We all want to lose stomach fat don’t we? It gives us the chance to get those all illusive abs we’ve always wanted and then be able to show off our 6-pack to all and sundry…right?
Well, it needs a decent amount of work to get to that stage…even when we are at our perfect weight when we lose our stomach fat, we still need to build up the muscles to show them off.
You can still have fat around your belly even though you’ve been training for months and it seems almost impossible to shift, but with a little more effort and a few tips, that last bit of fat will wander off defeated and you can get on with working on your 6-pack.
Follow these five tips to lose stomach fat altogether.
1 – Good Carb Bad Carb
Much has been written about carbs and it seems they are a major factor in the weight loss process and if you need to lose stomach fat they are extremely important. So, let’s see what sort of Carb you should NOT be consuming and the ones you should.
Bad Carbs seem to be in all the nice things we want to eat…typical! Snacks for a start, you should not eat cakes, crisps, chocolate…you know the thing, all the sweet tasty stuff. Then there’s the hard carbs like white bread, pasta, potatoes and rice.
These types of food can cause bloating with poor digestion, and the first place the fat cells aim for is your belly….so don’t eat these foods with abundance if you want to lose stomach fat. Just get a carb calculator book to find out which carbs are the worst and stay away from them.
The Good carbs now and I’m afraid they are a little boring. But they’re there to help you – not put you off food. Good carbs include Porridge oats, brown ice, beans, fruit, various vegetables and many kinds of beans. Go for a Low Glycemic Index Diet to help your overall weight loss, but certainly keep these kinds of carbs on your list if you want to lose stomach fat.
Look at this way. Would you rather eat a stable solid food diet that will benefit your body for life, keep you healthy and make you look good? Or would you rather eat a sweet and tasty diet that only satisfies you for a few minutes and makes you fat, unhealthy and unattractive? Harsh, but true!
Too many bad carbs will shoot your insulin levels up, which in turn will slow down your metabolism not allowing it to burn off those fat cells. You metabolic system cannot handle too much carbohydrate at once and the sugar from those carbs will go straight to your belly and sit there.
This is why diets such as the Atkins diet were so popular. You didn’t eat any carbs whatsoever and the weight fell off you because your metabolism was running like a furnace and eating your excess fat cells for energy because it didn’t have to waste time burning of carbohydrates.
The diet worked incredibly well but much was said about the dangers of doing it for long periods of time. Over a period of time, the body would have no fat left to burn as energy so what could it eat as fuel now…muscle. The diet became flawed, but it does work for short periods, especially the initial first 2 weeks. You should then introduce ‘good’ carbs to your diet slowly but surely!
Nowadays, the theory is to keep bad carbs out and get the good carbs in.
2 – Don’t Eat Junk Food!
Pretty obvious you may think, and yes it is, but…one takeaway from a famous high street clowns company will cause all sorts of damage to your plan.
Resist it completely until your belly fat has totally gone and then, when you are happy with your flat washboard stomach, and you’re desperate for a take-out, only have one if you promise to run 10 miles the next day, finishing off with 100 press-ups! It really is that important, you’ve worked extremely hard to get the 6-pack, don’t chuck it away on junk food.
Whilst we’re on the subject of junk food, what about the food in your cupboards at home? Is there a devil in disguise hiding in there? If you have any sort of sweetie thing hanging around…get rid of it! It will stop you getting those abs. And when I say get rid of it, I don’t mean scoffing it down so it’s gone…no, no, no! Give the tempting treat away to a friend or neighbour…after all, you are serious about this aren’t you?
You see, sweet things and junk food are full of sugar and refined carbs and when you eat these types of foods, where the ingredients are full of these, you get a sugar spike which creates your blood sugars to rise. This then leads to a slower fat burning effort and an increase in hunger. We don’t want that, so get rid of you sweet things and take-aways!
3 – Lose Stomach Fat Like a Neanderthal
Did you ever se a fat caveman! Ok…you never saw a caveman ever, but what is relevant here is that in very early days, when manufactured food was not invented, humans had to live like animals, and you never see podgy animals (well, next doors cat looks a proper fatty, but you get my drift).
Animals either hunt for food for protein meals, in the same time keeping fit, or they eat low energy foods where they just graze on trees and fields and do nothing but eat. No processed food, no junk food and definitely no sweets. The animal in us has all but gone now we have the ease of buying food instead of catching it (us most being carnivores).
So eat more lean meat, go for a run and only eat when you need to. Berries make tasty snacks and nuts are great for energy as long as you eat them in their raw form just as nature intended.
4 – Avoid Lazy Eating
One of the worst things you can do is eat before bedtime. To lose stomach fat you need to adhere to this rule especially. Imagine the scene: you’re sat at home, lounging around after a hard day, watching TV, the nights drawing in, you’re tired and….peckish. Eat now at you’re peril.
After you’ve scoffed your snack are you going to burn it off with a run? Are you going to make your metabolism speed up to burn off those pesky fat cells from forming by doing a 30 minute workout? No…you will carry on sitting there until it’s time for bed and then sleep for 6-8 hours.
Those calories you’ve taken in now go into storage because you haven’t woken up you metabolism to get rid of them. They are now making a comfy home in bellyfatville.
You will now have to work even harder the next day to get those fat cells to shift, if you don’t do anything about them, they will encourage their friends to come along and before you know it bellyfayville becomes overcrowded…stomach fat strikes again!
Try not to eat after 6pm and then go for a walk/run to help burn off your last meal; surely you can last the 4-6 hours before you go to bed without food? If you work shifts, just adjust the timings so you don’t eat 6 hours before you go to bed.
5 – Beer Belly!
A protruding stomach (apart from pregnancy) is a sign the owner likes his/her beer!
There are no nutrients in alcohol so the calories don’t get burnt off and turn to fat. How many times have you exercised after having a few beers or half bottle of wine? Almost certainly never.
When you drink alcohol you relax, your body does no work at all and so can’t burn off the fat. One of the worst things if you want to lose stomach fat is take in alcohol. If you can’t go without it though, just drink 1 small bottle of beer or 1 glass of wine with your meals.
You don’t need to give up alcohol altogether, after all, it’s pleasurable; but cut it right down if you want to get to that flat stomach.
