How to Get Rid of Belly Fat

How to Get Rid of Belly Fat Quickly with Interval Training

Alright, we’ve crossed the biggest hurdle already, that of educating ourselves on the fundamental principles of how to get rid of belly fat. It’s time for me to give you a little more fuel for you to attack the problem. And that is how it should be seen. Always remember that body and belly fat is just stored energy. It isn’t you, some obstinate part of your character that identifies you. It is just stored energy that can leave as easily as it came. It just takes determination and a plan. So let’s plan.

To get rid of belly fat quickly, we need to step up our energy output. As we’ve discussed, my preferred method of doing so is through interval training. Long cardio sessions do indeed cause you to burn calories, but your body will adapt in time, and it takes a great deal of fortitude to train for an hour a session, several days a week. I believe this is excessive. Interval training sessions of 20 to 30 minutes are more time efficient, and better for your all around system.

To review briefly, interval training is the combination of moderate to high intensity training for a period of 30 minutes or less. It is much more difficult than maintaining moderate speeds or resistance for extended periods of time. The 30 minutes should include both a warm up and a cool down, so the interval aspect of it need not be longer than 10 to 20 minutes. This is the key to getting rid of belly fat quickly. So let’s get into a beginner to intermediate interval training session.

If using the treadmill, start at a moderate warm-up level, one that gets your heart rate up to around 140 for 5 minutes (I’m assuming you have no heart conditions and are in relatively good health with the exception of having a bit of belly fat to take care of). After 5 minutes raise the speed to a level your body can only sustain for 1 to 2 minutes, but you’ll only maintain that level for one minute. After that minute, return to your base speed, or one that is higher but still allows for moderate recover in breathing and heart rate reduction without slowing your heart rate all together. Continue this pattern 2 more times. Add a 5 minute walking cool down. So together it would look like this:

-5 minute warm-up jogging
-1 minute sprinting or high intensity jogging
-2 minutes jogging at base speed
-1 minute sprinting
-2 minutes jogging
-1 minute sprinting
-2 minutes jogging
-3 to 5 minutes cool down, walking at a good pace

Every person will start from a different place. For me, my base speed is between 10 and 12 kilometers an hour. And my 1 minute interval speed is between 15 and 17 km per hour. That peaks my heart rate to about 170, and then I drop it back to 140 or 150 during my moderate 2 minutes. If you are just starting out, it may only require a light jog at 8 km to raise your heart rate to 170, and a fast walking pace to maintain your heart rate at around 140 to 150. These are more important indicators than the speed at which you are moving. Your heart is doing just as much work as mine, and that’s what we’re looking for.

Once you’ve become conditioned to this workout, which may take 2 to 4 weeks if done 2 to 4 times per week, then simply add 1 more interval to the equation. An interval is a set of a 1 minute sprint followed by 2 minutes of jogging, or whatever your ideal pace is. Once you’ve worked up to 5 interval sets, your total training time will be between 25 and 30 minutes. It is then time to add speed or add elevation to your workout for greater intensity. So any of these three factors can be altered to increase intensity; speed, elevation, or total number of intervals. Perhaps you can experiment to find what works best for you. But make sure you record the details of each session, including:

-Beginning heart rate
-Number and duration of intervals
-Speed
-Elevation
-Heart rate at the beginning of the cool down
-Heart rate at the end of the cool down
-Total workout time
-Your own feelings of how tired or weak you feel afterwards, and how difficult you feel it was in general

Make sure that if you’re adding weight training to your overall fitness plan that you don’t lift after you interval train. After exhausting the body of energy stores, your body may be forced to break down muscle fiber for the energy to complete your lift. This is not what we want as muscle mass in conducive to fat loss. So if you intend to weight train and interval train on the same day, weight train first and interval train second. The body will adapt to interval training, so keeping a log of the factors mentioned above will allow you to constantly change your workouts for better results, which will indeed get rid of belly fat quickly.

How to Get Rid of Belly Fat with Exercise

So far we’ve covered the basic principles for getting rid of belly fat, and we’ve also discussed how to alter our diet’s in order to achieve that end. We’re ready for the third discussion on topic; how to get rid of belly fat by exercising.

This is a hotly debated topic and one that’s highly misunderstood. Common fitness misconceptions include the notion of spot reduction, the idea that I can change one part of my body by doing exercises that target that one area. People want to get rid of belly fat, so they do crunches until they can’t crunch any more. After a couple weeks they look the same. Puzzling.

Another fitness misconception is that long cardio sessions are the cure for belly fat woes. While this is in part true, it isn’t the whole truth. For anyone who has tried long cardio sessions for any length of time has come to realize our bodies can adapt quickly to endurance training, and our metabolic rate may quickly shift to accommodate this extra energy output unless our diet is likewise adjusted downward.

The key to rapid weight loss, especially around the midsection, is through a combination of weight or resistance training and interval training. Weight training has several benefits to our overall body composition. The first is that the process of muscle breakdown and reconstruction itself requires a great deal of energy, and that energy, assuming you’re not overeating, will draw from stored body fat to aid in the muscle building process.

The second benefit is the ability to increase the intensity of our interval and cardio sessions due to the added strength acquired from weight training. Endurance training and weight training are not exclusive. Each one aids in the progress of the other. A more intense cardio session amounts to more calories burned which in turn helps you get rid of belly fat.

And the third benefit of weight training, assuming you’re doing it intelligently and seeing results, is the extra lean muscle mass you have, which also needs more fuel to sustain. This requires more calories during the day, and those calories, assuming you’re not over eating, can be met with stored belly fat. Weight training should be a component of any fat loss program.

In addition to this, it’s important for us to push our bodies past the point of comfort. Our bodies at present are at equilibrium, using close to the amount of calories we consume. If we want to shed the pounds, we need to tip this scale a bit, burning more calories in the day than we consume. This forces our bodies to release stored belly fat as energy. But long cardio sessions pale in comparison to the metabolic changes which occur through interval training, a combination of aerobic and anaerobic training.

Aerobic training requires oxygen to fuel our muscles, whereas anaerobic training requires our body to function at a level that cannot be sustained for any real length of time, and thus draws on other sources of immediate energy stored in the muscles. Anaerobic training includes sprinting, kickboxing, and certain kinds of weightlifting. When we operate at a level like this it forces our bodies to release hormones that are conducive both for muscle creation and fat loss.

Your typical interval training session will include and alternate between moderate and high intensity levels for less than 30 minutes. An example of this might be jogging at a moderate pace for 5 minutes, then sprinting for 1 minute, followed by 2 minutes of jogging, 1 minute of sprinting, etc. 2 minutes of jogging followed by 1 minute of sprinting is one round or set, and this ought to be repeated 3 to 5 times depending on skill level. 20 minutes of interval training is more effective than 45 minutes of straight cardio jogging.

So for those of you wondering how to get rid of belly fat, we’ve just discussed the second part of the two piece puzzle. Adhere to these two principles of caloric adjustment and your belly fat will jiggle away.

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.

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.