Most women spend a majority of their time daydreaming of sporting a flat belly and washboard abs, but this dream seems next to impossible with a lot of factors acting as roadblocks. They call excess tummy fat as “stubborn” for a reason because it’s extremely resistant to the fat-burning process. The wrong choice of foods and a sedentary lifestyle are the biggest reasons contributing to excess layers of fat around the tummy region, but wait, there are more enemies shooting down your dream of achieving a flat belly, and i this post, we list them down, one by one. Take a look:
1. Eating Lots of Food with Transfat: Fried foods, margarine, certain baked goodies, junk food contain transfat that not only shoot up calories, they build fat layers around the abdomen, and in fact, they mobilize fat from other areas of the body to the belly! Weed them out completely!
2. You Hardly Eat any Vegetables: Filling up half of your plate with veggies is a good way to have a control over calories and burn overall fat. Veggies come packed with a lot of nutrients essential for fat-burning and leaving them out can come between you and washboard abs.
3. Replacing Whole Foods with Refined Foods: Refined foods have high number of empty calories and contribute to both visceral and subcutaneous fat. These unhealthy carbs can reach your daily diet through many ways, from white bread, candies, chocolates, pasta to even processed breakfast cereals that you consider healthy. Food items such as sugar, candies, white bread, pizza, donuts, cookies, burgers, chocolates, etc. have refined carbs that spike insulin levels, that trigger conversion of excess calories to fat molecules. Refined carbs can hamper fat burning, especially tummy fat. Cutting down refined carbs and switching to complex carbs can accelerate the whole fat-burning process. Starting out on healthy weight loss diets such as on the Rati Beauty app will also accelerate the whole weight loss process.
4. Vitamin D Deficiency: New research done has found links to vitamin D deficiency and large waist circumference. Get a good dose of vitamin D by stepping out into the sun and eating these vitamin D rich foods.
5. Loads of Added Sugar in your Food: Refined sugar/added sugar is probably the number one enemy of weight loss and flat belly because the body tends to convert excess sugar into fat and stores around the belly, under the skin, and around the organs. This is exactly what leads to weight gain and that’s where the importance of cutting down sugar comes into play if you want to seriously lose weight.
6. Hydrogenated Vegetable Oils: These cooking oils that go through the hydrogenation process and have transfat content that triggers weight gain, especially belly fat.
7. Soft Drinks/Energy Drinks: A majority of energy drinks and soft drinks have heaps of added of sugar that bring along loads of empty calories, and they can be the reason behind increasing waist circumference if you consume them on a daily basis.
8. Junk Food: Fast food/junk food are made using unhealthy ingredients, saturated fats, transfat, refined flour, all of them increasing inflammation, leading to weight gain and abdominal fat.
9. Frequent Snacking: Frequent snacking leads to frequent insulin spikes which leads to storage of excess calories as fat, particularly around the belly and hip area.
10. No Healthy Fats in the Diet: Most of us avoid all forms of fat to lose weight, but we do need healthy fats to burn fat. Most food items that are marketed as “low fat” and “fat free” replace fat content with loads of carbs that when not used as energy, get stored as fat in the body, particularly, around the waist, resulting in belly fat. Therefore, choose healthy fats such as omega-3 fatty acids instead of going low fat. Find good sources of omega-3 fatty acids because they help reduce inflammation and help with burning of belly fat.
11. Insulin Resistance: Insulin, apart from being a blood sugar regulating hormone, is also a fat-storage hormone which triggers the creation of new fat cells. Chronic inflammation can trigger insulin resistance, which in turn leads to more insulin production, and larger creation of fat cells which converts all extra calories into fat, and stores it particularly around the belly area.
12. Sleep Deprivation: Sleep deprivation can throw a lot of important hormones out of whack, particularly insulin, cortisol, ghrelin – all of which have to be in the lowest range and leptin and human growth hormone – both of which need to be high for weight loss to happen. When you sleep well, the body rejuvenates, repairs, and balances out these hormones. Sleeping for less than 7 hours has been linked to increase in belly fat.
13. Not Drinking Enough Water: Apart from leading to water retention, dehydration can compromise and lower metabolism. Enough water in the body would curb appetite and flush out toxins too. Make it a point to drink at least 2 liters or more in a day to rev up the metabolism and burn fat.
14. Sedentary Lifestyle: If you move hardly from your work desk or spend most of the day on the couch, don’t expect to lose the paunch. Being active through the day, exercising for at least one hour at least 5 days a week, and eating a healthy diet can only make your dream of a flat belly real.
15. Excessive Stress: When the level of cortisol (the stress hormone) increases, the amount of fat, especially around the belly also increases.
16. Hormonal Imbalances: Fluctuations in hormones, especially estrogen, insulin, PCOD, are all responsible for that paunch, so unless you correct these hormonal issues, the belly fat isn’t going anywhere.
Summing up, belly fat or visceral fat is a result of bad dietary choices, high-calorie diet, lack of exercise, sedentary lifestyle, and also due to lack of sleep. When you straighten out these factors, most importantly, your diet by starting out on a weight loss diet such as on Rati Beauty, you can definitely sport a trim waistline soon.
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