Whats the best most effective way to get rid of belly fat?

What exercises should a person do to get a flat stomach and get rid of love handles? Details please

Spot reduction doesnt work... just gotta get rid of fat in general (cardio + watching diet).

Running to me seems best for toning the lower tummy as the fat comes off. lorik is right though. No spot reducing. Your diet is key to that area. For me it was the hardest to tone.

Exercise restraint and don't eat those cookies!! (har har...)

When you wake up in the morning after an overnight 8-12 hour fast, your body’s stores of glycogen are somewhat depleted. Doing cardio in this state causes your body to mobilize more fat because of the unavailability of glycogen.

2. Eating causes a release of insulin. Insulin interferes with the mobilization of body fat. Less insulin is present in the morning; therefore, more body fat is burned when cardio is done in the morning.

3. There is less carbohydrate (glucose) "floating around" in the bloodstream when you wake up after an overnight fast. With less glucose available, you will burn more fat.

4. If you eat immediately before a workout, you have to burn off what you just ate first before tapping into stored body fat (and insulin is elevated after a meal.)

5. When you do cardio in the morning, your metabolism stays elevated for a period of time after the workout is over. If you do cardio in the evening, you burn calories during the session so you definitely benefit from it, but you fail to take advantage of the "afterburn" effect because your metabolic rate drops dramatically as soon as you go to sleep.

 

Make yourself a diet and stick to it.   Building muscle helps the process ie lift weights.   high-intensity cardio.

http://www.bodybuildingforyou.com/bodybuildin g-supplements-guides/diet-and-nutrition-guide -1.htm ;

I tried carb cycling that I read from this body building website (I'm not looking to become a body builder but they have like 5% body fat so I was just curious to see what their secret was). Here is the link to it if you want to read more about it:

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/par30.html

Basically eat more often, reduce your carbs, especially carbs high in sugar and you will lose a body fat.
Good Luck!

With all due respect, no.

Don't. Work. Out. On. An. Empty. Stomach.

When you're doing strenuous cardio, your body will burn glycogen for fuel regardless. If it's not available from glycogen stores and food, your body will convert muscle protein to glycogen and burn that instead.

 Doing cardio on empty is a good way to burn muscle mass indiscriminately - and your heart is a muscle.

It's a crappy way to lose fat though.

That insulin spike you're worried about? Not gonna happen if you eat something with a low GI like oatmeal - your insulin will be stable throughout the day. Work out on empty though, and not only will your body burn muscle like nobody's business, but you'll put extra stress on your metabolism and elevate your own cortisol production - and cortisol promotes fat storage, upregulates ghrelin production to make you hungrier, and promotes the protein->glycogen conversion.

Eat breakfast before working out- your body will thank you.

I HATE working out on an empty stomach. I tried it and I can never keep myself going. I have to workout later in the day so that I can give myself time to wake up and get going, so the morning workout never worked for me.

There is no such thing as spot reduction. Diet and excersive and your body will eventually drop the fat.

Original Post by melkor:

With all due respect, no.

Don't. Work. Out. On. An. Empty. Stomach.

When you're doing strenuous cardio, your body will burn glycogen for fuel regardless. If it's not available from glycogen stores and food, your body will convert muscle protein to glycogen and burn that instead.

Doing cardio on empty is a good way to burn muscle mass indiscriminately - and your heart is a muscle.

It's a crappy way to lose fat though.

That insulin spike you're worried about? Not gonna happen if you eat something with a low GI like oatmeal - your insulin will be stable throughout the day. Work out on empty though, and not only will your body burn muscle like nobody's business, but you'll put extra stress on your metabolism and elevate your own cortisol production - and cortisol promotes fat storage, upregulates ghrelin production to make you hungrier, and promotes the protein->glycogen conversion.

Eat breakfast before working out- your body will thank you.

 Was that directed toward me....if so I never said don't eat before workout I was just posting what your body does for information.  I always consume something before I work out but never directly before.

Sorry if that seemed a bit over the top, but it's - well, latching onto a single facet of what your body does and not considering the overall effect on your metabolism is exactly the kind of mistake that lands people in a great deal of trouble.

 I suppose I might come across as extra-grouchy as I've just had another go'round with a buddy of mine who's fallen into the Fast-5 diet trap. I can't shout at him as much as I'd like, and it's possible that my ..annoyance... spilled over on you. In that case, I apologise.

It's just that misunderstood dieting like this is very harmful long-term for anyone....

melkor -- along these same lines, what do you know about the notion that eating before you go to bed will cause more of that food to be converted to fat than if you ate earlier in the day?

Somehow I have a hard time believing it... but I don't know enough to justify either way.

 Well, there is some truth to it if you do what the damn Fast-5 diet recommends: eat nothing all day, binge eat for five hours, and then stop.

 Your body can handle a lot of things, and even the fast-5 diet is survivable short term, but giving it an even supply of nutrients throughout the day makes a lot more sense from a metabolic perspective. Your body will always have either a catabolic or an anabolic homeostasis going on - that is, it's either tearing down or building up complex molecules, like fatty acids or muscle.

 So what we're trying to balance while on the CC diet is to put your body into a slight catabolic state to promote it "burning up" stored fat for energy, but not have it in a strongly catabolic state where it'll burn muscle tissue for glycogen instead of the fat we want to get rid of. Giving it an even - but slightly low - supply of energy throughout the day will ensure that your body won't raid your muscle tissue in desperation.

 At the same time your body does have limited protein synthesis capacity, which means that it can probably only reasonably handle 1/6th of your daily protein needs at once. Hence eating 6 meals a day with the protein evenly distributed makes sense.

Your carb needs however, vary considerably over the day, so it makes sense to taper the carb load a bit. Depending on when you work out, how physical your job is and so on of course, but to have eaten roughly 90% of your daily carbs by your fifth meal seems sensible according to bodybuilder lore.

 Where a lot of people run into trouble with late eating is that - well, it frequently resembles binge eating. Having a bag of Doritos, a giant-size snickers bar and then a jar of honey-roasted peanuts with the evening football game and washing that down with a six-pack of beer, for example.

 Eating roughly three times your daily calories in one meal isn't condictive to weight loss. So people who have trouble with that sort of eating pattern are well served by being advised to stop eating before the game comes on.

 It's not a function of when you eat though, it's more a matter of how much.

Well, that's my current best understanding of it anyway :)

OK... but what about the effect of a late meal consisting of more than 10% of your daily carbs, but still within your daily calories -- say, 200 cal breakfast, 400 cal lunch, 200 cal snack, 500 cal dinner.

Edited to say: My intent here is not to be nitpicky. Just to pose an example (that I don't think was addressed in your post) of a (questionably?) reasonable night-time meal, not a binge...

 Bodybuilders and others who are interested in adding muscle sometimes become annoyingly dogmatic about the whole thing of course - most people don't need to eat precisely measured amounts of food every three hours to optimise muscle building.

 Outside of the constraints I've mentioned, the studies I've read on the topic all confirm that it pretty much doesn't matter when your calories are consumed. So in practical terms there's really not much difference unless you're as obessive as me :)
 

So what you're saying is, <10% of daily carbs at night is optimal for muscle building. But you're not buying the idea that it gets converted to fat if you eat it at night more than it would if you eat it for lunch?

Pretty much, yeah. My swiss cheese memory has misplaced the link now, but the Mayo clinic among others have done studies on this and came to this conclusion.

Tom Venuto's book on the subject - "Burn the Fat, Feed the muscle" goes into a horrenduous amount of detail, but the gist of it is that a calorie is a calorie, and that the problem with late eating is that it frequently turns into a binge.

 That does leave optimising macronutrient ratios for muscle building and preservation out of the picture though - which is why the "fast-5" diet is completely bonkers in practice.

 Or "Body For Life" for that matter, they've also latched onto the same factoid without considering the big picture.

 Though  I'm sure the whole thing is vastly more complicated than I'm  making it seem now - there's a reason why Venutos book is several hundred pages!

Perhaps I'll read that when I'm done with the book I'm currently reading.

What is this Fast-5 diet that has you so irked? (I could look it up... but I figure from you I'd also get opinions of it!)

Also, a bit unrelated (and again I seem to have hijacked someone else's thread to ask you pointed questions :) ) how long do these body composition changes take to occur ... roughly? I don't know if I'm building muscle. I've been going to a weight lifting class, which, while not optimal, is better than naught. My macronutrient ratios are also not optimal (I've chosen my (already questionable :) ) food sanity over optimized muscle building), but I believe I eat healthily most of the time. But so far ... nothing in weight, measurements, or scale body fat reading (though it's a Taylor, not a Tanita, so I'm not sure how much I believe it... but it's consistent, ie within 4% of, online calculators that use measurements. It says 26% and online with measurements I've gotten 23% and 30%. Go figure.)

I am lifting heavier weights than I was before, but I'm not sure if maybe I could have lifted them before but just didn't try. Also, the teacher does more than 8-12 reps, so again ... not optimal. When I can, I modify, but in general I'd rather go to a suboptimal class than do an even-less-optimal no-workout-at-all. But long story short: no change yet, after, oh, a month? Little longer maybe? Twice a week. Should I just stay patient?

It is a good rule of thumb not to consume complex carbohydrates after 9pm.

Although the thread has been hijacked (melkor, flowerbud -- apologize to samantha), I'm also going to contribute to the hijacking (sorry Samantha).

I don't get home from work until after 9 -- I try to eat something before I leave (4-5pm), but can't eat a large meal as I do a lot of dryland/demonstrating with the kids), I try to snack all through practice.  I still get home at 9-9:30 with a good 5-700 left to eat (this is mostly on days I work out hard).  so, I am pretty much eating right on up 'til midnight, often shovelling in a bowl of cereal (with milk and fruit) at 1145.  Regardless -- I have lost 30+ pounds.  Eating before bed may cause you to be uncomfortable -- it will NOT make you gain weight, nor will it hinder a loss.  My deficit has never been over 1000.

As Melkor stated early -- how much is the factor, not the time of consumption

Samantha -- the thread is yours again -- I think if you searched back through the forums you would find most of them will tell you that since you can't spot reduce, you must do cardio to burn the fat all over (and abs/thighs usually last to go on a female), and the standard ab workouts (check out the Exercise tab) to stregthen the muscles underneath

coach_k -- agreed on 2 things:

1. Sorry for hijacking the thread!! I alluded to it in my last post but didn't apologize. I am now apologizing. Sorry!

2. When I lost weight I was also eating up until late because by time I would get home from my workouts and get something together to eat and eat enough to make 1200 cals it was time for bed. And I lost weight.

I just wonder, I guess, if maybe for some reason I would have lost faster? or less of it would have been converted to fat? I don't know that I believe either of these would have happened... just wondering.

jettj45 -- do you have any scientific or other reasoning for this rule of thumb? Also for your point #5 above that states that if you exercise in the morning your metabolism stays high, but if you exercise at night it doesn't? I'm not sure I buy either...