the best way to lose belly fat. A pot belly… love handles… the spare tire… call it what you will. It seems to be the area of your body that you’d really like to do something about.
Step #1. Lift weights 2-3 times per week. It’s often said that you should do aerobic exercise to lose fat, and train with weights if you want to build muscle. But that statement is only partially true.
The only thing you need to lose fat is a calorie deficit. You can create that deficit with resistance exercise, aerobic exercise, or a combination of the two.
Resistance training isn’t just for people who want to gain muscle, and will improve your body composition in two ways.
Firstly, if you don’t do some form of resistance exercise while you diet, much of the weight you lose will come from muscle as well as fat.
Losing muscle means that you’ll lose weight more quickly, as one pound of muscle contains a lot less energy than one pound of fat (800 vs. 3500 calories). But you’ll just end up looking like a slightly smaller version of your current self, with many of the “flabby bits” still intact.
Second, with a properly designed strength-training program, you’ll burn fat both during and after your workout.
In one study, researchers from East Carolina University had a group of eight men lift weights for 40-45 minutes. Each man had a microdialysis probe inserted into his belly. This allowed the researchers to measure the amount of fat that was released from fat cells under the skin before, during, and after the workout.
Here’s what they found:
Metabolic rate was over 10% higher after the men had lifted weights (104 calories per hour) compared with the same time point on the control day (95 calories per hour). The rate of fat burning was doubled (10 versus 5 grams per hour) following resistance exercise.
But that’s not all. The amount of fat being released from fat cells in the stomach was around 80% higher both during and immediately after the workout. In other words, lifting weights will burn fat, and some of that fat will come straight from your belly.
It’s true that many studies to compare resistance with aerobic exercise show that, on the whole, aerobic exercise works a lot better for getting rid of belly fat.
However, many of these studies use resistance training programs with a very low metabolic demand — the exercises are performed on machines, many of them are single-joint movements that isolate small muscle groups, and the overall training volume is relatively low.
Step #2. Use your diet to create a calorie deficit. Think of your belly fat like a bank account. But instead of storing money, it stores calories. If you want the amount of money stored in your bank account to go down, you have to spend more money than you’re paying in. In much the same way, getting rid of belly fat is all about “spending” more calories than you eat.
That’s not to say that calories are the only thing that counts, because they’re not. The composition of your diet IS important and has a big impact on how much of the weight you lose comes from muscle or fat. It will also affect your hormone levels, appetite, metabolic rate and so on.
But no matter which way you look at it, losing belly fat still requires a calorie deficit. Don’t allow yourself to be seduced into following an overly complicated diet masquerading under the guise of a “new and revolutionary” approach to weight loss.
Step #3. Eat a protein-rich diet. Studies show that protein does a better job at filling you up than carbohydrate or fat. Eat a protein-rich breakfast, for example, and chances are that you won’t eat as much food for lunch.
