Reducing Belly Fat

Belly fat is bad… bad looking and bad for you. Losing excess fat is important not just for your vanity, but also for your overall health and well-being. Belly fat is a fairly reliable predictor of heart disease; type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance and even a few cancers. Hard work might not be enough to be rid of this unsightly problem; genetic factors beyond your control or something simple like missing out on sleep could be to blame. Assuming diet and exercise have not done enough, there may be other reasons why you’re struggling that have nothing to do with work ethic or effort. Here are some factors that might be making it harder to lose belly fat.

1. Not incorporating strength training: Cardio alone won’t do much for your weight, you need both cardio and strength training to get real results. Strength training tones muscle mass and helps you burn fat, it’s a natural way to fuel weight loss in the body.

2. Eating too much processed foods: Refined grains and sugars raise levels of inflammation in the body, and belly fat is linked to this type of inflammation. Eating too much processed foods will stand in the way of your body’s natural ability to lose weight. Fruits, vegetables and whole grains are loaded with antioxidants that have anti-inflammatory properties.

3. Doing a workout that’s too easy: To burn belly fat, you really need to do vigorous workouts. Research has found that high intensity workouts help lose more belly fat than low intensity plans. Burning more calories is key in your fight against belly fat, and highly intense exercise does that for you. This means going all out for as long as you can.

4. Spot reduction: Despite what you’ve heard, this just won’t work. Instead you’ll need to focus on functional exercises that use all the muscles in your core… the abdominals, pelvic, back, obliques and other body parts. These exercise use more muscles so you burn more calories doing them. Planks are a great functional workout, as they use your core, arm, leg

and glute muscles.

5. Not enough sleep: If you sleep less than 6 hours a night (30% of us do) you need to get more rest in order to give your waistline the best chance of shrinking. Research finds that those who get under five hours of sleep a night are far more likely to gain weight than those who slept seven hours per night.

Reducing belly fat takes work… real sustained time and effort. It won’t just happen because you want it to. Losing belly fat comes down to eating a low calorie diet that’s high in fiber, low in carbs and sugar along with regular exercise that includes both cardio and strength training. –