Four Ways to

Shed Belly Fat

Based on article by Deborah Kotz  http://health.usnews.com

Studies on Belly Fat and Waist Size

(Healingtalks) A study published  in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure indicates that having a large waist siZe ups your risk of heart failure, a condition that’s often fatal. A second study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that exercise doesn’t harm those with heart failure and could actually provide some benefits.

The analysis of the belly fat research, based on data from two Swedish population studies, showed that being overweight or obese increased the risk of heart failure in men but didn’t in women—unless they had a large waist size.

A woman with a normal body mass index of 25 whose waist size increased by 4 inches over the years wound up with a 15 percent greater risk of heart failure than those whose waist sizes remained the same. (A 5-foot, 4-inch woman who weighs 146 pounds has a BMI of 25.) Medical experts recommend that women maintain a waist size of less than 35 inches to reduce their risk of chronic diseases. How to measure your waist size.

Where you carry your fat is largely determined by your genes.  But there are certain things you can do to help redistribute fat away from your belly. Remember excess belly fat is so dangerous

Here are the four ways to keep a fit belly:

1. Exercise to shed that belly fat

You can’t exercise to spot reduce, but it will help you shed excess pounds — and often, the fat your body sheds first comes from your belly. Abdominal crunches can help tone muscles to make your stomach look flatter, but to truly get rid of fat, you have to burn off abdominal fat through aerobic activity.

2. Be a mindful eater

Researchers are currently investigating whether really paying attention to what you eat can help redistribute body fat from your waist to your hips. Plenty of studies, though, have shown that mindful eating can help with weight loss efforts in general. We recommend.moving in the direction of eating mostly fruits and vegetables, thus a vegetarian/vegan diet with mostly whole, raw, living foods.

3. Get adequate amounts of sleep

Too little sleep (less than six hours) or too much (more than eight hours) results in an excess production of the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol promotes the storage of fat in the belly.

4. Reduce stress

Penciling in 15 minutes a day for relaxation can also lower your cortisol levels, helping you shed belly fat. Deep breathing, a stroll outdoors under the blossoming trees, or a bubble bath can help you leave the world behind.

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The following is based on comment on weight loss from Dr. Mercola’s Website

Number One Way to Lose Body Fat – Exercise

If you’re looking for that six-pack physique, you need to expose the abdominal muscles underneath the fat. But can you really lose fat in just one specific area – the abdominals? It’s unlikely, although some strategies may be able to do so a little.

• Exercise is your number one ally in shedding unwanted body fat.
• It helps normalizing your insulin levels.
• It  also helps you sleep better – another important factor not only for optimal overall health but also, as it turns out, for avoiding packing pounds around your midsection.
• I alleviates stress, so that you have less of the hormone cortisol that is connected to producing stomach fat.

Best Exercises For Weightloss

When you’re exercising to achieve weight loss, you’ll want to focus on weight bearing exercises, as muscle burns calories quite efficiently. It has been my experience that non-weight bearing exercises, like swimming and bicycling, are not as efficient or effective for weight loss. You will typically need to exercise four times as long in these activities to receive the same benefit of running, using elliptical machine, or using weights.

Additionally, to really maximize your weight loss efforts, make sure you include high-intensity interval exercises and strength training in your program.

One recent study showed that interval training can significantly enhance your body’s ability to burn fat. In this study, eight women in their early 20s were told to cycle for 10 sets of four minutes of hard riding, followed by two minutes of rest. After two weeks, the amount of fat burned in an hour of continuous moderate cycling increased by 36 percent!

An added boon of interval exercises is that it can radically decrease the amount of time you need to spend exercising.

As far as individual exercises to target your tummy are concerned, sit-ups and abdominal exercises that are associated with breath control mechanisms, such as yoga exercises, can help tighten your abdominal muscles.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that there is no single abdominal exercise that challenges all your abdominal muscles. So you need to perform a variety of exercises that involve the full range of muscles.

Another factor that is often overlooked is your back muscles. Your back helps you hold yourself up and your stomach in, from behind. So having strong back muscles, as well as abs, is essential for a flatter stomach.

Exercise and Diet Go Hand in Hand

The other, equally important, factor in helping you shed excess weight is to consume the most appropriate foods for your specific genetic and biochemistry. Remember, the foods that may be healthy for others are not necessarily healthy for you, and vice-versa. Determining your specific nutritional type is the proven way to ascertain which foods work best for you.

It’s also important to realize that controlling your insulin levels is as important to optimizing your weight as it is to protecting you against diseases like diabetes.

Why?

Because when your insulin levels increase, you are telling your body to store carbohydrates as fat and to not release any of the stored fat. This makes it impossible for you to use your own stored body fat for energy.

So excess refined and processed carbohydrates in your diet (such as breads and pasta) not only make you gain weight, they make sure you keep that weight on. By cutting grains and sugars from your diet, you can significantly improve your chances of successful weight loss.

As far as nutrition to target belly fat specifically, certain dietary fats have actually been found to be helpful in reducing the accumulation of subcutaneous and visceral abdominal fat.

A study published in the journal Diabetes Care in July 2007 found that diets rich in monounsaturated fats prevented the accumulation of both types of belly fat, without additional exercise.

Foods high in monounsaturated fats include:

• Nuts, especially pecans
• Seeds
• Avocados

Dangerous Weightloss Options

Unfortunately, many people simply opt for what appears to be the easiest solution, and when it comes to excess weight around your middle, surgical options like liposuction or treatments such as Lipodissolve are popular alternatives.

However, you need to be aware that there are many risks involved in procedures like these, and they may not give you permanent results.

During a Lipodissolve treatment, a chemical found in lecithin (phosphatidylcholine deoxycholate) is injected into fatty areas such as “love handles” and “bra rolls,” where it dissolves fat cells. But the injectable compound is not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and no long-term studies have been conducted on Lipodissolve’s safety.

Among the chief questions about the procedure is where the fat cells go once they are dissolved. Lipodissolve practitioners say the cells are excreted by your body naturally, but no one really knows for sure. According to the FDA, Lipodissolve is a “buyer-beware situation.”

And when it comes to liposuction, a survey of plastic surgeons found that more people die during liposuction than during most other kinds of operations: 19 deaths per 100,000 procedures. Meanwhile the generally accepted death rate for any kind of elective surgery is 1 in 100,000. The most common reported cause of death was pulmonary thromboembolism, or blood clots.

There simply are no better alternatives to a healthy lifestyle if you want a strong and shapely body.

Can You Wake Up to a Flatter Belly?

So, what does proper sleep have to do with a flatter stomach? Researchers have found that all body fat is not created equal, and that holds especially true for belly fat. Abdominal fat has a very rich blood supply and has four times more cortisol receptors than other body fat.

Cortisol is a stress hormone, produced by your adrenal glands in response to stress, but sleeping too little (less than six hours) or too much (more than eight hours) also results in an excess production of cortisol.

The cortisol belly fat connection comes into play when you are under chronic stress, as cortisol tends to store unused fat that has been released by your body in the stress response. Since your belly fat contains large amounts of cortisol receptors, you may tend to gain fat in the abdominal region when you’re chronically stressed or have trouble sleeping properly.

For helpful tips to help you sleep well, please review my 33 secrets to a good night’s sleep. And, to help combat stress — and address any underlying emotional issues that may cause you to lose precious sleep — I highly recommend the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). It’s a simple psychological acupressure technique that is routinely used in my practice that can help you optimize your emotional health.

Keyword tags: living foods, studies of belly fat and waist size, shed belly fat, lose weight, shed pounds, exercise and eat for weight loss, how to lose weight and fat, interval training

Older Generation

Falls Prey to

Eating Disorders

More than 10 million Americans suffer from anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders. And while people tend to think such problems are limited to adolescence and young adulthood, Judith Shaw knows otherwise.A 58-year-old yoga instructor in St. Louis, Ms. Shaw says she was nearing 40 when she decided to “get healthy” after having children. Soon, diet and exercise became an obsession.

“I was looking for something to validate myself,” she told me. “Somehow, the weight loss, and getting harder and firmer and trimmer and fitter, and then getting recognized for that, was fulfilling a need.”

 Clinical Cases of Midlife or Older Eating Disorders

Experts say that while eating disorders are first diagnosed mainly in young people, more and more women are showing up at their clinics in midlife or even older. Some had eating disorders early in life and have relapsed, but a significant minority first develop symptoms in middle age. (Women with such disorders outnumber men by 10 to 1.)

Cynthia M. Bulik, director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says that though it was initially aimed at adolescents, since 2003 half of its patients have been adults.

“We’re hearing from women, no matter how old they are, that they still have to achieve this societal ideal of thinness and perfection,” she said. “Even in their 50s and 60s — and, believe it or not, beyond — women are engaging in extreme weight- and shape-control behaviors.”

Triggers for Eating Disorders in Midlife and Beyond

Younger or older, patients tend to engage in the same destructive behaviors: restricted eating, laxative abuse, excessive exercise and binge eating. And the trigger is often a stressful transition — in a young person, perhaps going away to college or living through her parents’ divorce; in later years, having a baby, sending a child to college or going through her own divorce.

Difficulty In Diagnosing Later-Life Eating Disorders

“I think there is a probably much higher percentage than we’ve been able to identify,” said Tamara Pryor, clinical director of the Eating Disorder Center of Denver, who has been studying about 200 cases of midlife eating disorders. “I think out there in the workaday world there are a large percentage of women who just fly under the radar. They are subclinical and you don’t question them, because in so many other areas of their life they look so functional.”

One concern, she and other experts say, is that as women get older they are more adept at concealing the problem, and symptoms may be attributed to aging rather than to an eating disorder.

Ms Shaw’s Story of Concealing the Eating Disorder Problem

For instance, when a thin adolescent stops menstruating, doctors typically raise questions about weight and eating habits. But in Ms. Shaw’s case, they assumed it was early menopause. When she developed anemia and osteoporosis, they didn’t guess that the true cause was years of malnourishment.

“One of the things we’re working very hard to do is to make sure this stays on physicians’ radar screens so they can recognize and distinguish between menopause-related changes, real health problems and eating disorders,” Dr. Bulik said. “Often they don’t ask the question because they have in their mind this stereotypical picture of eating disorders as a problem of white, middle-class teenagers.”For Ms. Shaw, diet and exercise overtook her life. She spent more and more hours at the gym — even on family vacations, when she would skip ski outings with her husband and sons in favor of workout time.

“None of my friends, my ex-husband, no one ever said anything,” she said. “It was no one’s job to fix me, but I wish someone had said to me: ‘I miss you. You’re gone. You’re so obsessed.’ ”

Finally, a yoga instructor sounded the alarm after Ms. Shaw had twice fallen, breaking an elbow and then later her pelvis. “There’s nothing left of you,” the instructor told her. “Only you can decide if you’re going to change that by feeding yourself.”

At 53, carrying just 85 pounds on her 5-foot-3 frame, Ms. Shaw checked herself in to an eating disorders program.

In treatment, she struggled with writing exercises aimed at helping her identify the origins of her illness. Instead, she began creating art, starting with a life-size silhouette of her body, covered with cut-out newspaper headlines like “Help Wanted,” “Conceal” and “Find Real Value.”

Later, she created a plaster cast of her thighs. Like many others with anorexia, she had thought her legs were too big; now she could see how thin she had become.

Last year Ms. Shaw’s art went on display at Washington University in St. Louis, and now her exhibition, “Body of Work: The Art of Eating Disorder Recovery,” can be seen through mid-April at the Center for Eating Disorders at Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan.

“It’s certainly not the typical story, but we’re hearing about it more commonly,” said the center’s director, Dr. Evelyn Attia. “We need to let everybody know that it’s possible to develop these illnesses across the life span.”

Ms. Shaw says she often notices women who appear to be too thin or obsessed with exercising, and she hopes that telling her story will help others see the problem in themselves.

“In the course of my day, I can spot it,” she said. “I am 25 to 30 pounds heavier, but I feel lighter. The weight of those emotions is what it was really all about.”