Belly Fat Myths

Abdominal Exercise DOES NOT ELIMINATE belly fat!

A new study released in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning from July 2011, showed that people who did abdominal exercises 5 days a week for 6 weeks showed little to no change in belly adipose tissue (fat tissue).

After reading this statistic, people ask, “how can this be?” It’s EASY to explain; our body fat levels are determined by two separate things. The first is our diet, which determines about 80% of our fat tissue level. The second is exercise which has about a 20% relationship to the amount of fat we have on our bodies. Do not get me wrong – exercise is great and essential for muscle tissue, as is cardiovascular strength and conditioning, but exercise has a very low effect on the amount of fat we store in our body.

Think about it this way; how many people do you know that workout 3-4 times a week? I would be willing to bet a lot of those people are not at the optimal fat percentage for their body’s weight and age.

If someone works out for 60 minutes a day, 4-5 times per week but then is eating sugary products, they will have absolutely eliminated what the workout did for their fat levels and most likely add more fat tissue.

The reason is that your body only burns sugar during high intensity workouts. So, if you workout at high intensity for 5 hours during the week, that leaves another 163 hours per week that your body is not burning off the sugar you put into your body. During those 163 hours, a person who is eating sugary foods is raising their blood/sugar levels and that leads to the body converting the sugar into fat and storing it in fat cells.

If sugary foods are the reason 55% of the USA is overweight, it seems like it would be a very easy thing to change. WRONG. With the way foods are processed with fructose today it is almost impossible to find any food in the center aisles of the super market that are not loaded in sugar. To really change the effect sugar has on our bodies, we have to take major steps in changing our diets to the way our bodies are designed for.

What diet is our body designed for? Think of a cave man’s diet 10,000 years ago. If that was the diet our bodies were first designed to process then what makes us think we should try and change it? WE SHOULDN’T. Our bodies are still designed to eat just like a cave man’s diet from 10,000 years ago. This diet consists of high amounts of protein and moderate amounts of healthy fats and very, very, very low amounts of any sugar.