Best Way to Lose a Belly Fat

Best Way to Lose a Belly Fat

Are you frustrated you don’t see any results from your workout? Is fat around your belly still there? Are you tired of constant lies and false promising of results when clearly you don’t see any? Do you ask yourself: what is the best way to lose belly fat? What is the fastest way to lose fat?

If you are not getting results from your training, then some changes are needed. Most likely the reason is your food. You should adjust your nutrition or better meal planning. Most likely you might need to adjust your calories.

So what you need to do first? What options do you have? How can you adjust your diet to maximize results from training? What do you need to look at? Let me break it down and see what does it take to help you lose that extra fat from your body.

First Step Towards Victory

At the very beginning, I need to make myself very clear: no pill will magically make your fat disappear while you sit in your First Step Towards Victoryfavorite chair doing nothing. If you are popped out of that bubble, great, you can move forward. It means you have taken the first step and you already are working out.

The next thing you need to look at is overall calorie intake. If your nutrition is good, maybe you are overestimated the amount of food that you are eating. Bigger plates can often make it seem like you aren’t eating enough, but actually, you could be eating way more. Luckily, this can be easily sorted by serving your portion on a smaller plate.

So now you should track the number of calories more closely to make sure you are taking in the right amount of food. Obviously, this depends on the results you are waiting for. In this case, losing fat is what you want.

Stop eating junk food. You cannot out-train a bad diet. Eating junk food will not only slow down your fat loss progress, but it will also make it completely void!

What if you are eating out? How can you count your calories? Unless you trust the restaurant where you eat you may be taking in more than you think you are. Do you know much butter and oil are they are using?

To lose the fat and keep it off, you need a plan that is tailored to your own lifestyle and food preferences. What do you prefer? Do you prefer bigger meals during the day or bigger in the evening? Do you prefer to eat six meals per day? It really depends on what is right for you and what matches your training.

Yo-Yo Diet and What You Should Know

So let’s talk about the diet, especially a yo-yo diet. This is a mistake that almost everybody has done at least once in life. Best Way to Lose a Belly Fat yo-yo dietStop and think about this for a minute: if diets worked, everyone who has ever gone on one would be in great shape.

If they were easy and if they work everyone would be in great shape; there wouldn’t be a fitness industry, there wouldn’t be a diet industry, and they wouldn’t be worth a couple of billions per year.

You have to know: if you start with any diet, you HAVE to continue it. If not, there WILL be a yo-yo effect where all that you lost will return. Whether is it fasting or something else. If you choose this, you need to stick with it. Otherwise, there are side effects.

Why are diets boring? Because of at least three reasons:

  • Limiting food creates boredom and makes diet harder to follow.
  • The lack of food and calories leaves a dietary craving for more energy-dense foods. Negative effects of blood sugar negatively affect your energy level and subconscious you are always thinking about food.
  • As a result, dietary fall off the wagon, and quickly regain any lost weight, after gaining even more body fat. Besides that, you also get metabolic damage.

Fat loss is not a simple as energy in versus energy out. If that would be the case, then you could just chop your calories to 1000 per day, and you would lose weight that you want very quickly.

But we all know that is not true, it is not how it works. When the intake of calories is insufficient, that negative affect leptin which negative effect metabolism and slow fat loss progress.

When energy intake goes down, so does energy output. So when you give fewer calories to your body, it tries to slow down your metabolism to burn fewer calories because the body doesn’t want to starve.

The body starts to think when you are getting fewer calories than you are putting yourself in a situation where you cannot find food and it slows your metabolism which then negatively affects all of the positive recoveries that you should be getting from training, like muscle recovery, muscle building and balancing your hormones. So if you do not have enough calories and training, you will have negative results.

However, more energy also means more energy out. That doesn’t mean you have to fill yourself with 3000 calories. But it means you have to find a balance calorie intake whether it is surplus, maintenance or deficit for the results you want.

Negative Effects

Your BMR (base metabolic rate) decreases the more you do yo-yo diet, and the more you under eat yourself. If you continuously go to yo-yo diet can you start to lose muscle, your BMR will decrease and begin to drop, making it a lot harder to maintain your weight in the long-term.

Overall calorie burns drops and it keeps decreasing the more you lose muscle because your BMR is dropping and hence directly affect your total calorie burns daily.

This will negatively affect fat loss because it affects muscles and hormones. And the two things you need for fat loss are good muscle recovery and balanced hormones.

So if you have imbalanced hormones and you are losing muscle, then you are pretty much guaranteed you will be putting on fat and not losing it.

Fitness results become almost impossible because you don’t have enough energy to recover. The body is struggling to survive, and it is in a continuous cycle to slow down your metabolism more and more and more.

Why Can’t I Lose Fat?

Energy expenditure and fat loss are very individual. Factors such as your age gender, genetic potential, your diet history, your hormone levels, and possible medications if you are taking, may affect how your fat loss work in your body. But we still know a few things:

  • Energy output will be lower for those who have lost a significant amount of weight than those who have always been lean. Those people who have been fit whole life never really negatively affected their metabolism. They are like an excellent tuned engine that is working well. If you are overweight or obese, it will take a lot longer for you to lose that fat. It is like a cold old engine that needs time to warm up and tuning to work properly.
  • Body changes will be harder for some and easier for others. It depends on did you train before or not. If you have an active life before and have a sedentary life now, your changes will come sooner than those that were never trained previously. But the older you get, the slower it is going to be.
  • A fat loss is unique to you. Do not compare yourself to others; there are too many underlying factors to create a fair comparison. You can often see those 12 months transformations. Never compare yourself to them: you don’t know their story, you don’t know their background. This is your journey, no one else’s. Focus on yourself!

An efficient way of how you can progress to fat loss is to plan to prepare your meals in advance. One significant reason is that we usually think we are eating less and better than we are. So if you plan and prepare your meal in advance, you are making sure you will be taking the right amount of calories and the proper quality.

The second reason is that we also think we exercise more than we actually do. That is the problem because the fitter and MyFitnessPalstronger you get, the better results you have.

But also the fewer calories you burn considering your body is now more adjusting to exercise, and the more you have to challenge yourself. This means, if you are not progressing every six to eight weeks, then you are just maintaining.

So make a diary. If you think it is too complicated, there are several free apps for your phone that you can use. One I love is MyFitnessPal. It is great for counting calories and to figure out your maintenance and adjust with deficit or surplus, depending on your needs. It is also straightforward to use and can do so much more too, so feel free to take a look around.

Plan Your Road To Success

At the very end, I would like to take a moment to talk about planning your meals. The organization is the keyword to success. You can plan for ages but organize and execute is making it to action. That is when real things happen, that is when you start to succeed!

I won’t go into details about what you should eat exactly, but your meal should look like this: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Snacks in between. Guide yourself by the principle: Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dine like a pauper.

Snacks: apple, banana, protein shake. Apple in the morning, a banana before workout and protein shake after a workout.

Many people fail when it comes to the quantity of their meal, particularly overeating in the evening or overeating on weekends. You can’t cheat here, there is no room for that.

You could say: “I’m good 80% of the time, it is just the weekends that I failed”. Stop and think about it! Friday night, Saturday and Sunday are 43% of your week not 20% of your time. You nullify all the effort you made during the entire week if you fall into this category. Don’t do that!

How can you avoid it? How can you avoid getting yourself in temptation? For a start, shop by the ingredient, not junk food. There is no junk food allowed in the house! No crisps, no cookies, no cake, no pastries, no chips, no fizzy drinks.

If it is not in your house, you can’t eat it. If you fill your home with good food, you will eat good food. It’s easy enough to hit your maintenance with good food. And how easy it is to go over maintenance with junk food?

Drinking too much alcohol and eating too much processed food is also a good way in the opposite direction for your fat loss.

If you think you can eat whatever you want as long as you exercise you are wrong. That is why people get frustrated. That is why you won’t lose fat, especially your belly fat!

I hope you have learned something new today. If you find this article useful, why not share it on social media? Also, feel free to comment and ask questions if you want to know anything more. Or send me a message at dalibor@best4yourbody.com

I am looking forward to seeing your comments. Have a great day and till next time, remember, your body deserves best, and so do you!

Dalibor

4 thoughts on “Best Way to Lose a Belly Fat

  1. Hi Dalibor,

    You made a lot of really good points in this article. Planning and preparing meals in advance is definitely the biggest limiting factor for most people, as well as expecting results too fast, especially if they have, what you called, metabolic damage. It took a long time for someone to get to that point, so it’s going to take a long time to correct it. Really liked your car analogy for this, as well the weekend being 43% of your week. Exactly!

    Shelley and I train 4-5 days a week, plan and prepare almost all of our meals at home. Shelley has Celiac, so it’s kind of a blessing in disguise, those take-out urges go away pretty quickly because she really can’t have it, however we do enjoy our Nacho nights, homemade pizza, and homemade deserts. Moderation is key, and when you even plan out your moderation, it can be something you really look forward too.

    Thanks for interesting post, look forward to reading your post about intermittent fasting.

    Rodney and Shelley

    1. Hi Rodney,
      Thank you for your honest comment! I am glad you like my point of view.

      Exactly like that, moderation is the key! Having your own time together and spending time working out together and planning meals is awesome!

      Looking forward to seeing you more and reading your opinion.

      Best wishes,
      Dalibor

  2. Thank you Dalibor for this motivational text. Losing fat is actually pshychic struggle and everything starts in our heads. Do you have any special advice, if I really love sweets (nutella, chocolate milk, kinder….. ?

    1. Dear Suzana,
      Thank you for your comment.

      I know what you mean. Staying off sweets can be real struggle and not easy at all. Sometimes it can be like addiction.

      And like with every addiction, important thing is to start slow: limit the amount of sweets once you decide to eat them.

      Be strong and stay with your word. If you decide you will eat only one slice of bread with Nutella, eat just one slice. Don’t cheat, you can trick your brain, but you can’t trick your body.

      Best advice that I can give you is to try remove it completely because of all the negative effects that type of “food” has.

      Replace it with hunny, or dark chocolate with at least 70% cocoa.

      I wish you all the best in your life and desire to limit those bad sweets in your life 🙂

      Dalibor

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