trans fat goodies. For most, a work day is designed for belly fat augmentation. Sitting down for extended periods of time removes the greatest fat burner you have, the large muscles in your legs, from doing anything metabolically constructive. It also prevents your chore muscles from performing their sole function, to stabilize the body. Meanwhile the boredom of office work pushes you toward sugar cravings for a quick pick-me-up.

But this is nothing new. We know that inactivity is conducive to belly fat. But we may not realize just how much. Over the last week I did no exercise, or at least, notable exercise. I didn’t lift a weight. I didn’t run. I drank a lot of beer and ate heavy East European food several times a day. And I saw Prague and Budapest on foot. Oh, and I lost at least 5 pounds of fat (I say at least because I may have burned off a little muscle too, tough to say). This certainly had nothing to do with my gluttonous diet. It had everything to do with the simple and unfortunately temporary lifestyle change.

The simple act of being on your feet for most of the day is enough to call into play the largest metabolic boosters the body has, the muscles of the upper legs. Using these all too often ignored muscles raises your metabolism considerably, and it leaves your body in a nice calorie deficit. Your body needs constant energy throughout the day, and it takes that energy from belly fat. Despite the fact that my diet looked nothing like a diet, I still lost weight. There is almost nothing you can eat that if you’re on your feet for a good portion of the day, your body won’t make use of or flush out.

So what’s my new belly fat solution? Travel!!! Stop asking how to lose belly fat and instead use those precious vacation days to travel to a place that offers sights and culture that are accessible by foot. Spend your days walking through old cities with cobblestone walkways, brilliant architecture, and when you’re tired, dine on exotic cuisine and good booze. It’s a lifestyle change that if realized two or three times a year will not only enrich your life and shake off that pent up stress, but will also help you shed that belly fat you’ve acquired from countless hours at the office.

Mini Workouts for Belly Fat Reduction

Belly fat reduction is the natural consequence of living day to day in a calorie deficit as we’ve discussed several times already. The two paths to this are exercise and dieting. Exercise is the ideal choice to create a calorie deficit because you won’t run the risk of hurting your metabolism, which is your strongest advocate on the path to getting rid of belly fat. Dieting can be very effective, but if you’re not the type who likes to eat basic and natural foods all the time, it’s smarter to work with your natural inclinations and just suffer through a little but of physical training.

A barrier to belly fat reduction is the time and energy it takes to make it to the gym and push through a grueling training session. And fortunately for those who are busy or occasionally lazy, there is another more efficient training method that is just as effective for getting rid of belly fat. Mini workouts can last anywhere from 2 minutes to 10 minutes, and done once or twice a day can rival other training methods for effectiveness. And I know it may sound crazy, but it is quite possible to reduce belly fat with as little as 2 to 10 minutes of training a day if done properly.

As we’ve discussed elsewhere, the key to growth and gains in strength or endurance training is applying the principle of progressive overload, or methodically pushing your body past previous limits. One of the key components of this is the notion of intensity, which pushes our body to that limit in the shortest amount of time possible. This is how mini workouts can reap great rewards. When most people head to the gym they pay little attention to rest times and overall workout length. They just go in and do the work. But there is a very big difference in strength and endurance between a person who does a full body lift in one hour versus a person who can do that same lift in half the time.

This principle can be carried further to the point of short, intense, and compact workouts. These sessions in my opinion are most effective when done with bodyweight exercises, as most of us can do higher repetitions with bodyweight that with free weights. If you cannot do 15 pushups, sit-ups, or bodyweight squats, then you may need to supplement exercises with a bit of weight training. And here is the objective. To reduce belly fat, we want to exert as much energy as possible in the shortest amount of time. And this means using big compound movements in a fast paced circuit with no rest in between. Each exercise should be done to failure, that is until you cannot perform another rep, and then move immediately on to the next exercise.

To give you an example from my own mini workouts. I can generally do between 50 and 80 pushups, 50 and 80 bodyweight squats, and 20 to 40 v-sits. I do these as quickly as possible while maintain proper form and getting close to full range of motion (though speed reduces this a bit and maybe you don’t fully extend the arms and legs on the push up and squat motion). Start with as many pushups as you can do, then immediately move on to as many bodyweight squats, and then on to v-sits or crunches. This can be done in less than two minutes. This can be done for two sets after a 2 to 3 minute rest for a total workout time of less than 8 minutes, or can be done once in the morning and once in the evening. This simple compact mini workout is guaranteed to reduce belly fat if done daily or 5 to 6 days per week. Belly fat reduction has just become easy!

Get Rid of Stubborn Belly Fat with the Proper Fat Loss Mind Set

Getting rid of belly fat is not simply a physical challenge. Everyone who has every set fitness goals knows all too well that the largest hindrance to progress is laziness and procrastination. We like the idea of being fit, but we don’t like the idea of working out. If we wanted to work out in the first place we wouldn’t be in our current belly fat predicament.

Nonetheless, you are not alone in your aversion toward training. But there are several psychological factors that contribute to success, and several that don’t. The most pernicious habit for those looking to get rid of belly fat is procrastination, also known as the art of making excuses. When time comes to train we start to notice little things; my ankle hurts, I’m too tired, I think I’m coming down with a cold, etc. These issues are intense enough and present just long enough to keep us from training without the guilt of choosing to avoid a workout.

But we all know when we’re making excuses and once they creep in, so too is that voice of guilt and the path toward defeat set. It’s incredibly important that when we lay out our belly fat reduction plans that we don’t forget our dislike of training, and that we plan our sessions assuming they are going to be uncomfortable and difficult to adhere to. Don’t deceive yourself. Your personality will not change over night. You are going to be fighting the person you’ve conditioned yourself to be over a long period of time. So it’s important to make your belly fat reduction plans with all of this in mind.

There are a few techniques that successful dieters and weight losers employ in order to succeed, and you’d do well to adhere to them as well. After a few weeks of training you are not going to want to train. You will have seen no results by then, because it takes time for your body to get conditioned to burn fat regularly. And you will get discouraged. At this time, it’s essential that your workout times are not discretionary, but are in fact a priority in your daily schedule. The best weight losers get their workout first thing in the morning before excuses or self doubt creeps in.

This doesn’t need to be a hard workout; it just needs to be regular. Whether you get up 20 minutes early and go for a 15 minute jog, or your do a mini bodyweight circuit of pushups, sit-ups, and squats, getting something done before the day starts removes all pressure and all guilt surrounding your fitness plans. If you can make a harder training session in the evening, great, and if you can’t, no worries, you’ve already met your daily commitment. This simple tactic, while it will not produce quick weight loss or rapid belly fat reduction, will set the stage for long term weight loss and a healthy lifestyle.

The second tactic one should adhere to is the utter commitment to show up to sessions. This doesn’t mean you train and give 100% each session; it just means you show up. On those days where you feel tired or sick or your tooth hurts or whatever, you will not want to train. And not training opens the door for every excuse under the sun once the habit is established. If you are committed to showing up at the gym, or getting on your running gear every morning, then the workout will happen more often than not. If you have a legitimate issue, don’t stay at home and watch TV. Go to the gym and simply sit there and watch others or do something very minimal with a part of your body that feels fine. This will reinforce the importance of training sessions.

Another great belly fat reduction tactic is to find friends with similar goals and train together a couple of days a week, rain or shine. Support groups are not necessary but are incredibly helpful in pushing past the wall. And another tactic is to treat training like you love it, whether you do or not. And what I mean by that is that when we love to do something, we do it first, we do it now. Sometimes it makes us late for work or keeps us up at night. Treat training like you love it. When the thought or weight loss or training creeps in, force yourself to do something positive with it. Perhaps do 20 pushups or bodyweight squats. This will condition you not only to burn belly fat regularly, but also to get past the stigma of exercise as a burden to your lifestyle.

A proper belly fat reduction mindset will not be focused on the burden of fitness; it will be focused on the lifestyle commitment to fitness. You have set your long term goals, and then break them down into many mini goals that will be your week to week inspiration. These goals should not, in my opinion, be attached to weight loss in terms of poundage. Watching a scale forces you to care about the wrong things.

If you’re focused on improving your strength and endurance, and you’re eating properly, then the poundage will come off. But you also may build muscle you didn’t previously have, and this could leave you at a heavier lean bodyweight, but with serious progress in terms of belly fat reduction and size. Confidence doesn’t come from your weight in terms of pounds, but from your body feel and appearance. Who cares if you weigh 10 pounds more than you did that last time you were thin if your belly fat is gone and you’re lean in all the right places? And yes, it is possible to be 10 pounds heavier and look thinner if those ten pounds are muscle.