3 steps to lose belly fat that WORKS

3 steps worded on stairs

If you are having trouble losing your bulge in the middle, you may not know the actual 3 steps to lose belly fat. 

Many people have misconceptions about losing belly fat. Moreover, these people are quick to give out their advice to feed their ego and their wallets.

Friends and family are advising you to starve yourself to death. To big health websites that are trusted by millions of readers who teaches you the key to losing belly fat is through doing thousands of crunches. Yikes!

These types of advice are dangerous and irresponsible. Especially if the information is from reputable health sites that are experts, supposedly, in their field.

These health sites hire writers to write their contents. Writers who aren’t qualified, no prior knowledge and have no passion for health, well-being, and weight loss.

For your own sake, it’s vital that you listen from qualified people. Listen from people who invested and continue investing in the continued pursuit of their chosen niche. 

So, hear, peruse the adviser, do your due diligence. After all, it is your health, your well-being.

The scientific way of losing belly fat in 3 steps

scientist's eye wearing goggles

So here’s the deal. What I write about in this site is from extensive research and through my own experience and others’.

The following are the three steps to lose belly fat. It’s what works and backed by research and experience:

  1. Exercise
  2. Eat a clean diet
  3. Stay motivated

That’s it! It is all you need to help you become healthy and looking sexy. You need to workout, eat clean, and stay motivated.

People always tell me that they exercise and diet, yet they can’t lose the jelly belly.

Unless you have a medical condition that prevents your body from burning calories, then you will lose fat with diet and exercise.

You won’t see results straight away, and not seeing results can be demoralizing. Belly fat can be the hardest to shrink. So, it would help if you stay motivated and keep going.

Exercise

exercising

When people want to lose weight or ideally, try to lose fat. The first thing people do is exercise. So they join gyms or buy expensive training equipment.

The typical scenario for most is that they acquire a gym membership and lose motivation after a month. The only way you’ll see results is getting out of the car, go into the gym and hit those treadmills and weights.

Meanwhile, people who bought gym equipment to use at home collects dust because there are better things to do. Things like play games, or binge on Netflix.

Do you see how vital the 3rd step is in achieving your health goals?

No matter how many dollars or time you spend, without the motivation to keep grinding or stop the cravings, you will not see any results. 

Below are links that will direct you to the type of exercises you can do to lose belly fat backed by Science:

2 Exercises to lose belly fat

There are many more ways you can lose belly fat, but these are the most popular to lose that extra baggage around your middle section.

Here are two exercises you can start doing today to start shredding fat in your belly:

  • Running
  • Walking

Running

This cardio exercise is one of the popular ways people do when they want to lose weight. Because when you run, you sweat. When you sweat, you lose fat.

The notion of the more you sweat is the only way you lose fat is utterly ridiculous and can lead to self-induced heart attacks.

Depending on your fitness level, you might want to take it easy in your first run. To prevent any chance of a cardiac arrest, exercise moderately. Overexerting yourself after a long sedentary lifestyle can be dangerous. 

Start slow, perform exercises in your fat-burning zone. How do you know you are in the zone? When speaking becomes a nuisance.

But, to be certain, you need to find out the formula to calculate your optimal fat oxidation zone. You can do this using the new method (Tanaka’s) which involves more calculation than the old formula (Fox’s).

The old recipe is as simple as subtracting your age from 220 and multiplying the result with 70%. The result is your fat burning zone.

The new formula has more to it and requires you to know about the range for fat oxidation. Basically, it is 60.2% to 80% of your maximal heart rate.

The following is a method to find your maximum heart rate:

207 – (0.7 x AGE) = MHR (max heart rate)

To find out your optimum fat-burning zone, you can use the 60.2% to 80% suggested by NCBI.

[source: Quantifying differences in the “fat burning” zone and the aerobic zone: implications for training.]

Studies from marathon runners showed that using Tanaka’s method is more accurate compared to Fox’s. So I suggest adopting Tanaka’s method when finding out your fat-burning zone.

[source: Age-Predicted Maximal Heart Rate in Recreational Marathon Runners: A Cross-Sectional Study on Fox’s and Tanaka’s Equations]

Walking

Walking is a great workout to lose belly fat. Not is it only reduces the chances of cardiac arrest but is also friendlier to your joints compared to running. 

Ideal for people like me who have joint problems. You see, my left knee’s meniscus is not the best. It’s as thin as paper.

So, pursuing exercises that preserves my joint will keep me walking without help, for a while.

If you think that walking won’t burn your fat because you will not sweat, please refer to calculating your fat burning zone. The link below will tell you as to why you don’t have to be drenched in sweat to lose belly fat:

[source: Quantifying differences in the “fat burning” zone and the aerobic zone: implications for training.]

You will find it doesn’t take much for your body to be burning fat. I hit my fat burning zone at 109 BPM. Brisk walking can take me to 120 BPM or even more. 

Walking is a great start when you begin your active lifestyle. Then as you get fitter you may want to move on to running.

You can find out more exercises to burn belly fat by the following links:

Clean diet

woman holding apple

All the exercises in the world will not do you any good if you don’t watch your diet. Diet and exercise coincide with each other. 

Engaging in both will accelerate your fat loss compared to employing only 1 method.

Through helping people and myself, I found the biggest roadblock to losing belly fat is watching what you eat.

“I love food,” is a pretty common saying these days. With all the cooking shows popping up and how uber-popular they are. We have built a relationship with food that is trendy, satisfying and maybe detrimental to our health.

I’m not dissing the food industry, quite the contrary. 

I am a foodie. I do say the words, “I love food.” 

The trick is finding the right balance between being hungry and eating yourself to an early grave.

Being in love with food is not bad at all. It led me to learn how to cook, helping me churn up healthy dishes. I can modify “dirty” dishes to be cleaner and healthier but still taste yum. 

Also, it allowed me the ability to prepare a meal faster than driving to the restaurant and picking up the dish. Saving money is also a huge bonus.

So, being a foodie has a plus side to better your health and fitness. I also get to add superfood ingredients into any dishes I feel like eating.

If you want to know the type of foods to eat to lose belly fat, click on the following links:

Motivation

motivation

Without motivation, forget about doing a thousand hours of exercise. Forget researching the best diet plan. 

If you can not stay motivated, if you can’t change your bad eating habits, the grit to keep grinding, then no one and nothing can help you.

Not even the best trainer and the best courses, books in the world can assist you.

How do you improve your motivation? People are different, and they respond to varying types of motivating.

Some get a high of being the best. Some care so much about what other people think they are willing to do anything. Some people do it for their loved ones. Some love themselves.

There are too many variables to list because people are complicated beings. We are not computers, robots, which can be fixed by simply changing a line of code to change our mindset.

If that is the case, then everyone would be productive and active, walking around looking like Brad Pitt or Angelina.

The point is, no matter who you are, without motivation, you will fail. Not today, not tomorrow, but in time.

Motivation is the hardest part to fix, if you think that watching what you eat is difficult, well, that’s because your motivation is lacking.

Your motive to stay healthy should far outweigh your cravings for food that is bad for you.

My determination to be healthy is my little girl who is growing faster than I would like her to. I want to be there at every stage in her life, if possible. Moreover, that takes a lot of being healthy.

It would help if you had that “something” or “someone.” Huge enough for you to keep taking action to get it. It’s like an itch you need to scratch — something like if you don’t hold on to this, you will fall off the wagon.

The following are ways you can pick your motivation level up:

  • Cut out a photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger or anyone you’d like to look like and replace his face with yours. Stick this on your fridge or pantry or wherever the junk foods are.
  • Make a bet with someone you hate about how you will lose your fat belly in 6 months.
  • Ask your mom to give you chores if you don’t go to the gym.
  • Tell your gym to deduct an extra monthly payment if you miss one session of your training program.
  • Tell your partner to leave you if you can’t lose your love handles.

I am joking obviously, but before I had my daughter, I made a bet with someone to lose my big gut. I am sure you can think of creative ways to stay motivated, which doesn’t involve money or breaking up your relationship.

Conclusion

There are many sites out there that will give you the wrong information. Even the big health sites on the web that is trusted by millions and dominates Google gets it wrong.

I did write an article about the site giving misleading information and if you care to read, click on the following link: Exercises to lose belly fat.

The three steps to losing belly fat are simple in theory but not so in practice. The simplest step is exercising. Watching what you eat and keeping going takes more grit and determination than just lifting weights and, or, doing cardio.