Loose Belly Fat
7 Strategies to Satisfy Hunger and Lose Belly Fat
Loose Belly Fat Fast
Recently, Cornell University researchers asked a group of people a simple question: “How do you know when you’re through eating dinner?”
The answer might seem obvious. After all, doesn’t everyone push the plate away when they feel full? Well, no. The leanest people do, according to the scientists, but people who are overweight rely more on what are known as “external cues.” For example, guys packing a few extra pounds tend to stop eating when . . .
- Their plates are clean.
- Everyone else in their group is finished.
- The TV show they’re watching is over.
Unfortunately, these cues have nothing to do with how they feel physically. “People’s brains are often out of touch with their bodies,” says C. Peter Herman, Ph.D., a University of Toronto expert on appetite control. “And when eating becomes mindless, overeating becomes routine.”
The key player in all of this appears to be a region of your brain called the left posterior amygdala, or LPA. This area monitors the volume of food in your stomach during a meal. Fill your gut to a comfortable level, and the LPA tells your brain to drop the fork. Trouble is, it delivers that information at dial-up speed in a DSL world. “Many men consume calories faster than their bodies can say, ‘Stop!’” explains Herman. “So they look to external cues to guide their consumption.”
The bottom line is this: To shrink your gut, you need to start listening to it. We’ve scoured these science and tapped the top experts to help you learn how to do just that. Use these seven simple strategies, and you’ll fill up without filling out.
Strategy 1: Sit Down to Snack
Turns out, the trappings of a formal meal make you think you’re eating more than you actually are—and that may boost satiety levels. A 2006 Canadian study found that when people ate lunch while sitting at a set table, they consumed a third less at a later snack than those who ate their midday meals while standing at a counter.
Think of it as the Zen of eating: “If you treat every dining experience with greater respect, you’ll be less likely to use your fork as a shovel,” says sports nutritionist and behavioral psychotherapist Lisa Dorfman, M.S., R.D. “And that includes snacks as well as your three squares.”
Strategy 2: Turn Off the Tube
University of Massachusetts researchers found that people who watched TV during a meal consumed 288 more calories on average than those who didn’t. The reason: What you’re seeing on television distracts you, which keeps your brain from recognizing that you’re full.
Strategy 3: Slow Down and Savor
“Pay close attention to those first three bites, which people usually wolf down due to excitement,” says Jeffrey Greeson, Ph.D., a health psychologist at Duke Integrative Medicine. In fact, mimic a food critic: “Examine the food’s texture, savor the flavors in your mouth, and then pay attention and feel the swallow,” he says. “Psychologically, this form of meditative eating boosts satiety and promotes a sense of satisfaction for the entire meal.”
While you’re at it, try spicing up relatively bland fare, such as scrambled eggs, with hot sauce or smoked paprika. “Hot, flavorful foods help trigger your brain to realize you’re eating,” says Dorfman.
Strategy 4: Take a Bite, Take a Breath
University of Rhode Island researchers discovered that consciously slowing down between bites decreases a person’s calorie intake by 10 percent. “Breathing helps you gauge how hungry you are, since it directs your mind toward your body,” says Greeson. “It’s also quite practical, since you can do it throughout a meal and not draw attention to yourself in a social situation.”
Strategy 5: Don’t Share Your Food
Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo observed that men who ate with a group of buddies downed 60 percent more calories than when they ate with a spouse or girlfriend. That’s because people often match their intake of food to that of their dining partners.
Of course, you shouldn’t have to sit home on guys’ night out. Choose one reasonable entrée for yourself, and skip the communal foods—bread, nachos, wings, and pizza, for example—which encourage you to take your eating cues from pals.
Strategy 6: Keep a Food Journal
It’s an effective way to remind yourself how much you’re eating over the course of a day. But it doesn’t need to be complicated: University of Pittsburgh scientists found that dieters who simply wrote down the size of each meal (S, M, L, XL) were just as successful at losing weight as those who tracked specific foods and calorie counts.
One useful addition: Detail the motivation behind your eating habits. “Were you really hungry or just blowing off steam before bedtime? Recognizing that you weren’t feeling true hunger reinforces the idea of listening to your body,” says Dorfman. Read more
How To Lose Belly Fat
Exercises to Lose Belly Fat – 3 Things You Must Never Do
how to lose belly fat fast
Are you looking for specific exercises to lose belly fat? Truth is, belly fat does not burn off from only doing sit-ups, crunches or any other type of spot reducing exercises aimed at burning belly fat. Those are all great for shrinking the belly area by tightening muscle but they will not actually take the fat off from around your belly. For that, you have to do a little more. The most effective exercises to lose belly fat are those workouts that cause all over fat burning.
Cardiovascular Exercises to Lose Belly Fat
To burn fat off your body you have to burn more calories than you take in. Long, brisk walks, jogging, stepping, jumping rope, aerobics classes and spinning are all great fat burners. The best way to shrink your belly fast is to incorporate a combination of cardiovascular exercise and toning either in one workout or two separate workouts. If you are not sure where to begin, there are programs online as well as offline that can teach you ways to lose fat and tone up your abdominal muscles.
For Optimal Belly Shrinking, Add Some Toning
While crunches and sit ups do not burn belly fat if done in exclusivity, they do help tone your muscles and because of this, they can significantly reduce inches around your waist and belly. Exercises to lose belly fat should include ab exercises as they can make a big difference in the way your belly looks. Not only will your belly be smaller because of losing fat from cardiovascular exercise and dietary changes, but it can be firmer, too.
If you are having “issues” with a chubby belly, the best way to fix the problem is with a good weight loss program. There are no miracle fixes that will make your belly disappear but there are programs that work! All exercises that burn calories are exercises to lose belly fat and one of the best things you can do for yourself is to get up and get moving!
If your goal is to lose belly fat, there are 3 things you should never do, and you’re probably doing all of them. Here they are:
1. Don’ listen to infomercials.
Those infomercials you see that promise you’ll lose belly fat create nothing but confusion. They tell you that you will be thin, but you have to buy their fat loss pill. You bought the pill and it never worked.
They tell you that you can lose belly fat, but you have to buy their abs gadget. You bought it, and the infomercial said you could do it while sitting on your couch.
Well, you’ve been sitting on your couch for weeks, using that abs gadget, and still no results. What gives?
The problem is the infomercials themselves, and what they try to pass off as legitimate ways to lose belly fat. Those fat burning pill will get rid of nothing but your money. Those abs gadgets may work your abs, but that does you no good if you still have a layer of fat surrounding them.
2. Don’t do hundreds of sets and reps of abs exercises.
I know what you’re thinking. “How can I lose belly fat if I don’t do 100 crunches per day?”
The answer is that you can’t spot reduce your belly fat away. It’s impossible to just lose fat in your belly area only and not the entire body as a whole–and that’s the key.
In order to lose belly fat, you have to perform exercises that’ll cause your body to burn fat. I’m sorry to break it to you, but no amount of crunches or leg raises will produce the necessary hormonal responses that’ll get the job done.
3. Don’t lose hope.
There’s so much misinformation out there that it’s hard to tell the truth from hype. If you’ve been trying to lose belly fat, and failed, then you were probably following hype.
When people fail too often, they tend to lose hope. Any fat loss success story has its share of failures, and ultimately, success. Those that succeeded didn’t lose hope.
If you’ve been trying to lose belly fat, but have failed so far, you can’t give up. Belly fat loss takes commitment and time. You have to continuously do the things that will cause you to lose fat. Things like eating right, and exercising on a regular basis. Read more
