Crunch after crunch, sit-up after sit-up; the more time you spend in the gym working on those abs, the flatter they'll get, right? Wrong. Crunches and sit-ups are not the answer when wondering how to lose belly fat. While it's true that these exercises will tone and tighten the muscles of your stomach, this does sometimes give you a slightly leaner look around the belly simply because you're more toned, crunches and sit-ups don't actually cause you to lose fat at the midsection.
Why Crunches Are Not the Answer
To really understand how to lose belly fat, you need to understand how the body actually burns fat in the first place, and it really has nothing to do with resistance training or weight lifting. The body holds fat when you eat more calories than you expend; these excess calories are converted to fat and stored in the body, whether it's around your stomach or arms or legs or anyplace else. In reality, fat is fat, and the only way to learn how to lose belly fat is to learn how your body burns that excess fat in the first placed.
To reduce these fatty deposits in your body, you need to adjust that balance of calories consumed versus calories burned. This might mean decreasing your calories every day, expending your calories burned by increasing your physical activity, or a combination of both. This is the only solution to the problem of how to lose belly fat. When you begin to expend more calories than you consume, your body burns those stores of fat to compensate. It calls upon those "reserves" of fat to provide the necessary energy, and the fat begins to melt from your body.
How to Lose Belly Fat Versus Other Body Fat
The one problem that many people face when wondering how to lose belly fat is that they are trying to target this specific area for trimming. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing you can do to decide where your body is going to draw those fat reserves from. It might start burning the fat on your arms, legs, butt, face, or anyplace else before it takes fat from your belly. Crunches and sit-ups won't cause your body to take fat from that area any sooner or any quicker.
However, there is an upside to doing all those crunches and sit-ups when considering how to lose belly fat, and that is that this will make your stomach look more toned once that fat does start melting off. Also, doing resistance training and muscle building of any type will help your metabolism speed up, as people with more muscle mass have a higher metabolism, meaning that they are burning more calories even at rest, then those without. The body needs to work harder to constantly feed those muscles, so it's burning more calories overall. So don't discount the idea of doing crunches and sit-ups when learning how to lose belly fat, just don't expect them to perform miracles either!
Britney Smith writes her blog daily on slimming tips and weight loss, visit her blog at http://www.slimmingtips101.info/
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