The Truth About Spot Reducing Belly Fat:
By Chef K.T. Murphy
Fitness magazines and infomercials alike want you to believe that they have the magic secret to blast belly fat. Their methods include pills, shakes and secret magic workouts promise to target your belly fat and make it go away.
There’s only one problem with that promise, you can’t spot reduce fat on the body. Fat loss is a whole body experience. When you start to reduce fat, it happens all over your body. Your personal biology determines where the fat comes off, and when.
The Reasons It Doesn’t Work
There are several reasons why spot reduction doesn’t work. Here we’re going to outline the top reasons that you should consider before you attempt this physical fitness folly.
- Maintaining a low body fat physique is all about diet. According to Nerd Fitness, achieving a low body fat percentage is 80% diet and 20% workout. When people attempt a spot reduction workout, they tend to do 90% exercise and 10% diet. So, while they’re doing 1000 crunches every day, they’re also eating french Fries, pizza, burgers, cheese sticks, ice cream. The diet clearly doesn’t compensate for the amount of work.
- Breaking muscle points out that when attempting to spot reduce people work out the muscles under the area where they want to remove If you’re trying to get rid of your bat wings, you may work out your triceps repeatedly. What all of this is going to do is build up your triceps muscles. It is not going to move the fat away from your triceps magically. The only thing that will reduce your triceps area fat as a diet that has lower calories than a number of total calories you’re burning every day. Building muscle will allow you to look bigger once you have cut your body fat percentage. However, until you begin a fat reduction diet and exercise program you may actually have your spot reduced area looking larger because you’ve built muscle underneath the layer of fat you are trying to cut.
- Another reason that isolation exercises are ineffective at reducing fat is that they don’t burn enough calories. They are also very ineffective as a muscle building exercise. Isolating one muscle and working it repeatedly is going to have a lower muscle building effect than a large chain exercise. Think about doing leg lifts over and over and over again. Now think about doing squats over and over and over again. You are going to get a far better muscle building exercise and calorie burning exercise when you work the whole body by performing long chain exercises. Bodybuilding.com reminds us that all of our muscles are interconnected, and it is important that you work them out in a way that you would use them rather than in a repetitive isolated movement.
What About Surgical Options?
While it’s true that surgical options like liposuction are good at removing subcutaneous fat, they cannot reach deep fat like visceral fat. When dealing with body fat, you have two types of fat that have accumulated on the belly. The subcutaneous fat could be removed from the stomach, but the visceral fat cannot be removed via surgical options. Part of the reason that it cannot be removed through surgical options is that this type of fat wraps itself around your internal organs. When the fat is has encased itself around your liver or heart removing it through a surgical option becomes dangerous.
Now you know the ugly truth about spot reducing belly fat. Next time someone tries to sell you on the 1000 crunch a day belly fat reduction program, you can walk away. Understand that well-rounded diet and exercise program is going to be your best option for blasting away your belly fat.
All the best, Good Food makes For Better Decisions.
Chef Murph
