Drink three cups of green tea every day. In addition to being packed with antioxidants and other goodies, it has been proven that the fat burning of people who drink three cups of ‘the green gold’ every day went up by no less than 4 percent.
- At the gym, get off that treadmill and throw yourself on the weights. And no: you will not immediately look like a bodybuilder. Of course, you build some muscle instead of fat, but that’s only good. After all, muscles burn more calories, even when you are at rest.
- Drinking enough water (about one and a half to two litres a day) is essential for good fat burning. And while you’re at it, have two glasses right away. Reason: drinking two large glasses of water right after each other causes your fat-burning to skyrocket by up to thirty percent.
More from ELLE - Get your thyroid checked if you’re having trouble losing weight. This organ regulates fat burning, and if it doesn’t do its job, you can exercise as hard as you want, but not an ounce is lost.
- Okay, this one isn’t easy, but it’s essential: avoid alcohol. And especially with food. Why? Alcohol slows down the burning of fat, and if you have just finished a high-calorie meal, it is not a good idea to slow down the burning process. It is better to drink water: it boosts your combustion.
- Interval training also works so well to burn more fat, has been researched. Perfect work-out: because it takes much less time and is more effective. What does a man want more?
- Easier said than done, but put less stress in your life. Stress causes your body to retain fat, and you also get more hungry—a good reason not to skip your yoga class during busy times.
- Strange but true: during the last two weeks of your cycle, you burn about 30 percent more fat than in the two weeks before. This is the higher amount of estrogen and progesterone in your body because these hormones stimulate fat burning. During that time it is, therefore, a good idea to insert an extra sports session.
- This is fun: Eat a snack every four hours. In this way, your body continues to burn fat at the same rate because it constantly thinks you are eating. But don’t go for too large, fatty portions because that will, of course, work against you.
- Keep moving, even if you sit in your chair all day. Change positions regularly, stretch and stretch your legs now and then (this can be done under your desk), and you will burn some extra calories in good weather.
The causes of belly fat
As soon as you eat more calories than you expend, you start storing fat. Where you keep your genes partly determines this. But not 100%. It is up to you whether you grow (or lose) belly fat.
It’s straightforward: too many calories and stress cause your body to produce extra belly fat. And that makes for a big belly. You can read more about it below.
Cause 1: Too many calories
If you want to lose weight on your stomach, you must use more calories than you take in. This applies to weight loss in general, including weight loss on your stomach. By eating fewer calories than your body needs, you use your (abdominal) fat reserves. And that ensures that you lose weight (and therefore also lose belly fat).
You can do this in two ways:
By consuming fewer calories (with food)
By drinking more calories (with exercise)Losing belly fat is a matter of eating differently, not less. By eating fewer carbohydrates and more healthy fats, proteins, and vegetables, you are satiated longer and activate the fat-burning process (which gives you a flatter stomach).
That doesn’t mean you have to go hungry. With this article’s anti-belly fat weekly menu, you can quickly lose belly fat without experiencing hunger.
The low-carb diet most effective against belly fat
Countless scientific studies have shown that a low-carb diet is one of the most effective ways to lose weight.
A low-carb diet burns more belly fat than a standard diet (evidence: study 1, study 2, study 3). Later in this article, you can read how to eat low carbohydrates to burn belly fat.
Cause 2: Stress!
When you experience stress, your body produces a lot of the hormone cortisol. It is not for nothing that cortisol is also called the ‘stress hormone.’ You can also have an elevated cortisol level due to too little sleep or unhealthy eating.
Cortisol ensures that you store fat on your abdomen (source). Research has shown that there is a strong link between stress and belly fat in women. Women who have a lot of belly fat also say that they experience a lot of stress in their lives (source).
Researchers at Yale University have discovered something interesting. They found out that cortisol makes you fat in two ways.
High cortisol levels cause your body to store excess calories as fat on your stomach.
Cortisol increases your appetite, making you more hungry and more likely to have a 'good appetite.'This creates a vicious circle in which you continue to eat and store fat on your stomach. This is the chain reaction of cortisol:
Due to stress (and therefore a lot of cortisol in your body), you continue to have an appetite for 'something' while you are full.
You eat more calories than your body needs.
Those excess calories are stored as fat.
The cortisol in your body mainly sends this extra fat to your abdomen.
The fat on your belly accumulates, and you can't lose weight (because you are constantly hungry and therefore eat).As you can read, cortisol makes it very difficult to lose belly fat. But too high a cortisol value has many more nasty side effects that stand in the way of weight loss. Examples include the loss of muscle mass and thyroid problems—enough reasons to lower the hormone cortisol. You can read how to do that in the rest of this article.
