Three Belly Fat Loss Myths

If you want to lose stubborn belly fat faster, try not to make these three common mistakes.

1. Caloric restriction:

Caloric restriction = hunger = Loss of muscle mass = fat loss stops.

Muscle requires calories to grow. Without some degree of muscle growth weight loss is stunted. If you exercise intensely, as you ought to, but eat too little, the muscle will be eating itself to survive. The trick is to eat 6 small meals a day. This is very useful for fat loss as it increases your metabolism. If you do insist on eating only 3 meals a day, you should exercise between each meal.

Find out which foods naturally help to burn fat and make sure you're getting enough calories. Yes, you do need a calorie deficit to lose fat over a period of time, but taking the calories too low can decrease your metabolism and stop the loss of fat.

Active woman should never eat less than 1300 calories and active man never less than 1500 calories trying to lose weight. Within a few months of training, most people should be eating 1800 - 2000 calories, (males - 2100 - 2800 calories). With exercise and increasing metabolism fat will burn faster and faster with time. The aim should be to stimulate the metabolism to eat more, not less.

2. Long low impact cardio:

Walking will not work for long-term results of fat loss. It may work at first for someone who is extremely obese and never walks, but not for most people. Although the benefits of walking to relieve stress, personal time, reflecting on the movement, blood pressure and changes in cholesterol are true, it is not a good way to lose body fat.

The trick is to force your body to stimulate growth via the repair process. Giving your body a chance to adapt to the demand over time does not help you lose fat fast. Sure, you can see some initial results, often masked as "tone", but in the end you're turning your muscle fibre from oxidative-glycolytic, or medium speed fibres into oxidative, or slow muscle fibres that have great endurance.

The problem is it's the medium speed fibres that do a better job of getting lean!

By stimulating muscle strength you will increase your metabolism. It takes energy to build and restore muscle tissue. Allowing you to increase energy consumption a little more, but you do not have to 'bulk up' to see great results. Instead, simply create a repair process of the muscles while stimulating the metabolism to burn fat with 'food-burning-foods' to compound the results.

After a full body resistance and alternating training session, you boost your metabolism for 2-3 days as your body re-uptakes the lactic acid in the bloodstream, restores oxygen to muscle tissue that has been worked and repair micro-tears that took place in the muscles. 'Supersets' or circuit training throughout the body is an example of this, and interval training does this too, but what if we took things a step further and get off the machine?

The best method is, alternating body parts, directions, speeds, intensities and muscle synergies, or in pairs. The alternation in any form, even when the intensity is slightly lower, remains a sign of a rapid loss of fat for your body. You will see wild fat burning results once you start thinking about fat loss as "shocking the fat away."

3. Basing exercises specifically on 'Ab Training':

For some reason, the erroneous idea of spot reduction continues. No proof exists that you can lose fat in a specific area of muscle training. Fat loss does not work that way. However, for some reason, we can see hundreds of people every day in the gym doing hundreds of crunches and sit and think that somehow they are burning fat in the abdomen, when in fact they are wasting their time!

Fat loss is an effect that occurs in your body if you live a healthy lifestyle. The fat storage patterns vary from person to person depending on hormone levels, genetic patterns of fat accumulation, myofascial restrictions, and inflammation. Reducing body fat in specific areas through exercise is only performed if you are working to change hormone levels that have been associated with fat storage areas, for example.

There is still no evidence that you can do squats, for example, and lose fat just on your legs... It just does not work that way. The same goes for the abdominal muscles. In this case, even if you do 6000 crunches a day, you would not be doing much for fat loss in that one area. You'd just be building muscle on that area. You might even make your belly look bigger!

Fat loss is to do with:

1. The energy of the training system

2. Joint compound movements

3. Muscle balance

4. Motor unit recruitment and

5. Multi-planar motion

It is impossible to add all this in an abdominal exercise, or even a series of abdominal exercises. The aim is to tire as much of your body as much as is safely possible. This is called momentary muscular failure, and when the onset of lactic acid takes place. Remember, lactic acid, which is what causes pain, is a very good thing. This means your body is working hard to reduce inflammation and repair. You are well on your way to lose fat fast. You will see incredible results when you accept this.

This may be completely contradicting what you have heard and thought all your life, but it certainly explains why you have not be seeing the results of fat loss if you've been doing sit ups and crunches to lose belly fat!

In a nutshell, three serious errors of fat loss you want to avoid:

1. Avoid caloric restriction = hunger = Loss of muscle mass = fat loss stops. Solution? Eating more and build more muscle to burn fat and increase your metabolism for long term weight loss.

2. Avoid long duration low to moderate intensity cardio - This actually trains your body to avoid losing fat.

3. Avoid doing only abs-specific training - There is no such thing as targeted weight loss! The only way to burn fat off your abs is to burn fat all over and the best way to do that is intense exercise.