Why Your Not Losing Stomach Fat
1. Diet:
its no surprise that diet is a number one contributor to fat in the mid-section. You can't get doughnuts & fast food every day and except to have a lean stomach.
Now on the other hand you can eat healthy and still not have a flat stomach. Why is that?
Well at the end of the day, and at the end of the week it comes down to how many calories you are eating. If you are consuming more calories than you need in a day you will be a surplus & thus you will lay down adipose tissue in your mid-section ( and other places) So you need to make sure that even though you are eating healthy you have the right amount of calories for your body ( not to many and not too little)
too many carbs:
now don't get me wrong I love carbs. If you are client of mine you know that I promote this babies. However not everyone responds the same to carbohydrates. Some people cannot tolerate them like others & thus they lay down fat in the mid-section. I'm not saying cut out carbs but I am just saying be mindful of the type of carbs you eat such as complex carbs.
2. exercise:
another big surprise here. Of course exercise & lower abdominal fat are correlated. But again just because you run 1 hour a day 6 days a week doesn't mean you will have less abdominal fat maybe at first thing method will work but eventually your body will adapt.
making sure that you are constantly changing things up. Incorporating more HITT workings allowing your HR to becoming elevated at 80-90% then bringing it back down. This will help you to lose that stubborn fat on your stomach along side with a healthy diet.
Weight lifting: this is such an important factor because like I'm my previous post this helps increase your metabolism which in turn decreases body fat ( in the mid-section). Its all about finding balance between aerobic & anaerobic workouts so your body can be a mid-section fat burning machine.
3. Stress:
This may be a new one to you but stress & cortisol are directed correlated to stomach fat gain. First of all cortisol is a hormone in our body which is not necessarily always bad but too much of it can be especially for our tummies.
I found this great article that I would want to share on this subject!
The Cortisol Connection: Tips on Managing Stress and Weight written by: Christine A. Maglione-Garves, Len Kravitz, Ph.D., and Suzanne Schneider, Ph.D.
"Cortisol directly effects fat storage and weight gain in stressed individuals. Tissue cortisol concentrations are controlled by a specific enzyme that converts inactive cortisone to active cortisol (9-11). This particular enzyme is located in adipose (fat) tissues".
in this article is also mentions that abdominal fat has great blood flow and 4x more cortisol receptors than then usual subcutaneous fat!
Now that is crazy because when we stress too much where is all that crap going?! = the tummy!
now this may be alarming to some of you. like mentioned above, this hormone can cause fat gain especially in the mid-section. Making sure you find ways to cope & deal with stress is so important. Making sure you have relax time & enough sleep. Because if we are constantly putting all this stress on our bodies, naturally our cortisol levels will increase. and we will have a hard time losing that stomach fat. If you want to learn more about this I highly recommend that article mentioned above written by (Maglione-Garves, Len Kravitz, Ph.D., and Suzanne Schneider, Ph.D.)
I've worked with hundreds of clients & its always interesting when they come to me there are doing hours of intense workouts I MEAN HOURS, eating minimal calories & not sleeping. So instead I slowly reverse diet them ( increasing calories slowly), Decrease workouts, increase rest & sleep.. Then after a few months they start to finally lose that stubborn stomach fat. Because we helped control there cortisol levels!
