Losing Belly Fat on a Budget

Losing belly fat doesn't need to be an expensive exercise as many advertisers of the latest exercise toys would like you to believe.

Essentially the simple, effective methods of fat loss not only work best but are also extremely cost effective.

Just getting outdoors and walking the dog, going for a brisk walk in the sand at the beach or even better going for a swim are all great low cost and hugely effective fat loss activities.

It's unfortunate that many people totally lose faith in themselves and put complete faith in the first miracle fat loss product they come across to help them lose stomach fat.

The fact is with a bit of education with the right information and some planning can get you well on your way to some truly amazing fat loss results.


Here are some great tips for losing belly fat on a budget!

• Buying a good pair of running shoes is an invaluable investment; just look for any excuse to use them in place of your car which will cost you in gas and wear and tear.
• Living near the coast is a huge bonus, swimming is probably the best exercise you can possibly perform to increase your cardio fitness and helps to burn fat too! Also the sea water is great for muscle recovery and running on soft sand is a great way to drastically reduce the impact and potential damage that can be done to joints when running on hard surfaces such as concrete.
• Purchase a Yoga, Pilates or Dance Fitness DVD's they don't cost the earth and if you have a few friends who are trying to lose weight you can swap and share!
• While paying someone to mow your lawn may seem easier, doing it yourself provides a great mini work out and get you out in the sun and fresh air.
• Many people don't regard stretching as an exercise, although lengthening your muscles by regularly stretching increases blood flow to muscles and helps to increase metabolism. Stretching will also help to prevent injury, reduce stress by releasing those natural feel good drugs, endorphins.

Abdominal Crunches - Their Role in Fat Loss.

The role of abdominal crunches in losing stomach fat is even to this day largely misunderstood.

Many still believe that the single best exercise to burn stomach fat and flatten abs are crunches and lots of them.

The fact is any physical exercise will contribute to fat loss just by simply burning up energy and speeding up your metabolism.

In truth, the idea of singling out a single exercise which is believed to yield the quickest and most effective results can seriously put you on the wrong track, which often leads to bitter disappointment.

Crunches are a great exercise, they are easy to perform, are quick and convenient and help to contribute to overall results, but to relying on them wholly and solely to get a flat stomach is a big mistake.

The best fat loss results come from having a well-rounded exercise and training regime which includes a healthy amount of muscle building exercise or resistance training (weights) as well as regular cardio work while putting a healthy focus on increasing your core body strength to support continued strength gains which will add healthy muscle mass all the while consistently improving your diet gradually over the long term.

The real secret to effectively using exercise to lose stomach fat or rather overall body fat is to pursue ever increasing body fitness and strength. Setting yourself small realistically attainable goals, for strength and cardio fitness gains as well as fat loss is a sure fire way to succeed over the long term.

Crunches do provide a great benefit to your core body strength, which will in turn help you develop strength in other areas of your body, which provides a great flow on effect of increased muscle mass, but the real secret to getting the most out of this very basic and versatile exercise is variety.

Look to add a number of different types abdominal crunch exercises to your training repertoire not only to keep things interesting but also to encourage your abdominals continue to develop, strengthen and grow. An invaluable training aid for abdominal crunches is abdominal crunch ball. These inflatable abdominal balls force more of your abdominal stabiliser muscles to work during exercise providing you with a much more intense and thorough abdominal workout.

Also the ball allows you to lower your torso below the horizontal which provides a great stretch for your abs and strengthens and works out your lower back at the same time.

With the added muscle mass your body's energy requirements are drastically increased. Having more muscle means you will be burning more energy even during sleep.

Abdominal crunches have a very important role to play in not only toning your stomach muscles but also provide very good indirect benefits by supporting the process of muscle mass gains which leads to fat loss!

Secrets on How to Lose Stomach Fat

You are looking to lose a few pounds, lose stomach fat or looked for the secrets to get abs of steel, then you have probably seen many eye catching titles like the one I have used for this article.

Seriously though, the bad news there are no real secrets on how to lose stomach fat only good sound information, the burning desire in yourself to make a meaningful change and iron determination and persistence. These are your best tools for success in losing belly fat.

Although if there is one 'real' secret to fat loss it would have to be the very powerful yet often overlooked effect of synergy.

The full effect of synergy comes into affect when you make a large number of small yet positive health changes to your lifestyle which quite simply 'all add up'!

All to often people get tunnel vision and try and look for, identify and concentrate on the one element whether that be a type of exercise, a certain food or a particular supplement which provides the single most beneficial effect.

The danger in doing this is overlooking and missing out on so many small yet effective elements which could provide real benefit to your weight and fat loss goals.

For more details on how to concentrate on the adopting a 'synergistic strategy' to your weight loss visit this great article on the subject.

How to Lose Stomach Fat

Elliptical Trainers - A Better Option than Treadmills

If your are looking to buying a treadmill it would be worth your while considering a Elliptical Trainer instead.

The big advantage of elliptical trainers is that they offer a impact-free workout.

Although the impact experienced from running is great for strengthening bones, it is very easy to overdo it and the risks of injury to joints and connective tissue is far greater when using a treadmill.

Of course if you a competition runner who is after a convenient workout which keeps you out of bad weather then of course a treadmill is your obvious choice.

But if you are looking of a quality cardiovascular workout while at the same time getting an effective all body workout, an elliptical trainer with handlebars for your arms and pedals will provide you with more exercise options and value for money than a treadmill.

Where treadmills concentrate almost all of the exercise on the lower body, elliptical trainers can provide a 'complete body workout'!

While exercising on an elliptical trainer you can immediately choose which muscle groups to concentrate on or even use all your muscles at once.

You can even isolate small muscle groups to target specific areas on your body.

It does take a little concentration and practice but you can concentrate on specific areas of your legs and lower body, say your but by swinging your legs from your hip while keeping your legs are a  little straighter you will be isolating your but muscles. By bending your knees a little more you will be recruiting more of your quads and hamstrings (upper front and rear leg muscles).

You can just as easily concentrate on upper body areas with an elliptical trainer simply by concentrating and recruiting muscle sets of your arms and shoulders.

With a good elliptical trainer there are literally countless exercise variations and exercise routines you can design for yourself, all of which are low impact.

Also one thing that most people will fail to consider when buying any piece of exercise equipment is the likelihood of maintaining motivation.

With a treadmill there is only one exercise you can perform with very little if any variation. Elliptical trainers on the other hand can provide you with plenty of variety in your workout which helps keeps things interesting and provides a huge boost to ongoing motivation.

If you enjoy your exercise routine you are much more likely to perform it regularly and maintaining motivation by keeping things interesting and challenging is key!

Searching for the Holy Grail of How to Lose Stomach Fat

The cold hard fact about losing belly fat is that for most people its going to take some serious effort and its going to take time.

For many there is no getting around these two and any time your spend looking for a magic bullet or a secret ingredient wither that be a new amazing piece of exercise equipment or a scientifically proven health supplement or pill there's a very good chance you will be not only wasting your time but also your money.

If you are at a state where you are simply carrying around too much weight chances are your gradual weight and fat gain has been the result of a number of small contributing factors over a period of time.

Therefor the most logical way to turn back the clock and reverse your weight and fat gain is to do the same but in reverse.

That is make a number of improvements in both your diet and exercise routine over a period of time. Rarely if ever, there is a single outstanding fat loss element that overshadows the large number of small changes you can make to your diet and exercise routines. In pretty much all cases the best results are seen from making a large number of positive health changes over time which provide a synergistic or accumulating affect which often give you some amazing results.

In keeping everything in perspective, it is far more worth your while to adopt many healthy habits which have been well proven to provide weight and fat loss benefits rather than look for for the Holy Grail of How to Lose Stomach Fat.

What Makes a Great Breakfast

Breakfast would have to be the most important meal of the day as its the first meal to kick start out metabolism in the morning and give us the energy for the most productive part of our day.

But what makes a perfect breakfast?

Well just like any other food which will help us in losing stomach fat and give us a flat tummy a breakfast needs to be low in fat! As well it has to contain very little sugar as we want a long and sustained release of energy throughout the morning. Also a breakfast has to no or at least little salt. But last but not least, the ideal breakfast cereal has to contain a healthy amount of dietary fiber.

This means if you favor toast for breakfast then it best to select a brown or wholemeal bread containing whole seeds and grains.

Though if you prefer a breakfast cereal for your morning 'pick me up' then you can't go past oats or porridge. A substance in oats has been found to increase the conversion of body fat into bile, in effect ridding your body of excess fat. So having a bowl of oats or porridge every morning is a very good fat burning habit to get into.

Bad Breakfast Choices

Pastries and coffee: for breakfast is a nightmare recipe for anyone looking lose stomach fat due to the fat and sugar content and the caffeine will help send more of that sugar and fat straight to your hips and stomach.

Bacon and eggs: a breakfast high in saturated fat will quickly sabotage your goals for losing belly fat as your body will store as much energy as it can, so having a high fat meal for breakfast will see a good proportion of that fat being stored in your body.

No breakfast at all is probably the worst choice as your metabolism will slow to a crawl and any food you eat during the day your body will try and get the most out of by storing much of the energy as fat.

Many people don't realize the powerful benefits of eating a great breakfast and your very first meal of the day doesn't have to be boring or time consuming to prepare.

Some oats or porridge with a little honey and a sliced half banana or a few slices of rye and wholegrain toast with a few slices of ripe tomato and some cottage cheese. These are two simple, easy and very healthy breakfast choices you can make to help you lose stomach fat.

Low in Fat But High in Sugar

Fats have copped a really bad rap in recent years and for anyone learning how to lose stomach fat it can be easy to become totally fixated on avoiding any food containing fat.

Although what is misunderstood by many looking at losing tummy fat is that some fats are actually good for you and actually help you to lose fat and become fitter and healthier.

The 'good fats' polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats actually help to rid your body of the bad fats 'Visceral fat' and bad cholesterol which clogs your arteries and lowers your fitness and exercise capacity.

But whats even more worrying is the amount of sugar contained products that are low in fat.

This is why its always smart to look closely at the complete nutritional profile of every product before making it a regular addition to your supermarket trolley.


The three deadly dietary sins to watch out for.

• The percentage of 'bad fats' in the product, saturated and trans fats.
• The percentage of sugars in the product
• The percentage of salt or sodium in the product

Consistency, the Key for How to Lose Stomach Fat

The cold hard fact for many people looking for ways of  losing stomach fat is that success may take a little longer than you first thought.

There are many reasons for this and most of the time its because you have the curse of gifted genetics, that is your body metabolizes and stores excess energy super efficiently.

Everyone's body is different so the best fat loss recipe for each individual person will be different. The best thing you can do if you find that you just haven't been seeing the results you were hoping is to remain consistent and change just one thing with your diet are exercise routine, if you start to see positive results then you can pretty much assume that that single change you made is a step in the right direction.

Experimentation can be a powerful tool when it comes to fat loss, although if you change a number of things at once you will never know which change is most responsible for the positive results.

In many cases, if you are doing everything right, your drinking plenty of water, eating plenty of fruit and veg, working out regularly, limiting stress and sleeping well. Making just a single small change can be enough to trigger the results your after.

The real trick is to keep consistent so you can identify what works for you!

The Low Fat Lies

Many products on our supermarket shelves claim to be low fat, but how do you determine if a food item is in fact low fat?

Well firstly for a food to be considered to be low fat it must have less than 2% of it weight in fat. Now that's not much in percentage terms but I have seen products containing 8% even 15% of fat lay claims to being 'Low Fat'.

What the product may be claiming is that it is lower in fat than its competitors, but this is deceptive!

Typically low fat is 2% fat or less, moderate fat is between 2-4% and high fat is greater than 8%.

Although of course there are many types of fat, there' saturated fat, trans fats, polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated fats.

As a general rule you really want to reduce your saturated and trans fat intake as much as possible as these two fats are considered the 'bad fats'.

Polyunsaturated fat is a good fat but its the monounsaturated fat which is the best type of fat to eat.

If you look at the products Nutritional information Profile on the packaging it pays to check the proportions of these four fat types in the product.

If the product contains higher amounts of saturated and trans fats as opposed to polyunsaturated or monounsaturated fats, then it would pay to look for an alternative.

But if the amounts of saturated and trans fats in the product are tiny in relation to the other fats as well as all the other ingredients of the product, then chances are you are onto a winner!

For some highly educational information and some great tips for how to reduce belly fat visit the How to Lose Stomach Fat site!

Simple, Easy Weight Loss - Drink More Water

What would you say if I told you that there is a simple, easy and highly effective way to shift your excess weight without having to spend a fortune, without having to bust your gut at a gym?

Drinking enough water would have to be the absolute best thing you can do to lose weight yet for most people looking to shed the fat their simply not drinking enough of the stuff!

Drinking more water would have to be the easiest thing to do in order to lose weight but for many drinking eight glasses of water a day is somewhat uninspiring and even downright boring.

There just seems like there are so many other more interesting and thirst quenching drinks out there, the only problem is that most are packed with sugar, alcohol or caffeine, all of which help to dehydrate your body.

The best thing you can do to lose stomach fat is get into a pattern of drinking water regularly. Once you develop a habit of downing healthy amounts of H2O everyday, you will not only feel better for it and start to see increased fat loss results, you will start to lose the taste for the unhealthy drink options.