Where people go wrong is that they are not looking for the right exercises and types of workouts to get rid of persistent belly fat. What they are looking for is the most awesome abs workout ever, so effective that it will burn up belly fat faster than you can say “…awesome six pack, bro!”

The unfortunate truth, though, is that ab-targeting workouts do NOT burn off the fat on your belly. What they actually do is work the abdominal muscles underlying the fat, making them stronger and more toned. Speeding up your metabolic rate and the fat-burning hormonal response is what you really want to achieve, and this is done by developing a focused full-body workout strategy.

Also, you won’t necessarily get the largest metabolic or hormonal response from just doing cardiovascular workouts. What works best is a more comprehensive workout program, made up of high-intensity multi-joint exercises and resistance training, which aims to train the entire body.

The key to burning up excess stomach fat and exposing your abs is this kind of high intensity, full-body training, coupled with a healthy, balanced, nutrient-rich diet.This will give far superior results than even the strictest regimen of abdominal training, where basically your hope is that you will lose your belly fat by doing a whole heap of exercises like ab crunches and leg raises.

It’s quite incredible that the prevailing belief is that in order to lose stomach fat, a daily ab workout incorporating hundreds of repetitions is required. This belief can be seen even in the advice given on fitness forums, on a regular basis. Please, don’t fall for this kind of advice, you’ll just end up having wasted your time.

Let me hasten to add, though, that including some ab-specific exercises as part of your overall routines is indeed beneficial. When done correctly, abdominal exercises will help strengthen and tone your ab muscles, thereby assisting with correct posture and the maintenance of a healthy back. However, at the end of the day, ab-specific exercises will not help you lose stomach fat like you want!

The most significant factors are a training routine which includes all of the body, complemented by a healthy and balanced diet. The full-body exercises often include variations that demand a high level of stability, and thus indirectly work the core and the abdominals anyway.

Take the above advice to heart, put it into practice and soon you will see that you have begun to lose stomach fat!

Most people, however, are not aware that excessive stomach fat is not just a risk to one’s vanity, but poses an extremely serious risk to your health. Although we are all aware that being overweight in general is unhealthy, scientific research has put it beyond doubt that excessive stomach fat in particular is alarmingly dangerous.

Your abdominal zone has two kinds of fat. One kind of fat is that which hides your abs: so-called subcutaneous fat, which occurs in a layer between the skin and the underlying abdominal muscles.

The second kind of fat is what’s called visceral fat, which is found in the abdominal cavity, beneath the abdominal muscles and surrounding the internal organs, or viscera. The visceral fat contributes to the archetypal beer belly which may stick out a lot and even sag, but is quite hard to the touch.

Although both these types of fat are health risks, visceral fat has been determined by science to be a lot more threatening. Both these types of fat, but visceral fat more so than subcutaneous fat, significantly raise the risk of you developing stroke or heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep apnea, various types of cancer and other forms of degenerative disease.

Apparently more inflammatory molecules are consistently released into your system by visceral fat , and this is what makes it so dangerous.

There is no two ways about this: if you have any concern for your own quality of life, and that of your loved ones, you simply have to make the reduction of any excessive stomach fat a No. 1 priority! Of course, aside from the health benefits, losing that extra abdominal fat means that your belly will flatten, the not-so-pretty bulges and rolls will disappear, and if you get lean enough you’ll be able to flaunt those sexy 6 pack abs everyone admires.

So how do you go about losing that extra stomach fat? Is there a solution you can trust to work, amongst all the hype and commotion with a myriad products promising miraculous results?

You have to understand from the start that there just is no short-cut, no quick fix. There are no supplements or magic pills, none at all, to help you lose your belly fat faster. And, sorry to say, you won’t get rid of abdominal fat with ab rollers, ab belts or ab rockers either. These contraptions are useless for getting rid of stomach fat – sorry, but it simply cannot be done like that.

There is ONLY ONE solution to effectively lose your stomach fat, and for good.  A nutritiously sound diet packed with natural, unprocessed foods, combined with a correctly structured exercise program that generates the required metabolic and hormonal response from your bodily system. Your training regimen as well as your dietary intake are important to achieve success.

This statement is backed by research studies, where participants were split into two groups, diet-only and diet combined with exercise. Even though both groups progressed well, the diet-plus-exercise group lost significantly MORE belly fat than the diet-only group.

You also have to understand that not just any old training program will of necessity do the job. So many people, even though they are trying hard, do not work out in a way which will effectively bring about the loss of persistent stomach fat. To see proof of this, all you have to do is visit the gym.

Typically you see a person doing boring and ineffective cardio workouts, with a bit of retro body-part-specific weight training, topped off with crunches, leg raises and side bends, in the fervent hope that this is useful for burning away their stomach fat. It only takes a few weeks of this, sometimes months, with no discernible results, for them to become frustrated and demotivated, wondering what went wrong.

Finally, I have some good news. There is someone, a certified nutritionist and fitness expert, who has been researching this for over a decade, investigating the science and putting it into practice “in the trenches”, so to speak, to see what really works to generate the loss of abdominal fat, with himself as well thousands of clients from around the globe as subjects. He sincerely wants to help you to, at last, to lose that excess stomach fat. Not only is it UGLY – it is also very DANGEROUS.

A well-known, renowned fitness and nutrition expert says that with so much confusing advice, the first thing to take on board is that you do not need to follow any of the diet fads. It is not necessary to go “low fat” or “low carb” or “high protein”  – or anything high or low, actually – in order to succeed at losing body fat and becoming lean enough to show off your abs. He believes in keeping things simple for his readers and followers. Balance is the key, coupled with a diet containing foods rich in nutrients, which are as close to their natural state as possible (with little or no processing).

The extreme amount of processing many foods undergo is what actually creates havoc with our bodies, not the foods themselves. All foods are generally good for us in their unprocessed, natural state. But there are of course exceptions to the rule: for example, some mushrooms are poisonous, and even though they are natural and unprocessed, eating them would not be a good idea!

Here are the most important things to take note of when it comes to a nutritious diet to lose belly fat and aid you in and staying lean for the rest of your life and showing those six pack abs…

1. Ensure that your daily diet contains quality protein, and enough of it – compared with carbs and fat,  the digestion thereof requires more calories to be burned ( referred to as a higher thermic effect) and it also keeps you full and sates your appetite for longer. It is also essential for building and maintaining muscle… and the more lean muscle your body has, the comparably higher your metabolism – and the more calories you burn.

2. Remember fiber! Almost all of the carbohydrates you eat should be from high-fiber sources, like vegetables and fruit, and unrefined high-fiber grains. Things to avoid are refined sugars and grains, which are responsible for so many people struggling to lose body fat. Grains are a relatively recent addition to the human diet, and actually are not essential to health at all. In fact they have toxic anti-nutrients, lectins, gluten, and phytates – the exception being sprouted  grains. And, you can get most of the carbs you need from veggies and fruit. These carb sources generally contain a fair amount  of fiber anyway, which helps fill you up and lowers the glycaemic response of other foods you eat.

3. Fat is good for you!! Eating too little fat in your diet can affect your hormones negatively and cause you to have more cravings. You should eat sufficient healthy fats on a daily basis. Healthy fats can be gotten from avocados, nuts and seeds, olive oil, eggs, organic meats, coconuts and their virgin oil. You should note that saturated fats derived from tropical oils are now known to have been mistakenly cast as culprits in the past, and the practice unfortunately continues, even amongst some health professionals. It is true that they have a high saturated fat content, but contrary to what we have been taught they are highly beneficial. Coconut oil especially is loaded with a multitude of nutrients, and is also great for cooking with.

4. In the makeup of your diet to lose belly fat, be really diligent about avoiding the two worst things contained in our food supply:
- artificial trans fats (found in shortening, margarine and hydrogenated oils, and contained in most processed food)
- high fructose corn syrup – which almost every sweetened product on the market contains
NB!! It’s easy to avoid these if you stick to the advice of not eating any processed foods.

Embrace these four points, include them in your everyday living and eating, and you will begin to have control over your appetite, along with improvements in your blood sugar and hormone levels, and other health indicators. It all falls into place, and you eventually gain total control over how lean you want to get. Take control of this aspect of life, consume balanced amounts of the nutrient-dense foods and you will have a diet to lose belly fat, and soon that six pack will be obvious!!

Well, everyone knows that fruit and veg are healthy, so I am not going to bore you with a repetition of that. I would far rather help you enrich your diet with some palatable variety, and fortunately there are three wonderful foods I can do that with.  And, most people are going to be completely bowled over that these foods are really amazing for getting rid of fat, and are some of the best foods to eat to lose belly fat!

1. EGG YOLKS.  Yes, good old egg yolks…those guys with the oh so bad rep for for being oh so fatty and absolutely laden with cholesterol! Let me hasten to update you regarding the cholesterol issue: egg yolks have now been proven to raise your GOOD cholesterol and aid the establishment of properly balanced ratios of the different types, so there is no reason to be wary of the cholesterol and fat in these little powerhouses of nutrition. You can get even better nutrition by selecting organic eggs, or free range eggs (from hens that are not caged), which have a higher level of Omega 3 and a better balanced fat profile.

When it comes to nutrition, egg yolks are one of the most densely packed foods you can find: the list of vital nutrients like vitamins and minerals and trace elements they contain would easily fill a whole page. And please – do NOT bypass egg yolks in favor of egg whites. Even the latter’s protein is more bio-available when you eat the yolks with them!

To conclude, please get rid of those unwarranted fears and tuck into healthy and delicious eggs to burn up that belly fat fast.

2. AVOCADOS – Another super food with a bad “fatty” reputation, but which is actually one of the top fat-burning foods! And don’t avocados add a delectable creamy texture and make almost everything more tasty? They also happen to be packed to the hilt not only with healthy fats and fiber, but also anti-oxidants, vitamins and minerals. The healthy fats contained in avocados aid in controlling the urge to eat, and support fat-burning hormones.

This is a versatile food. Add avocado slices – or guacamole for variety – to morning eggs (!), sandwhiches, salads, burgers or any of your favorite foods, to start burning body fat faster! Avocado is a healthy superfood, one of the best, and definitely one of the foods to eat to lose belly fat.

3. GRASS-FED BEEF.  Most of the beef on offer at grocery stores is so-called grain-fed beef, which is from cattle which are often in poor health. This means that the ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 fatty acids is quite out of balance , and the nutritive value of the beef overall is much lower. The far better choice is grass-fed beef!

It is known that grass-fed beef contains significantly higher levels of the healthy Omega-3 fatty acid, with lower levels of Omega-6 which occurs at far too high levels in the diets of most people anyway. Great amounts of many vitamins and minerals are found in grass-fed beef, which also contains superior levels of the healthy fat known to aid the building of muscle and the burning of fat – CLA, or conjugated linoleic acid.

So you can relax, whoop it up a bit and eat more beef, so long as your choice is grass-fed and not grain-fed.

Enjoy eating these 3 “fatty” foods, which in fact are the foods to eat to lose belly fat and burn body fat in general!