tips-for-belly-fat-loss

Top 10 Fat Loss Tips 

1. Drink water - Not only does drinking lots of water help you lose belly fat, but it will also give you tons of energy, and keep you from over eating. Most hunger pangs come from "dehydration". In fact, often times your body will confuse dehydration with hunger and cause you to eat more. This 1 fact should be enough to make you want to drink tons of water. Though, if that's not enough, water serves to lubricate your joints so you can move around pain free. If you want to lose belly fat and feel better, be sure to get your H2O. Generally, I would recommend 1 gallon of water per day.
2. Muscle Training - One of the most important factors that determine how much belly fat you burn, is how much muscle you have. For every pound of muscle, you will burn approximately 30-50+ calories per day. So training with weights or some sort of physical exercise is important to keep your metabolism roaring and your body burning fat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!
3. Cardio Exercise - Cardio serves only as a supplement to help burn fat. The fact is, you don't need it if you're on a clean nutrition program and following a proper strength training program. However, there will be some people that just can't go with out it. If you're a beginner or have been on an exercise lay off for a length of time, I'd suggest the slow cardio to start. You can hop on a treadmill or a bike and perform cardio 20-40 minutes, 3-5 times per week. If you're a bit more advanced, you may want to give interval training a shot. This is when you alternate quick bursts of intense exercise with short rest periods. For more information, go to the interval training article.
4. Protein - It's important to get plenty of protein to help build or maintain muscle mass. As we talked about earlier, muscle is where fat is burned. Well, protein is what helps build muscle, so make sure you get plenty spread throughout the day. I suggest consuming 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight for optimal results, and to ensure that muscle isn't wasted during exercise. This should give you a positive nitrogen balance, and help kick your metabolism into super-high gear.
5. Eat Carbs - This is a protein sparing nutrient. So if you eat carbs in moderate amounts, it will help prevent your body from using protein as fuel, and actually allow for the protein that you do consume to be used to help build muscle. Not only will carbs give you energy, it's actually your body's preferred fuel source. Be sure to take in plenty of carbs for your first meal of the day, and post workout for best results. If you take them in during this time, they will be immediately absorbed by your muscles.
6. Eat Every 3 hours - You've probably heard this before, eat small meals every 3 hours. It's important for 3 main reasons. First, it stabilizes your blood sugar levels and minimizes the hormone that prevents fat from being burned. Secondly, it increases both your energy levels, and calorie expenditure. When this happens, you have More energy to be active, and you'll burn even more calories from being more active. It has an accumulative effect. You'll be eating just enough to fuel your activity for the following 3 hours. This helps ensure the calories you're eating aren't being stored as fat!
7. Eat within 30 minutes of your workout - You'll want to make sure you eat a meal consisting of protein and carbs within 30 minutes of finishing your workout. Also, you can be more liberal with your consumption of carbs during this time as the calories will be absorbed into your muscles like a sponge, leaving no excess calories to be stored as fat. This is also the time that your glycogen stores are at its lowest throughout the day, so it's very important to refuel your body to keep it constantly burning fat.
8. Cardio After your workout - The best time to perform cardio for lasting fat burning effects is immediately following your strength training workout. Here, your glycogen stores are low, so your body taps into fat store for energy a lot quicker. It's prime-fat-burning-time.
9. Cardio First Thing in the Morning - Studies have shown that performing cardio first thing in the morning on an empty stomach isn't as effective at fat loss as once thought. BUT if you tackle this chore first thing in the morning before you do anything, you'll knock it out of the way and not have to worry about it. Plus, like doing cardio after your workout, your glycogen stores will be fairly low from not having eaten since the previous day.
10. Protein and Carbs, or Protein and Fat, not all 3 - This is a little known secret that my clients and I use to burn fat constantly and to ensure that we don't over eat. The point is when preparing your meals, make sure they consist of either Mainly Protein and Carbs, or Mainly Protein and Fat - but never all three combined. It keeps you from having to always have a calculator on hand to ensure everything fits. I call it the "Dumb Belly Fat Loss" formula.