Want to lose belly fat? Here's 3 exercise, diet changes to start doing

I frequently receive questions about losing body fat, especially belly fat.

While it's not the same for everyone, let me begin with the basics. Obviously, you need a good diet, with an emphasis on vegetables, fruit, and whole grains, reduced red meat and fatty dairy products consumption, and avoid simple "sugary and white flour" carbs. But that's only the starting point and a good diet may not be enough. You need to be mindful of what’s happening with your insulin level, and, of course, you must not only exercise but exercise the right way.

I have waged my own battle of the bulge for many years. When I was younger, I trained hard as a boxer and then later as a powerlifter. Because I exercised to extremes as a competitive athlete, a trim waist was never a problem, and I was proud of my deep-cut six-pack abs. Ah, the good old days!

But as I got older, although I was still following a healthy diet and exercising regularly, it was disappointing that my waistline wasn’t anything like it used to be. Finally, I stumbled upon a solution. To reclaim my trim waistline, I started controlling my daily blood insulin level through intermittent fasting.

How intermittent fasting can help you lose belly fat

When you eat all day long — even if you are careful with your diet and exercising — you constantly trigger an insulin response. According to Dr. Mark Hyman, a health expert I respect greatly: "High levels of insulin tell your body to gain weight around the belly."

Worse, too much insulin and too much belly fat contribute to insulin resistance, which makes things worse because it promotes the accumulation of even more belly fat, plus belly fat becomes more stubborn. As Hyman says, you "hold on to that spare tire for dear life."

You may like: What are varicose veins? Here are 4 things to know and how to treat them

Intermittent fasting is effective because it keeps my insulin level low during prolonged periods of daily fasting (18 hours or more). And with insulin low, especially if you eat right and exercise, you enter a fat-burning zone that is especially effective for reducing belly fat.

How aerobic exercise can help you lose belly fat

Now, let's turn our attention to exercise. It's common to resort to spot reduction techniques to lose belly fat, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Spot reduction means attempting to lose body fat in one specific location, and a typical bogus approach to losing belly fat is doing lots of sit-ups, leg lifts, crunches, etc., trying to burn off fat surrounding the abdominal muscles.  These exercises will strengthen the underlying abdominal muscles, but they will not remove the layer of fat that is covering them.

A pioneering research study from Research Quarterly in 1984 was conducted in which subjects desiring to reduce belly fat focused on spot reduction with abdominal exercise. After training five days per week and performing thousands of sit-ups, subjects showed no loss of belly fat. Why was there no effect?

The abdominal workout burned off only a few calories (kcals). You need to burn off a whopping 3500 calories to lose just one pound of body fat, and 30 minutes of abdominal exercises don’t make even a small dent.

You may like: What are the most common golf injuries? Here's three things to know to stave off back pain

More importantly, the underlying abdominal muscles cannot "reach out" and grab the surrounding fat and burn it selectively as fuel. Instead, if fat is mobilized it comes from storage sites all over the body and is dumped into the blood steam. From there, exercising muscles can take it up and use it as needed.

Several other research studies have shown similar poor results for spot reduction exercise compared with aerobic exercise which can produce significant improvement in both the loss of overall body fat and belly fat. This is because aerobic exercise burns a large number of calories, and losing body fat is about burning off more calories than you consume, creating a negative caloric balance. If you burn very few calories with an abdominal workout in 30 minutes versus 300 or more calories brisk walking, jogging, cycling, swimming, etc., for the same 30 minutes, it’s easy to see why aerobic exercise would be more effective.

How resistance training can help reduce belly fat

Aerobic exercise burns lots of calories in 30 minutes. In contrast, 30 minutes of resistance (weight training) exercise burns far fewer calories. This means the acute effect of an aerobic workout is superior to resistance exercise.

However, the chronic calorie-burning effect brought about by resistance exercise really adds up. The effect is so good, in fact, resistance exercise is recommended as an effective weight management tool, especially as you get older. Here’s why.

Starting in your thirties, the body begins shedding muscle unless you engage in resistance exercise. This is important because muscle mass drives the lion’s share of your resting metabolic rate ― the number of calories you burn every minute to support daily bodily functions.

You may like: Can antibiotics ruin good bacteria in your gut? Yes. Here are 3 things to know

If you don’t lift weights, you lose muscle mass. In turn, your resting metabolic rate declines, and you burn fewer calories each day. For example, let’s say your resting metabolic rate as a young adult is 1.0 calories per minute, but decades later with the loss of muscle mass, it drops to .95 calories. This small difference is important because metabolism is ongoing chronically, 24/7, and a small difference adds up.

A drop from 1.0 to .95 in resting metabolic rate is only 0.05 calories/minute, but it is very important because each minute the 0.05 calories is not expended. Over one year, you have 0.05 x 60-min x 24-hours x 365-days = 26,280 calories you used to burn off in the past, but not now. That’s 7.5 pounds of extra body fat (3,500 calories per pound) due to the loss of muscle mass and a drop in resting metabolic rate.

As you can see, a two-pronged exercise attack with acute and chronic calorie-burning exercise (aerobic and resistance exercise), is the best way to go to reduce body fat overall, and belly fat.

Reach Bryant Stamford, a professor of kinesiology and integrative physiology at Hanover College, at stamford@hanover.edu.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Want to lose belly fat? Here's 3 exercise, diet changes to start doing