Are These the Reasons Why You’re Not Losing Belly Fat?
May 16, 2014
Story at-a-glance
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Abdominal fat actually produces inflammatory molecules,
and high inflammation levels in your body can trigger a
wide range of systemic diseases linked with metabolic
syndrome
Exercise can have a pronounced effect on your hormone
production, naturally raising sex hormones and HGH, for
example, which can have a more or less direct bearing on
weight management
For weight loss, opt for high-intensity interval
training (HIIT) rather than conventional cardio. Studies
clearly show that exercising in short bursts with rest
periods in between burns the most fat
Key dietary corrections needed to optimize fat loss
include swapping processed foods for whole foods, and
replacing carbs with healthful fats
By Dr. Mercola
Many find that their abdominal area is particularly difficult to
firm and tone and contrary to popular belief, solely doing standard
sit ups is not likely to be of much help. Learning effective methods
for shrinking your waistline is worth the effort however, as the
benefits extend far beyond mere aesthetics.
Abdominal fat actually produces inflammatory molecules, and high
inflammation levels in your body can trigger a wide range of
systemic diseases linked with metabolic syndrome. This is why
carrying extra weight around your middle is linked to type 2
diabetes, heart disease, strokes, and other chronic diseases.
Besides aesthetics and reducing your disease risk, having strong
core muscles will also allow you to maintain good posture, conduct
everyday movements of reaching and bending more easily and safely,
continue to have strong continence, and sustain strong balance and
stability.
But why is it so difficult to shed fat from this area,
despite hard workouts? The featured article in Time Magazine1
lists several potential reasons why you’re not losing belly fat.
Age May Be a Factor, But It’s Not an Excuse
With age, your body chemistry changes, and many of those changes
make it increasingly difficult to lose weight. For example, around
the age of 30, your
human growth hormone (HGH) level begins to drop off, and HGH
helps with both fat metabolism and muscle building. And, as noted in
the featured article:
“Both men and women experience a declining metabolic
rate... On top of that, women have to deal with menopause. ‘If
women gain weight after menopause, it’s more likely to be in
their bellies,’ says Michael Jensen, MD, professor of medicine
in the Mayo Clinic’s endocrinology division.”
The good news is that you can counteract this chain of events,
provided you make and maintain the appropriate lifestyle changes.
Choosing your exercise wisely is perhaps the most efficient way to
bolster your body’s capacity to function optimally as you get older,
and this includes maintaining healthy hormone levels.
Many people fail to realize that exercise can have a pronounced
effect on your hormone production, naturally raising sex hormones
and HGH, for example, which can have a more or less direct bearing
on weight management.
Three Exercise Mistakes That May Be Sabotaging Your Fitness Efforts
The featured article lists three common
exercise mistakes that
could be sabotaging your efforts to shed that stubborn belly fat.
This includes choosing the wrong kind of workout, doing the
exercises incorrectly, and/or doing exercises that aren’t
challenging enough.
For starters, most people tend to focus on traditional cardio
workouts when trying to lose weight, but running on a treadmill is
typically not going to have any major impact on your waist size.
Part of the problem is that cardio is among the least
effective forms of exercise when it comes to weight loss.
Instead, opt for high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Several
studies have confirmed that exercising in shorter bursts with rest
periods in between burns more fat than exercising continuously for
an entire session.
High-intensity interval exercises are at the core of my
Peak Fitness routine. This short intense training protocol
improves muscle energy utilization and expenditure due to its
positive effects on increasing muscle mass and improving muscle
fiber quality.
Muscle tissue burns three to five times more energy than fat
tissues, so as you gain muscle, your metabolic rate increases, which
allows you to burn more calories, even when you're
sleeping.
HIIT is also extremely time efficient. You can actually lose more
weight by reducing the amount of time you spend exercising, because
when you’re doing HIIT, you only need 20 minutes, two to three times
a week.
Any more and you'll overdo it! The key factor that makes
interval training so effective is intensity. To reap maximum
results, you need to work out at maximum intensity, with
rest periods in between spurts.
It’s also important to remember to keep upping the intensity as
you get fitter. Again, if the exercise is not challenging enough,
you’re not going to reap results. You can get the details on how to
properly perform high-intensity interval exercises in the following
video demonstration.
I also recommend incorporating
Buteyko breathing into your workout, which involves breathing
through your nose while doing your workout. This raises the
challenge to another level, but it will also help you pace yourself
as you may need to slow down in order to keep breathing through your
nose.
Other Helpful Workout Tips to Effectively Shed Belly Fat
In addition to HIIT, you’ll want to consider adding some
strength training to your program. Note that you can actually
turn your strength training session into a high-intensity workout
simply by slowing down your movements. Proper form is important, so
to learn more about how to perform such exercises, please refer to
my previous article, “Super-Slow
Weight Training.”
Also, as mentioned earlier, spot reducing simply doesn’t work, so
if you’re doing sit ups and little else, you’re not likely to see
results. Besides being ineffective for weight loss, the traditional
abdominal sit ups have been found to recruit and produce the
least amount of muscle activity, which means it’s also
ineffective for coaxing out that six pack.
Instead of doing just the standard sit up, add functional
core-strengthening exercises like planking, which engages a
wider range of muscle groups, including your arms, legs, glutes,
back, pelvic muscles, and obliques. Here are two key points for
performing a plank correctly:
While in plank position, pull in your bellybutton.
Your bellybutton is attached to your transverse abdominis, that
inner sheath that holds your gut inside and gives your spine and
vertebrae a nice, weight belt-tightening type of support. So by
pulling it in, you begin to contract that deep inner transverse
abdominis muscle. If you want to work your six-pack rectus
abdominis muscle, drive your chin down toward your toes while
you're focused on squeezing your bellybutton in.
Next, do a Kegel squeeze. A Kegel squeeze
is performed by drawing your lower pelvic muscles up and holding
them up high and tight. For men who aren't familiar with that
term, it's similar to trying to stop urinating in the middle of
the flow. This squeeze will allow you to feel and focus on your
abdominal muscles.
Another example of a functional exercise would be to work with a
stability ball, as your body will have to engage a wide range of
core muscles to stabilize itself on the ball. Keep in mind, however,
that in order to really get "six-pack" abs, you have to
shed fat. Men need to get their body fat down to about six percent,
and women around nine percent in order to achieve a classic six-pack
look.
Proper Diet Is Key for Success
No matter how much or how well you exercise, all your efforts may
come to naught if you’re still eating processed foods, too many
carbohydrates, and the wrong kinds of fat. Eating right is key for
any kind of weight loss success, and it’s downright crucial when
you’re trying to get rid of visceral fat around your internal
organs. As noted in the featured article:2
“’Refined grains like white bread, crackers, and chips,
as well as refined sugars in sweetened drinks and desserts
increase inflammation in our bodies,’ says [registered dietitian
Kate] Patton. ‘Belly fat is associated with inflammation, so
eating too many processed foods will hinder your ability to lose
belly fat.’”
Most people are not aware that leptin plays an enormously
important role in the development of obesity. Leptin is a hormone
produced by your fat cells that is just as important as insulin in
determining your risk for type 2 diabetes and other chronic
diseases. It also impacts how much you eat and how much fat you
burn, and leptin resistance specifically causes your body to produce
and accumulate visceral fat around your midline. So how do you
become leptin resistant? In short, by:
Eating a diet that includes too many sugars and grains
(grains turn to sugar once you consume them)
The sugar metabolizes to (turns into) fat and is stored in
your fat cells
This activity in turn causes a surge in leptin
Your body becomes resistant to leptin just as it can become
insulin-resistant
When you’re leptin-resistant, your body no longer hears its own
signals to stop eating, burn fat, or pass up sugary foods. As a
result, you feel hungry, crave sweets, and your body continues to
store fat even though it already has more than enough. When your
body routinely stores this excess as visceral fat, you increase your
risk for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, vascular disease,
atherosclerosis (hardening of your arteries), and an increased
thickness in the walls of your heart.
Two Key Dietary Changes That Will Put You on the Right Track
Key dietary corrections you need to make in order to optimize
your fat loss efforts include the following:
Swap processed foods (including restaurant or fast food) for
whole, ideally organic fare, focusing on raw vegetables. Cooking
them will destroy many of their valuable micronutrients and
biophotons.
Juicing can help you boost your vegetable intake if you’re
having trouble getting enough of them into your diet. By
removing processed foods, you automatically cut out most of the
refined sugars and carbs (grains) from your diet, along with a
whole host of other health-harming chemicals and additives. If
you opt for organic, you’ll also automatically avoid hazardous
pesticides and
herbicides, as well as genetically engineered ingredients
Next, replace the missing carbs with healthful fats. The
notion that glucose is the preferred fuel for your body is a
pervasive one. Everyone from diabetics to top athletes are
advised to make sure they eat "enough" carbs to keep their
systems from crashing. This is unfortunate, as this misguided
advice is at the very heart of many of our current health
failures. (Keep in mind that when we're talking about harmful
carbs, we're only referring to grains and sugars, NOT vegetable
carbs.)
Fat is actually the preferred fuel of human metabolism, and this
can be traced back to our evolutionary roots. Avoid highly processed
and genetically engineered omega-6 oils like corn, canola, and soy,
however, as they will upset your omega 6:3 ratio. All
trans fats should be avoided, but contrary to popular advice,
saturated fats are a key component of a healthy diet that will
promote weight loss. Most people need as much as 50-85 percent
of your daily calories in the form of healthy fat for optimal
health.
It is important to note that these recommendations appear to be
useful for most that are struggling with insulin or leptin
resistance (overweight, high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol
ratios, or diabetes). If you don’t struggle with insulin/leptin
resistance, then it would be wise to have a higher percentage of
carbs and lower percentage of fat. It can be helpful to remember
that fat is far more satiating than carbs, so if you have cut down
on carbs and feel ravenous, this is a sign that you have not
replaced them with sufficient amounts of fat. Sources of healthy
fats that you'll want to add to your diet include:
Coconuts and
coconut oil (for all types of cooking and baking)
Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk
Grass-fed and pasture-finished meats
Raw nuts, particularly macadamia
Organic pastured egg yolks
Avocados
Unheated organic nut oils
Address Your Stress to Boost Your Weight Loss Efforts
Stress makes your body produce cortisol, known as “the stress
hormone,” which depletes lean muscle and makes your body hold on to
fat in the abdominal region. It also enlarges your fat cells,
allowing them to store more fat. One of the most important
strategies for addressing elevated cortisol levels is to reduce
stress in your life. My favorite technique for addressing day-to-day
stress is the
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which is the largest and most
popular version of energy psychology.
It’s a very effective technique that can help you reprogram your
body’s reactions to the unavoidable stressors of everyday life.
Getting enough sleep will also help reduce your cortisol levels, and
can have a significant bearing on metabolic disorders such as
obesity, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes, allowing such problems
to improve. As noted in the featured article:
“If you’re among the 30 percent of Americans who sleep
less than six hours a night, here’s one simple way to whittle
your waistline: catch more Zs. A 16-year study of almost 70,000
women found that those who slept five hours or less a night were
30 percent more likely to gain 30 or more pounds than those who
slept 7 hours.”
To Sleep Better at Night, Get Enough Sunlight During the Day
To address your sleep problems, I recommend beginning by
realigning your circadian rhythms to the natural rhythm of daylight
and nightfall. Without this synchronization, aspects of your
waking/sleeping system will be working at the wrong time, making it
difficult to sleep at night, while increasing daytime sleepiness.
For an in-depth explanation of how this works, and why it’s so
critical for your overall health, please see my interview with
researcher
Dan Pardi. Three key factors to keep in mind are as follows:
Get daylight exposure, ideally around solar noon, for at
least half an hour or more each day
In the evening, dim environmental lights and avoid the blue
light wavelength
When it's time to go to sleep, make sure your bedroom is
dark. I recommend installing blackout shades for this purpose,
or use a sleep mask to avoid disrupting your melatonin
production
Besides maintaining a natural circadian rhythm, there are a
number of additional ways to help improve your sleep if you're still
having trouble. For a comprehensive sleep guide, please see my
article "33
Secrets to a Good Night's Sleep."
Are You Committed to Taking Control of Your Health?
As noted by Time Magazine, sometimes the only thing
standing in your way is a lack of commitment to your own health.
“Are you committed to the work needed to lose belly fat? ‘Reducing
belly fat takes a combination approach of a low-calorie diet that is
high in fiber and low in carbohydrates and sugar along with
cardiovascular and weight training,’ Dr. Kashyap says. “If you are
willing to do the work, you can move past genetics and lose it.”
Indeed, there’s no magic pill that will allow you to continue
eating junk food and remain sedentary without suffering the ill
effects. That doesn’t mean making changes have to be excruciating,
however. I recommend starting with your diet, and then adding in the
exercise as the weight starts coming off. I believe about 80 percent
of your ability to reduce excess body fat is determined by what you
eat, with the other 20 percent related to exercise and other healthy
lifestyle habits such as sleep and stress reduction.
If you make the appropriate changes to your diet: boosting your
vegetable intake and swapping refined carbs for healthful fats, you
may be surprised at how quickly your body composition starts to
change. For more details, I suggest you review my Optimized
Nutrition
Plan, which is a comprehensive and step-by-step guide to help
you make health-promoting food and lifestyle choices.
Don’t be discouraged if it takes a few months, though. Some
bodies require more time to make the shift from burning sugar to
burning fat as its primary fuel. Just keep making incremental
changes, and stick with it.
Intermittent fasting can be helpful for making the transition
faster. For details on this, check out my previous article, “What
the Science Says About Intermittent Fasting.” There is simply no
question in my mind that this is the most powerful tool you can use
to optimize your lean body mass.
Last but not least, exercise correctly! For results, make sure
you include high-intensity interval exercises, along with strength
training and core-strengthening exercises. If you’ve lost track of
how many hours you’ve spent plodding on the treadmill and squeezing
out sit ups without success, implementing these changes may be the
answer you’ve been looking for.