How to Get Rid of Stomach Fat: Secrets for the Regular Person - Part 2 of a 4 Part Series
Posted: Wednesday, July 09, 2008
by Brett Basinski
Part 2 - Changing the Way You Eat and the Foods to Avoid to Get Rid Of Stomach Fat
Changing the Way You Eat
Back in Part 1 of my 4 part series I gave an overview of Stomach Fat, Why We Have It, and What We Have to do to Get Rid of Stomach Fat. In Part 2 of this series I will shift the focus to nutrition and how changing the way you eat will help you get rid of stomach fat, lose weight, and lower body fat. According to who you talk to, nutrition probably accounts for 70-90% of a lifestyle change designed to lose weight. That's right; I said lifestyle change, not diet. Diets have let us down for years, starting with how the USDA designed the food pyramids. The USDA let us down back in the early 80's. They changed the food pyramid to focus on more carbohydrates and less fat. The USDA drove us to start eating more carbs by making the base of the pyramid (the biggest portion of the suggested diet) heavy in starches, grains, and other carbs. They didn't educate the average American on the dangers of a diet rich in refined carbohydrates like regular pasta, white bread, and baked potatoes. This was a great disservice to the American public, based on what we know now.
So what is the solution? The easiest solution is to make a resolution to ourselves to eat healthy (90% of the time) for the rest of our lives. In my next section I am going to outline an easy eating plan to help do just that. But before I do that, let's do some math.
Counting Calories
Counting calories on a daily basis isn't necessarily part of my plan to get rid of stomach fat, but it is a good idea to have a basic understanding of daily caloric needs so we can put some kind of a plan in place, so let's do it. There are many different formulas out there and you can do your own research to find one that works for you, but here is a simple formula to determine your basic daily caloric needs to work from:
* You need to know that 3500 calories = 1 pound
Let's use an example of a woman that weighs 160 lbs. and whose goal weight is 130 lbs.
1. Multiply your goal weight by 10: 130x10 = 1300
2. Add 20 percent if you are sedentary (sit at a desk, etc.), add 50 percent if you are moderately active (outside sales, walk up and down stairs, etc.), and add 70 percent if you are active all day. For our example our woman is sedentary so, 1300 x 1.20 = 1560
3. Add the number of calories you burn during your workouts. For our example, our woman is not doing any exercise, so any additional calories burned during exercise is a bonus. We'll cover calories burned during exercise in Part 3 of the 4 Part Series on How to Get Rid of Stomach Fat for the Regular Person.
4. Reduce this total by 15 percent for steady weight loss.
So in our example,our woman needs about 1560 to maintain her weight, and since she doesn't exercise, she needs to eat about 1326 calories a day for steady weight loss. If you are more active and exercising, then you need to eat more calories or your bodies metabolism will slow down too much. Another easy calculation is to figure out how many calories you are eating on a daily basis with a diet log and then subtract 15%. You have to be true to yourself and count every single thing that goes in your mouth for 3 or 4 days (a week is optimal).
Now one of the biggest fears we have in trying to lose weight is being in a constant state of hunger because we feel we have to starve ourselves. That is just not a healthy way to live and it isn't part of this plan. Another part of our plan to change the way you eat is to eat smaller portions more often. In fact, we need to eat 4-6 times a day. I prefer 6 times a day, but it all depends on your goals and your lifestyle.
So in our example, our woman should try to eat 4-5 times a day dividing 1326 calories among those meals, so that would be approximately 330 calories a meal. It could be broken down like this:
Breakfast - 400 calories
Snack - 100-200 calories
Lunch - 300 calories
Afternoon Snack - 100-200 calories
Dinner - 400 calories
In this example we would eat 1300-1500 calories and would eat 5 times a day.
I will go over what we should eat later in the article. Now let's look at what we shouldn't eat so we can finally get rid of stomach fat.
Foods to Avoid
I'll be any one of you reading this could help me write this section. We all know what foods we should not be eating. We should not eat foods high in sugar. We should not eat foods high in saturated fat. We should not eat fast food. We should avoid liquid calories. We know this. We still do it. You know what? It's OK. Just do it in moderation. I am not going to tell you to cut these foods out of your diet completely, but to get rid of stomach fat; you must eat these types of foods and drinks in moderation. If you are at a birthday party with your kids, go ahead and have some cake, with the key word being "some". Don't scarf down 2 pieces; instead have half of 1 piece or just a bite or two. You'll satisfy your sweet tooth and save a ton of calories over time. If you are out to eat, go ahead and have a French fry or two, or a slice of pizza. Just don't over do it, and limit these little "cheats" to once a week. More on that later too.
So let's address these foods and drinks to avoid in a little more detail. " Sugar - let me say this, sugar is the enemy. Food or drink high in sugar will sabotage your healthy eating plan faster than anything else. Look at your food labels and try to stay away from anything over 10 grams of sugar per serving.
- High Fructose Corn Syrup- another ingredient that will kill your chances oflosing weight. Your body doesn't even recognize the calories and in fact your body shuts off its natural appetite control switches, so you can eat and eat far more than what your body would be able to handle. In fact, HFCS is sort of like setting up a direct line into your stomach to produce fat. HFCS is in cereal, ketchup, soda, flavored waters, marinades, etc. I've even seen it as the first or second ingredient on supposedly healthy WHOLE WHEAT BREAD! It's everywhere. Avoid it all costs. If it is listed as one of the first 4 or 5 ingredients on the label, think twice about eating or drinking that item.
- Trans Fats and Saturated Fats- thankfully the government finally cracked down on the food companies to remove trans fat and put it in the labeling. They are tough to digest and increase the amount of bad cholesterol in your blood. Since trans fat is synthetic and doesn't exist naturally, your body has a tough time processing it. It not only raises bad cholesterol (LDL), but it lowers good cholesterol (HDL). This is awful. Check labels for these words and avoid at all costs: hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated. The higher on the label, the more they have. Here some common foods with hidden trans fat: soups, biscuits, fries, Oreos, spreads, frozen foods (chicken pot pie and waffles), most fast food, and movie popcorn. Keep away from these foods at all costs. Saturated fat is also bad for your heart and cholesterol levels. Saturated fat shows up in fatty cuts of red meat and in whole-milk dairy products. Saturated fat basically goes right from your stomach, to your stomach. How do you like that? It doesn't have far to go at all to make you fat, so eat fatty meats sparingly and drink low fat or fat free milk. We'll talk about good fats when I discuss my easy to remember nutrition plan below.
- Sugar Filled Drinks- if we really want to drop pounds and shed calories in a hurry, we need to get rid of sugary drinks. Sodas, Fruit Juices, Flavored Teas, Flavored Milk, Flavored Coffees, and Smoothies from a store. Some of us get up to 25% of our daily calorie intake from sugary drinks without even processing this in our mind as bad for us. Did you know that a can of Sunkist Orange Soda has 190 calories and 52 grams of sugar per 12 oz. can? Did you know that a Jamba Juice Peanut Butter Moo'd Power Smoothie has 1170calories and 169 grams of sugar? These numbers are shocking. Imagine our woman in the example above is trying to lose weight by eating around 1300-1500 calories a day and she drinks a Jamba Juice Power Smoothie thinking the "power" in the title is healthy. She just drank almost her entire day's worth of calories in 10 minutes! Let's say we are drinking a coffee loaded with cream and sugar, an 8 oz. glass of OJ in morning, a couple of regular sodas a day, and maybe a beer or two for dinner, then guess what, that is about 500-600 liquid calories a day. Just by switching to water or mineral water, we would lose a pound a week without changing anything else. Think about that for a moment. Just by switching to water, sugar less green tea or diet soda, we could lose a pound a week. Pretty incredible.
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High Glycemic Foods- these are starchy foods like regular potatoes, white rice, regular pasta, pretzels, plain bagels, white bread, or any other food made with enriched flour. These foods are almost like eating sugar because they are converting almost directly into fat (guess what the USDA had us eating all those years at the bottom of the food pyramid. No wonder we got fat!) You can do some research on the internet at sites like calorieking.com to learn how many calories your favorite foods have. Remember, I am not going to recommend counting calories on a daily basis, but you should really get anidea of how much sugar, fat, and calories your favorite foods and drinks have.
We have covered the bad stuff, so now let's move onto to my easy to remember and easy to follow eating plan. Part 3 of my series, How to Get Rid of Stomach Fat: Secrets for the Regular Person will cover the foods you must eat to get rid of stomach fat.
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