One the most frequently asked questions I am asked is, “I workout all the time but I still cannot seem to lose belly fat, what exercises are best to help me?” My answer usually is something like, “how do you handle stress, do you get to bed on time, and what is your food like?” This usually prompts a confused look from the person asking the question as they were hoping I could give them some miraculous training program to give them a six pack. In my 20 years as a personal trainer this question is without a doubt the most frustrating thing I am regularly asked as there are so many people with the belief that they can exercise their way to good health or some special diet that melts the fat off them for good. We see this all the time, the person who destroys their body with endless cardio sessions to get sweaty but never changes in appearance. It almost seems that the harder they workout the worse they get.The people who struggle to lose the gut no matter how much exercise they complete need to recognize their solution is not a new workout or more intense training, but adopting more effective strategies of handling STRESS and eating quality NUTRITION. In this article we are going to give you the secrets to getting rid of the gut for good by looking at the three biggest mistakes people make.
We all want to have a nice flat stomach for besides the obvious benefit of looking good we know there is many great health benefits associated with less belly fat.
Excessive visceral fat is linked with many diseases due to its location being so close to many vital organs, such as the pancreas, liver, and intestines. The higher the amount of visceral fat a person stores, the more at risk they are for certain health complications, such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
We know that exercise is great and can go a long way to help to reduce it but as we explained in the introduction there are many people already exercising intensely but not making much progress to their waistline.
There are many mistakes this person may be making and the first one is often the most problematic and also the hardest to change.
Mistake Number 1 – Ignorance of the Damage Caused By Stress
Many people scoff at this as being the reason for weight gain and I have many ignorant internet trolls who tell me weight loss is all about the energy in versus energy out equation and that it all comes back to calorie counting. What these morons fail to understand is that apart from the hormonal imbalances that stress creates that I will explain in detail shortly, people who are overly stressed have little to no reserves left to consider sticking to a calorie deficit diet.
Their willpower is greatly diminished for they need every bit of energy to sustain the pressures they are currently under. Forcing them onto a calorie restricted diet is never going to work until you resolve some of the easier options first, which these ignorant idiot internet trolls would know if they had worked with hundreds of people over a 20 year span like I have.
Think of your willpower as a reservoir.
For some, it’s a large, massive pool of water that you can tap into and it always seems pretty full. For others, it’s a small pond that is must be used wisely or it will run out. Every action you take draws water from this reservoir. The tougher the task, the more willpower it takes. Changing your diet and drastically reducing your food intake takes a lot of willpower versus eating comfort food or a drink of wine at the end of the day.
Now this is not to say I am giving people a free pass or an excuse to eat more. My point is that the underlying problem is that their energy reserves are empty and it is wiser to fill these reserves up with simple adjustments before trying to deplete their energy straight away.
Also you have to understand that stress comes in many forms and it is not just linked to the mental and emotional version we normally think of.
Most people already have work stress, family responsibilities, financial stress and day to day problems. When you combine this with poor sleep, nutritional deficiency, lack of exercise, too much exercise can all create a perfect storm that inevitably leads to problems.
The more factors at play the less likely it is the body will be able to lose weight and achieve good health.
Take a look at the info-graphic below to see various factors that contribute to weight gain and poor health.
Unfortunately it is not easy to work through some of these things so you need to be wise with how you use exercise. Sure it will help a lot to but you must appreciate the damage it can cause.
When someone is working out all the time but they are not losing the belly fat you’ll see there is two things happening.
Firstly whenever cortisol levels (your stress hormones) are chronically high, it suppresses your androgens (growth hormones), so things like testosterone and growth hormone are suppressed, which is not good if you are trying to add muscle to get stronger and fitter. You need more muscle to speed up your metabolism so you are already off to a bad start.
Secondly as testosterone decreases, your gluco-corticoids or your stress hormones are elevated.
One of the first reactions is that the body thinks that it’s going to have a long-term energy crisis, so to prepare for this situation our bodies start accumulating fat right around the belly button.
This is your signal that this is a chronic stress related problem, not a lack of cardio workouts. Exercise is excellent to counter the damage of stress but it can also add to your stress if not used wisely.
If you start trying to crush your body with endless exercises and trying to starve yourself with a restrictive diet your body reacts to this as more STRESS!
Instead of having a positive effect and helping the body to grow muscle, repair damaged tissues and increase metabolic rate for more energy, the effect is the exact opposite. The body senses danger and releases more cortisol and decreases growth and repair hormones crucial to a healthy body.
The message is clear that stress will ruin your health very quickly and you must acknowledge the damage it causes.
Stress is needed to prepare us for survival and this is called “Fight of flight” response. In a stressful situation the body secretes stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol to our arms and legs in order to help us either run away fast, or, stay and fight. This is good in life and death situations as these hormones will possibly save your life. But it is not good if this system is turned on all the time.
An unchecked stress response can cause repeated spikes in blood pressure increasing the chances of a stroke. You will begin to stockpile fat around the abdomen due to the high levels of the stress hormone cortisol being activated lowering IGF-1 and maintaining high levels of glucose in the bloodstream. This endless supply of cortisol greatly weakens the immune system and exposes the body to deadly diseases like diabetes and cancer.
I wish I had a solution that could help you lower your stress level but as I said at the start this is often the hardest to change. The first thing in changing it is recognizing the damage it creates. Trying to get to bed on time, using meditation, creating some quiet time and doing all the things you can to give your body a chance to recover will enable your body to lose weight.
Good nutrition and exercise will help greatly but you cannot try to eat or exercise yourself out of trouble if you have massive pressures from other things going on in your life. If you really need more help don’t be afraid to seek help.
Trying to punish your body with more workouts will not help.
A good article to read about this is – Using exercise to improve mental health
Mistake Number 2 – Poor Quality Nutrition & Eating Habits
This is obviously a big part of the problem but many people find it harder to change bad eating habits and find it easier to punish their body with intense exercise instead. On the flip side of this is people constantly resorting to fad diets with quick fix weight loss goals. Neither of these strategies work in the long term and only serve to cause more trouble.
The biggest piece of advice I can give to you about eating right is THERE IS NO ONE SIZE FITS ALL DIET!
Only what works for you. There are some things I will cover here that contradict each other. Knowing which one works best for you will take time as you will need to test it to find how your body responds.
Nutrition is a huge piece of the puzzle and can be very confusing for some people to get right. Make no mistake you will not get very far if you do not get this step right.
Where to start?
The first thing to do is make sure you EAT GOOD QUALITY FOOD. The old saying you are what you eat is so true.
Cutting back and ideally eliminating processed foods as much as you can is a great start. This will ensure your nutrition is from fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, dairy and grains that are loaded with the essential vitamins and nutrients your body needs.
If it is in a packet, bottle, or jar, don’t buy it. This means it is processed in some way so try to minimize as much of these foods as you can. By completing this step you are already half way there!
Secondly you need to find the foods that best fuel your body.
What works for me may be completely different for what you need to eat.
For example, certain foods may give me energy and feeling great might make you sleepy and sluggish. You must learn to listen to your body, keeping a food diary for a month can help with this, not only writing down the foods that you eat, but how they make you feel.
•Did they increase your energy?
•Did you crave sugar after a certain meal?
•Did the last meal make you sleepy or wired up?
The answers to these questions are all clues as to what fuel mix your body needs and have a lot to do with WHAT YOU EAT.
Our modern western diet is so high in carbohydrates, especially high energy carbohydrates. We seem to be always in a hurry and are often looking for convenience when it comes to food choices, which often leads to poor food choices.
To avoid putting yourself in this situation it is vital you plan your meals in advance.
Another classic mistake people make with the quality of their food is avoiding fat. I will give you a little tip that will change your perspective about fat forever.
“You cannot get fat by eating fat”
You are more likely to get fat from eating sugars and highly processed foods. And interestingly it is the low fat products that often have high levels of sugar.
If you eat a diet that is high in sugar and grains, the sugar gets metabolized to fat (and is stored as fat in your fat cells), which in turn releases surges in the hormone leptin. Over time, if your body is exposed to too much leptin, it will become resistant to it (just as your body can become resistant to insulin).
And when you become leptin-resistant, your body can no longer “hear” the messages telling it to stop eating, burn fat, — so you remain hungry, you crave sweets, and your body stores more fat. Leptin-resistance also causes an increase in belly fat, sending you on a vicious cycle of hunger, fat storage and an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, etc.
Below is nutrition graphic with some simple tips to help you.
One other thing to consider is your meal timing and portion control.
In many ways these two factors are linked together. You could be eating the right foods but eating too many of them or too sporadically creating metabolism problems for the body making it difficult to lose weight.
There is research out there showing that whenever we are in front of a television screen or even a computer screen that the basal metabolic rate can drop below your normal metabolic rate.
In my 20 years as a Personal Trainer I have often found that the people who had the most trouble losing weight, 90% of the time were also people who regularly skipped meals. It is really important for people to really understand what happens when they are skipping meals while they’re working at computers and end up in a hypnotic dream like state.
This is a real problem for people that are trying to manage their weight or their body shape because they don’t realize that essentially they are reducing the number of calories their body is burning every minute by going into this state!
This just becomes a bad habit and if it remains unchecked for too long becomes increasingly hard to change!
One of the things that happens when people have improper meal spacing is that they go from having normal food and normal blood sugar to low blood sugar and hypoglycaemia and the rebound effect is that if they eat too close together to compensate, that they overload their body with too much food. This puts tremendous stress on the body which has to activate the immune system to cope with the stress.
Remember how dangerous this is from step one? Well now it is happening again.
If you are a person who does not have much reserve and blood sugars drop you will often see this person reach for a coffee or something sweet dessert to give them a kick and get their blood sugars up again. On and on this happens throughout the day and this cycle becomes entrenched and wreaks havoc on the body.
The body can easily be entrained into any rhythm—good or bad. It is up to us which one we teach it.
If you have improper meal spacing, it can become engrained into your system constantly putting you in situations of blood sugar crisis where you over-eat or reach for sugar foods to boost your levels back up. If you can change this habit by having a plan to eat regularly and within four hours you avoid being put in this situation.
This brings me to the next popular strategy which is intermittent fasting. This can be really good method for some people to use but you do need to understand how to eat correctly in the meal window to maximise its effect and this is where some people get it wrong.
I published an article about this on the website you can read here – Before you try intermittent fasting make sure you read this article first
Mistake Number 3 – Poor Exercise Choices
The person who is struggling to shed the weight and exercising must look carefully at what exercise program they are doing for it is obviously is not working.
Sometimes people think it is a lot of ab exercises they need with the most common exercise being the sit up. I will give you a little secret, sit ups won’t help you lose belly fat at all even if you did 1000 per day. They will help you get a disc bulge though and a lifetime of severe back pain.
Anyone with even the slightest bit of knowledge with exercise will know you cannot spot reduce. Your body will take fat from all over the body, not just the area you are working out, and when it comes to the abdominal area this is usually the last place it will take fat from. The reason for this is varied as people distribute fat to different areas of the body due to gender, age, genetics, and even illness or disease.
The other problem we see with exercise is the over use of long slow cardio sessions.
The person who thinks if you don’t get a sweat then it is not a good workout is destined for failure!
This person often counts how many calories they have burned and tries to destroy their body with more exercise. Unfortunately calorie counting rarely works as there is so many problems with relying on this method.
See articles below by Precision Nutrition for more on this.
•The surprising problem with calorie counting part 1
•The surprising problem with calorie counting part 2
Most important part of using this method is how much stress is placed on the body from excessive cardio. And you will see shortly how destructive this can be to your body and why your exercise efforts are actually backfiring.
Now do not take this as you should not exercise and all cardio is evil for it is not. You just need to start to see how you need to gain a better understanding of the exercise that will promote positive adaptation to the body, as opposed to destructive.
The best exercise choices are strength training and interval training.
Building muscle should be the MOST important activity you do if your goal is to lose weight because increasing muscle is the best way to increase your Metabolic Rate ( the rate at which your body burns energy at rest).
The breakup of the factors that influence your body’s metabolism over a 24 our period is as follows:
•Lean Muscle Mass = 66%
•Exercise = 17%
•Eating = 12%
•Body Temperature = 5%
(Reference: Metabolic Precision.com)
Adding muscle does so much more than just speed up your metabolism and is essential to completing many other tasks.
Watch the video below for an explanation of how muscle influences so many important functions of the body.
The long slow cardio workouts will not be able to complete these functions. They will improve slightly but not to the level they need to be for dramatic improvement and overall health.
If you want to get sweaty and improve your fitness levels the use of interval training is the best.
This is where you break your exercise session into short segments that alternate high intensity with a rest period in-between.
For example 10 sets of 200m sprints with a 1 minute rest between each set.
Scientific researchers found this type of exercise works because it produces a unique metabolic response. Intermittent sprinting produces high levels of chemical compounds called catecholamines, which allow more fat to be burned from under your skin and within your muscles. The resulting increase in fat oxidation is thought to drive the increased weight loss.
The best part of this training is you don’t need very much time to do it as a great session might last only 20 minutes!
Watch the video for more detail on this.
Do You Need More Help?
To help you put all this together several years ago I created a detailed report that includes everything you need to know about nutrition and exercise. There is specific chapters relating to various needs like diabetes, lung capacity, cholesterol, and even detailed heart rate testing assessments. This is the ultimate manual to not only improve your heart health, but your overall health.
You can download the PDF report instantly click here or on the image below.
About The Author
Nick Jack is owner of No Regrets Personal Training and has over 20 years’ experience as a qualified Personal Trainer, Level 2 Rehabilitation trainer, CHEK practitioner, and Level 2 Sports conditioning Coach. Based in Melbourne Australia he specializes in providing solutions to injury and health problems for people of all ages using the latest methods of assessing movement and corrective exercise.
References
•Built From Broken – By Scott Hogan
•Movement – By Gray Cook
•How To Eat Move and Be Healthy – by Paul Chek
•Eat Real Food – by David Gillespie
•Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers – By Robert Sapolsky
•Metabolic Typing – By Trish Fahey & William Wilcott