What you Must Know if You Want to Lose Belly Fat
Almost everyone trying to shed weight is also aiming for a flat belly. The flat belly is a sign of weight loss success. You could force your body to shed a lot of weight. In this case most of the weight comes from muscle and water loss. But you cannot force your body to shed stomach fat. Losing fat on the stomach requires you to have a deeper understanding of how your body operates. This is what this write-up hopes to achieve.
The most fundamental thing you must be aware of is that there is a physical limit to the amount of fat that your body can burn. This is limited by the number of tiny power plants in your body. These tiny power plants called mitochondria are limited in number. Fat is burned in the mitochondria. Fat cannot be made to vanish from your body. Once this is understood, you will have a realistic expectation on how much fat you could lose.
You store body fat in layers. Imagine this to the many layers of an onion. The fat must also peel off in layers. You need to be aware that belly fat is a small part of the much bigger fatty layer covering your body. You can’t just get fat off at the stomach without losing fat in the other parts.
Your body has a fat burning pattern that is determined by your genetic make-up. The first place to gain weight is the last body part to lose it. The belly is always the first body part to gain fat and the last place to lose it. Most people are so caught up with their problem areas that they are not aware that the body is losing fat in other areas of the body. This can be a source of frustration if you are not aware.
The smart way to lose stomach fat is by boosting your metabolic rate. This increases your daily energy deficit, provided that you have not increased food intake. A raised metabolism allows you to lose weight through out the day. The best way to raise metabolic rate is via weight training to build your muscles, whether you are a man or woman. The more muscles you have, the more passive fat burn you will have.
When you skip meals, your body believes that there is a food shortage. It holds on to its fat reserves tighter than ever. This is especially so for the fat reserves in your stomach. This is called your body’s starvation response. When your body activates its starvation response, it is not possible to shed fat especially abdominal fat. You must never skip meals or drastically reduce calories to avoid activation of your starvation response.
[Be especially|You need to be] careful about quick-fix weight loss methods and gimmicks. These include spot training, drugs, diets, herbal remedies, supplements and anything that promises a toned stomach in an unreasonably short period of time. Some of these quick-fixes such as drugs and starvation type diets can help you lose weight. But these very rarely help to reduce abdominal fat. Often, this sets you up for rebound weight gain. Most of these also cause the activation of your starvation response.
Natural and healthy weight loss happens when the weight loss is solely due to the loss of fat. It is unhealthy and unnatural when there is also muscle and water loss. Water and muscle loss will affect your metabolism and probably also activate your body’s starvation response. You should be aware by now that your body has a physical limit to the amount of fat it can burn. As such, patience is important if you want to shed abdominal fat naturally. If you lose it correctly, you only need to do it once.
If you want a quick way to lose belly fat, go to the Lose Belly Fat Blog to learn what it takes to lose belly fat and keep it off. If you have the correct know-how, you only need to lose weight once where others spend an entire lifetime on diets because they don’t understand how their body operates.