How To Lose Belly Fat – The Guide

The strategy involves both diet and exercise – nothing new there. However, it entails 2 unique
ways of going about it.

The Diet – Become a Fat-Burner

Low-carbohydrate nutrition is the most-effective way of shedding pounds of fat from the body.

Why?

Basically, the body burns energy in the following order:

1. Carbohydrate (from food and stored glycogen)

2. Fat (from food and bodyfat)
3. Protein (from food and muscle tissue)
If you eat what most government guidelines recommend you eat, you are a carb-burner. It then
becomes obvious that in order to become a fat-burner, you should remove the current primary
energy source i.e. carbohydrate.

When you do this, your body takes a few days to flip a ‘metabolic switch’ and become a fat-
burning machine. At that point, the fat you eat gets consumed first, and then you start burning
away bodyfat as your primary source of energy. Obviously, you don’t therefore consume copious
amounts of fat, and you don’t need to go zero carb to benefit. Anything under 100 grams of carbs
a day is considered ‘low-carb’, but ideally under 60 grams would produce great results.

On low-fat diets (which by nature are high-carb diets), when your ‘food calories’ are gone, the
body will burn a mixture of both fat and muscle tissue (protein). As muscle is ‘metabolically
active’ — it burns calories all day long just by being there — losing it is a disaster for the dieter.
Their metabolism will continually slow down over time.

This is one of the main reasons why low-fat diets very often produce temporary results: you lose
weight for a while, but then it stops working (as your metabolism has crashed) and you pile it
back on – and then some!

The Exercise

Loads and loads of cardio, right? Wrong.

Overdoing cardiovascular exercise will also put your body in a state where it breaks down lean
muscle tissue (catabolism). So the question is, how do we complement our fat-burning
nutritional strategy with fat-burning exercise.

It’s called ‘Interval Training’, or more specifically ‘High Intensity Interval Training’. The idea is
to perform some sort of cardio in ‘fits and starts’ i.e. a period of lower intensity followed by a
period of higher intensity.
Why?

Research shows that this type of work burns more fat than steady-state cardio, typically by about
50%. In fact, one study showed a 9 fold increase in fat loss for HIIT compared to low-medium
intensity cardio.

Also, with respect to belly fat in particular, research has shown (though the reason is not clear at
this time) that HIIT can produce more fat loss in this area than other parts of the body. An
Australian study found that the HIIT group lost 3 times more fat and significantly more belly fat
than the steady-state cardio group who actually exercised for twice as long!

The even better news is that HIIT need only be performed for 10-20 minutes at a time.

Hopefully you can see that these unique approaches to diet and nutrition will work
synergistically to produce truly effective fat-loss:

1. Get your body to burn fat for energy.

2. Then add exercise that will utilize the most fat possible.
There’s obviously more to talk about on this topic, but a single post doesn’t permit me to get into
it all. I hope you enjoyed it and if nothing else, you feel inspired to find any weight-loss program
that you feel you can work with to bring permanent results.