Getting older comes with many profound benefits. You’ve got more money, a satisfying family life and a strange new love of gardening. But there are a few downsides. Perhaps the worst is that ever-growing ring of fat, circumnavigating your naval. The facts speak for themselves. Adults in Western countries gain approximately one pound per year, every year, between 18 and 55. Over the course of a lifetime, the average person ends up putting on more than 30 pounds. For some of us, it’s more.
Getting rid of that bulge around your middle is a priority for many women. The evidence says that having a lot of belly fat is actually dangerous for our health. More belly fat means more visceral fat. And more visceral fat means a higher chance of things like diabetes and heart disease. This, in turn, messes with your hormones and, when that happens, losing weight gets tough. So what can you do to turn the tide back in your favor?
Quit The Booze
Let’s have a look at the facts about alcohol for a second. A 5-ounce glass of wine has 125 calories. That’s about as much as a packet of crisps. Go for sugary alcoholic drinks like Pina Colada? That’ll set you back more than 500 calories. Suffice to say that alcohol is extremely energy dense and delivers a big energy bomb to your body.
But it’s not just the raw energy that counts when it comes to alcohol. It’s all the other effects that it has. For instance, when you drink alcohol, you shut down fat burning. The liver has to deal with the alcohol first. And once it’s processed, it shunts in out into your abdomen. Over time, this fatty area grows, and you get a big flabby belly.
You’re Eating Too Many Processed Foods
Processed foods are high in two problem ingredients: sugar and fat. Today’s over the counter diet pills are designed to bind to these substances and take them out of your body. The reason for this is that these substances, when refined, are harmful. Take inflammation, for instance. When you eat a lot of sugar and fat, inflammation in the body rises. Why? Because you’re not eating them as part of the whole food. An apple contains sugar, but apples also contain loads of other health-promoting ingredients. These other elements make the sugar in apple good for you. But when you eat sugar by itself, there’s nothing else to offset its adverse effect. Higher levels of inflammation reduce your body’s ability to metabolize sugar, and you can end up putting on weight as a result.
You’re Doing Crunches
You might think that doing crunches is an excellent way to lose belly fat, but you’d be wrong. Belly fat isn’t there because you haven’t exercised your abdominal muscles enough. It’s there because you’ve got a calorie imbalance. If you log onto the internet, you’ll find dozens of stories about people who swear by abdominal exercises. But take these stories with a pinch of salt. It’s usually not the exercises themselves that have made all the difference, but the accompanying change in diet. If you want to exercise effectively, don’t bother with smaller movements, like crunches. Stick to whole body movements, like lunges, jumps, and squats.
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