The most straightforward way that anyone can fight belly fat, is to simply eat fewer calories than they burn. This is what is called maintaining a ‘caloric deficit’ and it basically means that the body needs to burn fat in order to get
the energy it needs.
The body is constantly burning energy, not only to allow it to engage in various
activities such as walking, jogging or thinking but also to allow it to simply stay alive.
That is to say that you need to burn energy for the most fundamental of human
bodily functions such as blinking and breathing.
If you are constantly eating, then you are constantly supplying your body with the
sugar that it needs. This will remain in the blood until the body is able to use it to
power whichever movements are necessary. Failing that, the body will look to stores
of glycogen which is kept in the cells. It’s only once both of these energy supplies
runs short that the body then needs to start looking elsewhere. That is when it starts
to burn fat.
How to Measure and Maintain a Calorie Deficit
If you want to measure and maintain a calorie deficit, then you need to first calculate how many calories your body burns in a given day. This means looking at the number of calories that you burn while inactive (called your ‘basal metabolic rate’) and then looking at how much exercise you do on top of this – making your AMR or ‘active metabolic rate’.
There are plenty of different calculations out there for getting a rough estimate of
these numbers.
Ultimately though, it is actually more effective in most cases to try and work this out using a fitness tracker. While calculations can be useful, they don’t allow for variations from one day to the next. Most of us will find that our active metabolic
rate varies tremendously throughout the week and this of course has a big impact on
how much you should be eating.
A good fitness tracker will allow you to enter some personal metrics, such as your
height, weight and gender, and will then count your steps and measure other
activities throughout the day.
A device such as the Fibit Alta HR for instance will not only track steps but also monitor your heart rate throughout the day and automatically detect exercises and activities like walks, runs and sports. Using this data, you can then get a much more accurate picture of how many calories you burn daily.
From there, you can then start calculating how many calories are going in. Again,
there is technology out there to help you do this. MyFitnessPal for example is a tool
that will let you log the foods you eat by entering the calories and ‘macronutrients’
manually, or by simply scanning a barcode in order to add them from a hu
database.
If you scan everything you eat through MyFitnessPal – not forgetting the drinks you
consume (including alcoholic!) and any smaller snacks throughout the day – then you
now have a total number for all the calories you’ve eaten to measure against the
ones you’ve burned.
Now all you need to do is to plan your day so that the number of calories coming in
stays lower than those going out. Let’s say that you’ve burned 2,300 calories and
you’ve eaten 2,200.
You can either stop there, or you can try and do some more
exercise in order to burn more calories. Either way, you need to keep the first number higher than the second one. If you can do that, then you will burn fat. It’s
that simple and it has to work – because there’s no other source of energy for your
body to get fuel from.
Maintain a constant caloric deficit of around 200-300 and you’ll slowly lose more and
more fat. Remember: slow and steady wins the race!
Except it’s not really that simple. Is it? For starters, there are the kinds of foods
you’re eating – the nutrients. Then there is the matter of your metabolism and, you
know, life.
Maintaining a caloric deficit seems simple and flawless on paper but in practice, it is
too simplistic. Over the next few chapters, you’ll discover why and you’ll find out how
to strike that happy balance that will result in guaranteed fat loss.
Women reading this might even be worried they’ll lose weight from places that they want it: like their breasts!
As some of you may already know, this does not guarantee you’ll lose your belly.
That’s because nothing can guarantee that you’ll lose your belly. Unfortunately,
there is no such thing as ‘targeted’ fat loss. That is to say that you can’t choose which
part of your body you want to improve the looks of and then conveniently blast fat
from there.
The order in which fat is lost from your body is actually genetically predetermined
and is impossible to change. Some people will lose weight from their guts first and
those people are very lucky indeed. Other people might lose it from their arms first.
As of right now, science has no way of helping you choose which order things happen
in for you.
So the only way you can burn belly fat is to burn all fat and then feel safe in the
knowledge that it is going to eventually reach your belly.
That said though, we will look at some tips in these articles later on that can help you to make your belly flatter and more toned in other ways…
The Role of Hormones in Weight LLoss
The Role of Hormones in Weight Loss
If you look around the web for advice on how to lose weight, you’ll find that people
fall into two broad camps. There are those that believe weight loss is entirely
dictated by that caloric deficit we just discussed and there are others that feel there
are other, more important factors at play.
Let’s take a look at some criticisms of the ‘calorie deficit’ approach to dieting…
Problems With the Deficit
It is certainly true that your body needs to burn fat for energy once it has run
out of other sources. It is certainly true that if you have no other means of
getting that energy, you will lose fat stores and eventually you lose weight.
This really is simple math – cause and
effect.
But the problem comes with calculating that magic ‘AMR’ – active metabolic rate.
These calculations are rough guesses at best and they are based on nothing more
than your physical features.
- The best calculations take into account your muscle mass (which is metabolically active) but even these don’t take into account underlying issues such as the balance of your hormones.
- Simply put, some hormones help you to burn fat faster and some help you to burn
- fat faster. These are directly responsible for how many of those processes that
- require energy are going on in your body at any given time and how capable your
- body is of utilizing the various stores of energy available to it.
- Just a few of these hormones include:
- Cortisol
- Insulin
- Thyroid hormones (T3 and T4)
- Adrenaline
- Serotonin
- Leptin
- Ghrelin
- Testosterone
- Estrogen
- Progesterone
- IGF1
- Human growth hormone
- And many more
- The problem is that we all have different balances of these hormones. These
- hormones are in constant flux and are affected by everything from what we are
- eating at the time and how stressed we are, to how much sleep we’ve had and how
- sunny it is.
- Some people have imbalances in these hormones that are permanent, while others
- will use medications that can alter them.
Those fitness ‘gurus’ that ignore the role of hormones in weight loss can’t explain
why hypothyroidism or polycystic ovaries leads to weight gain. They also can’t
explain why using steroids builds muscle and burns fat.
You may not have a condition like hypothyroidism but the point to recognize is that
these conditions are not really binary.
You do not have to ‘have’ or ‘not have’ a condition – but rather you can view everyone as existing somewhere along the spectrum. You might have a slightly lower production of thyroid hormones than someone else, or you might be higher in testosterone.
This is why some people lose fat very easily and it is why some people struggle to
lose it. It’s also why things tend to get harder for us as we get older and it’s why
things get harder for us as we become more stressed and more tired.
All of this upsets our hormone balance and puts our bodies into ‘fat storage’ modes.
The issue is not with the calorie deficit but rather our ability to accurately calculate
our own AMR.
Not only that, but these hormones also play a very big role in why we
struggle to lose weight (they make us hungry, low in energy and depressed) and they
contribute directly to fat storage around the midriff.
This is before we take into account the fact that it is essentially impossible to
calculate the precise number of calories burned (heart rate alone is not a perfect
correlate for calories burned) or the number of calories in any given item of food.
You really think that every single apple has the precise same number of calories in it?
Are you sure you are really adding precisely the same amount of sauce to your
meals?
Then there’s another fallacy of the calories in/out diet, which is the notion that our
calories somehow magically reset at the end of the day: that we can make sure we’re
in a calorie deficit on Monday and then start again on Tuesday. In reality, the build-up of calories is cumulative and can be ‘carried over’.
The Roles of Carbs and Fats
As mentioned, the timing of your food and the way you eat can have a big impact on
your hormonal balance. Likewise, the hormonal balance can have a big impact on the
way that you’re eating!
For example, if you eat first thing in the morning, you ‘break’ your fast. That is to say that you take yourself out of a catabolic state where the body is desperate for food and is burning fat.
Some people will then try to extent this catabolic state for as long as possible as a trick to burn more fat.
They might even engage in something called ‘fasted cardio’ which means that they’ll work out first thing in the morning before breakfast so that the only thing available to burn is stored fat.
Another trick is something called ‘carb backloading’. Here, you engage in intensive
exercise designed to deplete the glycogen stores. Then you consume carbs and as a
result, they will be more likely to be stored in the muscle cells rather than being
stored as fat.
But the technique that most people are interested in is to avoid ‘simple
carbohydrates’ altogether.
Simple carbohydrates are any carbs that release their energy immediately into the blood. These tend to be the sweetest carbs like sugar, cake and white bread. By eating these, you cause a sudden spike in blood sugar which triggers the release of insulin and puts your body into a ‘fat storage’ mode.
If you avoid these simple carbs however, then you can maintain more of an
equilibrium and thereby prevent your body from storing the energy. Instead, you’ll
simply be replenishing your blood sugar as it is being used up.
This is the objective of many low carb dieters who will instead rely on complex carbohydrates and fats which digest much more slowly and therefore release sugar into the blood at a
slower rate as well.
Some low carb dieters and fasters will go even further to try and reduce blood sugar
to the point that the body beings producing an alternative energy source ketones.
Do you need to worry about this? Is any of it relevant for losing your belly? Don’t
worry – everything will be explained into a simple to follow program very shortly…
Make sure You Read our Next Post…How to Fitt A Simple Diet into your Lifestyle(the Easy Way)
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