How to Get Rid of Belly Fat Through Proper Dieting

As we discussed in How to Get Rid of Belly Fat the Healthy Way, there are two important factors accounting for our current metabolism and thus resulting in our current body weight. These two factors are energy exertion levels, or exercise, and energy intake levels, or diet. This post will focus on the latter, how to get rid of belly fat by changing our eating habits.

When we discuss dieting principles, I don’t want you to misinterpret the word diet as a flat reduction in food consumption across the board. In fact, many people can consume larger quantities of food, the right kinds of food, and experience rapid weight loss. The key to dieting properly is to first alter the kinds of food you’re consuming, and second, to reduce the quantity you’re eating if the first step doesn’t meet our desired weight loss goals.

By altering the kinds of food, we mean primarily reducing bad fats, like hydrogenated or trans fats. These are easy to identify as they’re posted on all food products in the USA. Carbohydrate consumption may or may not need to change, depending on your particular case. But for most of us, reducing our consumption of high glycemic carbs like white pasta, white breads, cakes and cookies, and instead consuming low glycemic carbs like wheat and whole grain breads, vegetables, and wheat pastas is enough to elicit a fast metabolic response. High glycemic carbs tend to spike our insulin levels after a meal, giving us an immediate energy boost and resulting in an energy crash a couple hours later. Insulin tells our bodies to retain belly fat.

The third dietary macronutrient is protein. Protein is an extremely important component in diet, as it keeps our bodies from breaking down muscle for energy, it allows us to build new muscle when we stimulate growth through exercise, and a proportionate amount will put our bodies in a constant fat burning state. The best sources of protein are chicken, fish, and tofu. These are low fat sources of high quality protein. But the occasional burger won’t kill you either.

A good balance of said macronutrients is somewhere in the ballpark of 40% carbs, 30% protein, 30% fat (the right kinds of fat). This is quite different from your average American diet, which typically looks something like 60% carbs, 20% fat, 20% protein. This simple shift in diet may be all it takes to burn fat around the clock. You may even be able to eat more food more often and still shed the extra pounds. If this does not get you where you need to be however, we need to look at the second factor of how to get rid of belly fat, portion size.

Many of us have a habit of eating until we are full. This is a great way to get fat in the long run. A better more disciplined approach consists of eating until we are no longer hungry. This is a subtle difference and requires a slower pace of eating, so we don’t blow right past the ‘not hungry’ state and into ‘ready to puke’ state. Once we learn to eat in order to stave off hunger, we need far less food per meal. What happens then is we become hungry more often. This is a good development in diet, not bad, and the exact metabolic state we’re looking for.

Feelings of hunger when dieting properly are signs your body needs fuel. When dieting improperly hunger indicates your body craves sugars or fats to keep insulin levels up. Our ideal meal schedule would require us to eat about 6 times a day, every 3 hours or so, and in sufficient portions to carry us to the next meal. Reducing food intake per meal and keeping meal frequency high actually keeps our metabolism high while reducing our caloric intake, and thus puts our bodies in a constant fat burning mode, literally burning the belly fat 24 hours a day. While this doesn’t need to be uncomfortable, it does require a commitment to a new lifestyle.

And now that we’ve covered how to get rid of belly fat with our diet we can approach it from the other side in the next post, exercise.