How to Get Rid of Belly Fat the Healthy Way

Pick up any health or fitness magazine today and you’ll be hard pressed to find a cover story that doesn’t include advice on how to get rid of belly fat. And with as much information out there on the topic, it is still a concern that plagues a great many of us. So before we get into exactly what it takes to get rid of belly fat, lets dispel a few of the myths surrounding weight loss, especially as it relates to the body part in question.

Belly Fat Misconceptions
1. You can lose fat on just one part of your body.
This concept is called spot reduction, and it doesn’t work. Our bodies are unfortunately programmed to keep fat in certain areas rather than others. Some people have fat calves, others have love handles, and some have saggy arms. This is not a genetic predisposition toward being fat, but it is a genetic predisposition toward storing body fat in certain places more than in others. As a corollary to this, doing exercises that target one muscle group or region will almost never result in fat loss in that area. It is only by reducing all around body fat that our trouble spots become less troublesome.

2. That to lose fat, you shouldn’t eat fat.
Contrary to what many fad diets recommend these days, fat (the right kinds) is good for you. Carbohydrates (the right kinds) are good for you. And protein is good for you. The problem is not eating these things, but in eating them excessively or in quantities that our bodies can’t use for energy. In fact, for many people who have belly fat, fat consumption may actually need to increase in order to let your body release your stores of fat for energy, rather than store them for fear of starvation.

3. That crunches and sit-ups will get rid of belly fat.
This comes back to the spot reduction issue. Crunches and sit-ups, while at times valuable supplements to a training program, are not all that necessary for weight loss or even lean abs. In fact, doing squats will typically contribute more to belly fat reduction than situps will because you’re working large muscle groups which requires significantly more energy perform. Furthermore, by stressing the body through resistance training our body burns a tremendous amount of energy through the process of breaking down and rebuilding muscle.

4. Skipping meals and occasional starvation diets will reduce belly fat.
These measures may work temporarily, but the damage they cause to your metabolic rate will outweigh any short term results. Our bodies react quickly to changes in diet or fitness routines, and reducing our caloric intake drastically will cause an immediate loss of weight, as our bodies will be forced to use stores of fat to make up for the lack of food energy to meet our metabolic needs. But after a short time, our metabolism will adjust downward to meet this new diet, and when we break from this extreme diet we put on fat immediately, because our system has adapted to fewer calories and now reads our previous consumption level as excessive.

How to Get Rid of Belly Fat the Healthy Way:
Now that we’ve covered how not to trim the tummy, lets talk about how to properly get rid of that gut. To do that, we need to understand why we have extra body fat in the first place. Most of us know that when we eat too much food, or eat poor quality food, that we get fatter. And we also know that if we eat less, we tend to lose weight. This is because our bodies require a certain amount of energy each day to function at a level necessary to sustain our lifestyle. When we consume too many calories, our bodies store that extra energy as fat for a later time when our bodies may need it.

On the other hand, when our caloric intake is lower than our daily energy needs our bodies make up the difference by burning fat for fuel. So if we understand this very simple process, then we understand that in order to burn belly fat we need to reduce our caloric intake, raise our metabolic rate or activity level, or both. Doing both will result in the fastest and healthiest long term results. Notice here that I don’t mention the necessity for abdominal work. This is because, in reality, one can have six pack abs without doing any abs exercises. The abdominals are stabilizing muscles, and receive indirect stimulation from almost every other type of physical training. The body will burn fat the fastest and result in a tone, lean midsection if it is treated as a unit, and not the sum of many parts.

This may be too general for many people to take action on, but I’ll follow this post with specific and actionable information on how exactly to change ones diet and increase ones activity level so as to reach a more favorable energy needs to energy consumption ratio. Now that we’ve discussed the underlying principle for how to get rid of belly fat, we can move on to the two largest components, diet and exercise.