The Lose Belly Fat Diet
The Burn Belly Fat Solution >Part 1 of 6 – The lose belly fat diet. This is the first article of six explaining the ‘Burn Belly Fat Solution’ entitled ‘The Lose Belly Fat Diet’.
Firstly, we will tackle ‘how to burn belly fat’. It is crucial to understand why you are doing what you are doing as it will make things make sense and you can then take more personal responsibility for your progress, plus you are more likely to stick to something when you know why you are doing it. So, here we go:
The first thing we need to address is calories. As we are all aware the food and drinks that we consume contain calories. That is a plain old simple fact that no one can deny. As you can see we are going to take this nice and easy to start with. And burning belly fat revolves around calories.
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When you eat and drink you take on board calories, when you move, or in fact do anything even digesting food you burn up calories. This all happens on an ongoing basis even when we are sitting down our body still needs to burn calories in order to provide energy for breathing, keeping us warm and so on.
So, if we do all of this moving then why do we get fat and increase out belly fat? Well basically some people take on too much energy and do not use it all up. The body then attempts to ‘save’ this unused energy for a time in the future when it might need it and therefore stores it as belly fat! If you have no excess energy i.e. you use up all of your supply each day then you will stay the same weight.
So let’s say you are on a lose belly fat diet and you ingest 3000 calories a day, and your body burns 3000 calories a day, your weight and total body mass would remain unchanged. The figure 3000 mentioned here is what we call the ‘Calorie Maintenance Level’. It is the amount of calories required for the body to function and maintain its current weight.
There has never been a more important concept to grasp and it is that the calorie maintenance figure is a huge factor in planning a lose belly fat diet.
The Calorie Maintenance Level (And the “big secret”) As you can see knowing how to calculate your body’s own calorie maintenance figure could come in pretty handy. Upon knowing how to calculate it, controlling personal weight is a relatively simple task. This is at the real heart of any lose belly fat diet which everything else needs to be built around! It is in fact the big revelation that you probably already knew but might have lost sight of as people (marketing companies) tried to convince you that losing weight was more complicated than this along the way!
Each individual requires a certain number of calories each day so that they are able to perform their daily tasks and routines without running out of energy. Therefore, if you want your weight to remain constant, simply take in as many calories as your body burns. If you want to lose weight, then take in less calories than how much your body burns.
Calorie Deficit (Giving your body less calories than it needs) As mentioned the trick to incorporate into a lose belly fat diet is to create a calorie deficit. You just have to burn more than you take on. Let’s say your maintenance level was 3000 calories and you only ate 2500 per day for a week, this would basically reduce your belly fat by 1 pound per week.
Why is this so? The reason being is that there is approximately 3500 calories in 1 pound of fat. Therefore on average, if an individual consumed 500 less than their maintenance figure each day, for a grand total of 7 days, it would then be tantamount to the 3500 less calories needed to lose 1 pound. (500 x 7 = 3500). Easy peasy, no rocket science there!
Conveniently for us, there are 7 days in a week. So, you could simply start off like this by limiting your calorie intake to around 500 calories below your daily maintenance level i.e. 2500. This would ensure that you would lose about 1 pound per week. Losing 1 pound of fat per week is the perfect goal and much preferable to anything greater than that, sounds odd but here is why that is so:
If you try to lose too much too fast there is a high chance you might actually end up losing muscle mass instead of the excess fat in your body, if you reduce calorie intake by too much (more than 500). Reducing the amount of calorie intake (500 or more) to such an extreme level is not just incorrect, it is also unsafe and might instead cause harm to your body. When your body realizes it is suffering from a severe lack of calories then it triggers something known as the starvation response.
The body’s main job I think you’ll agree, is to keep itself alive and when it is starving the body assumes that its survival is at stake. For this reason to ensure that it doesn’t waste any calories/energy that it does have, it slows the body’s metabolism right down. This means that it will try and hold onto all the energy that it can ensuring that you will find it really difficult to lose any weight at this time, this is the reason that extreme dieting does not work and plays no role in the lose belly fat diet!
What about working out? Were you thinking “instead of eating below my maintenance level, couldn’t I just workout more and therefore burn more calories than I take in overall?” And of course the answer to that is ‘yes’. It is possible to lose more calories by simply working out and not dieting. It is possible even if you consume 3000 calories per day. Just work out enough to offset the extra 500 calories you should not have consumed. This way a calorie deficit will still be opened up and you are still on the path to burning belly fat.
As you can see this calorie deficit is the core concept in the lose belly fat diet. A balanced diet with a proper workout plan will go a long way to achieving the weight loss results desired. An added benefit is that your personal health will also improve, with a healthier diet and sufficient exercise.
To discover how to workout your calorie maintenance level in Part 2 go here.