Chances are that you have not yet read this Ultimate Guide for a tight and flat stomach, otherwise, you would have lost your excess belly fat long ago! In this comprehensive guide, you will discover first the 3 most common mistakes in weight loss. Then I give you 10 golden tips to get a tight and flat stomach. What are you waiting for?
Mistake 1: Do abdominal exercises to get a flat stomach
Every time I see people with obesity doing abdominal exercises, I get a bit unhappy inside. These people think that abdominal exercises are the way to lose weight.Their logic is probably as follows: I am fat around the belly, so if I put those muscles to work belly, I will lose belly fat! Unfortunately, it does not work that way.
It is not possible to lose local fat.
In short, there is no point in doing abdominal exercises because you do not lose out locally. Of course, you train your abdominal muscles, but that is not enough to lose weight. Training your abdominal muscles helps you in the following ways:
- Your belly will hang less
- Your stomach muscles become more visible (if you also lower your fat percentage)
- Less chance of back pain
- Better balance
- Better attitude
The ratio of food and exercise to weight loss is about 70/30.This means that 70% of weight loss depends on what you eat and 30% of your exercise. For the exercise, you can indeed replace abdominal exercises with something else, when it comes to losing fat. I will come back to this later.
Mistake 2: Going on a (crash) diet
I can already hear you thinking: "So if food is so important, then I should definitely go on a diet?" The answer to this is a clear no. Almost all people who lose weight through a diet get back to the diet. Some diets do not even work at all to get a flat stomach! This is due to one big problem with dieting.
People go on a diet with the idea that they stop later.
In other words, the diet is a temporary thing. It is that mindset that makes diets often not work. During the diet, you fall off, but at a certain moment, you are done with it. Then comes the notorious relapse. Because a diet is too heavy to sustain in the long term, the kilos will sneak up again at a given moment.
The problem is that you currently have an unhealthy diet. Dieting does not solve the problem of eating, but only ensures that you temporarily break the pattern. So after the diet, you simply return to your old routine.
In addition, many diets require that you eat very little. This does not make diets fun at first, making it more difficult to keep up, but secondly also bad for you. Diets do not tell you how to eat healthily and are sometimes deficient in healthy nutrients. In addition, your body responds to a poor diet by delaying your metabolism. This slows you down slowly.
Error 3: Eating fewer calories/counting calories
Do you know the stereotype of teenage girls who diligently look at how many calories they have in each product? Maybe it comes closer than that and you recognize yourself in this description. However, it is important that calorie counting does not work.
It's not about how many calories you get, but about which calories.Of course, if you get more calories, you will also get more. Calories, however, are not the total picture. Tell yourself which of the following rows is healthier. Both count up to 2000 kcal, which is average for an adult woman per day.
Eating pattern 1:
- 4 slices of bread with toppings (500 calories)
- 1 pizza (1000 calories)
- 2 soft drinks (200 calories)
- 1 bag of chips (200 kcal)
- 1 apple (100 kcal)
- 1 large green smoothie (300 kcal)
- 1 meal with brown rice and chicken (600 kcal)
- 2 liters of water (0 kcal)
- 2 apples (200 kcal)
- 2 spelled butter with tuna (300 kcal)
- 1 bowl of Greek yogurt with walnuts and honey (400 kcal)
- 1 portion of healthy nuts (200 kcal)
In addition, not every food has the same effect on your body. For example, carbohydrates and proteins contain about the same amount of kcal per gram. By eating carbohydrates, however, a lot of insulin is produced, so you store fat instead. In addition, you are hardly full of it. Proteins ensure moderate insulin production and a high level of satiety.
So stop just counting calories and look especially at the nutrients.
Tip 1: Remove carbohydrates from your diet
Our eating behavior is dominated by carbohydrates. With every meal, you get them inside. The following products contain a lot of carbohydrates:
- Bread (both white and brown)
- Rice
- Pasta
- Potatoes
- Candy
- Fizzy drink
- Cakes and pastries
- Sweet spreads
Carbohydrates, as mentioned earlier, ensure that your body produces more insulin. An excess of insulin in the body causes your body to store more fat. In addition, many carbohydrates mainly consist of sugars. Your body thereby tends to burn sugar instead of fat burning, while you get a flat stomach from burning fat.
Finally, carbohydrates are less likely to make you feel full.
Result: you keep eating carbohydrates, which makes the problem even worse.It is therefore very important to the number of carbohydrates in your diet to reduce. That can be easier than you think! Carbohydrates can be easily replaced by other products. These contain healthier nutrients and make sure you are full faster. Use the tips below.
- Replace meat with soy products and/or nuts
- Use alternative products, such as wholegrain pasta or brown rice
- Eat (Greek) yogurt with fruit or a smoothie in the morning
- Take a salad for lunch instead of sandwiches
- Replace unhealthy snacks/cookies with fruit/nuts
In the long term, however, you are reaping the benefits. Research has shown that low-carbohydrate diets work better when burning fat than low-fat diets. In addition, a low-carbohydrate diet is easier to maintain. So you can better focus on eating fewer carbohydrates than eating less fat.
Tip 2: Eat more fiber
Fibers are extremely important if you want to get a tight stomach. This mainly concerns soluble fibers or fibers that are soluble in water. There are also fibers that do not dissolve in water, which we do not go into further.
These fibers are very difficult to digest, so they end up in your intestines fairly continuously. There they are delicious food for healthy bacteria. These bacteria are very important for the health of your intestines. They provide less inflammation. Inflammations that play a role in almost every chronic disease in the West.
Moreover, fibers are very effective in reducing your hunger.
This mainly concerns 'syrupy' soluble fibers. These are the fibers that, when they come into contact with a liquid, become very viscous. The more vicious this substance, the more difficult it is to digest. This ensures that all food in your digestive system is broken down more slowly so that you are full longer.
From these products you get the best fibers:
- Brussels sprouts
- asparagus
- Sweet potato
- Legumes
- Apricots
- Mangoes
- Oatmeal
I already mentioned that abdominal exercises are not effective when it comes to losing belly fat. For that brief high-intensity training much better. The name says it all: you are moving very intensively for a short time, alternating with moments of rest. Doing this kind of training three times for 20 minutes can help you lose weight drastically.
Several studies show that this kind of training is more effective in getting a flat stomach than cardio. In addition, you get more muscle mass from this type of training, while people who do cardio sometimes lose muscle mass.
An example of such a simple workout is the following:
- 3 minutes warm-up (jogging, knee lifting, jumping jacks)
- 8 sets of 20 seconds of sprinting, 60 seconds of walking
- 3 minutes cooling-down (stretching and stretching)
You can also do abdominal exercises to get a nice, tight stomach. They do not help to lose belly fat, but once you have lost weight you can enjoy a sexy belly. If you combine this from the beginning with short, high-intensity training, you will see the fastest result.
Tip 4: Drink water and green tea
You have probably heard that you should actually drink 2 liters a day. Did you, however, also consider what exactly you should drink? In any case, no 2 liters of soft drinks; I will return to that in Tip 7.
The best drinks for a tight belly are water and green tea.
Water is the most important food of man. Without food, you can still live for a week, but without water, you only keep it for a few days. Water helps especially to keep your body hydrated. This is very important for your general health.
Moreover, water ensures that you are full faster. This helps you to eat less, so you automatically lose weight. My tip is to always have a bottle of water on hand, which you can easily fill. So you always have water at hand - at work, at home, at work, and so on.
In addition, green tea is a very good drink. Green tea contains caffeine. This substance helps to prepare body fat as an energy source. This is an essential step in the transition to fat burning instead of sugar burn.
Green tea also helps to burn fat. It also accelerates your metabolism, which helps to burn food and body fat. I must mention that not all studies show such results and that you have to drink a lot of cups of green tea to see results.
Tip 5: Skip breakfast once in a while
There is a lot of confusion about skipping your breakfast. Some people swear by it, others believe it is bad for your metabolism. I believe there is a kind of middle way. You can always skip your breakfast, but that is very difficult. In addition, it is important that you still eat as much in a day.
If you skip breakfast, you should eat more calories in less time. For people who go to work, for example, it can be difficult.
I, therefore, advise you to skip your breakfast once or twice a week.
But why do you have to skip your breakfast exactly? Good question! I've already talked about sugar burn and fat burning and that you prefer to have your body in the fat burning mode for a flat stomach. If you do not eat, your body will automatically switch to fat burning mode after 6 to 8 hours.
This also applies when you sleep. When you wake up, your body is still burning fat. What happens when you have breakfast? Right - your body is about to burn sugar again! And you do not want that. In addition, the occasional breakfast may have the following benefits.
- Lower blood pressure
- Higher insulin sensitivity, which makes you burn fat better
- The increase of HGH hormone, which accelerates fat burning
- Cell repair is initiated
Do you know which countries are the healthiest countries in the world? These are countries such as Japan, Iceland, Sweden, and Singapore - or countries where many fish are eaten. Because fish is incredibly good for our body. The most important nutrients in fish are omega-3 and vitamin B. Omega-3, in particular, does not occur in almost any other product, making fish food even more important.
I can already hear you thinking: but eating fat is still bad for you?
No, that is not necessarily true! There is an important difference between unhealthy and healthy fats. The first ones are mainly in fast food, chips, and fried food. You are indeed fat of this. Healthy fats, on the other hand, are extremely important to our body and can even help you lose weight. Healthy fats can also be found in:
- Avocado
- Nuts
- Coconut
- Linseed
- Olives
- Green leafy vegetables
- Eggs
- Beans
Tip 7: Avoid soft drinks and fruit juices
Walk around the supermarket and you'll see dozens of sorts of soft drinks, juices, and other drinks. There is almost too much to choose - but not again. In all these drinks there is a huge amount of sugar. Sugar is the biggest fattener of all and is found in many products.
It is therefore not a bad idea to completely banish soft drinks, fruit juices, and sports drinks, also for your children. Research shows that children with artificially sweetened drinks have up to 60% higher risk of obesity.
Note: this also applies to so-called 'light' soft drinks!
These contain sugar substitutes, such as aspartame, which is also bad for your body. Therefore, step away completely from sweet drinks. For example, you can drink water and green tea, as described in tip 4. In addition, you can make smoothies yourself. Of course, there are fruit sugars in this, but this is amply compensated by all fibers and vitamins.
Tip 8: Do not eat after 8 o'clock in the evening
What could be better than watching TV on the couch in the evening with a bowl of crisps on your lap? Many people have made it a habit to eat in the evening. This is actually not good because you do not burn the glucose that you get out of your dinner in the evening. You do not move more intensively before you go to sleep.
The energy from your food is converted into body fat while you sleep. This applies in particular to foods with high carbohydrates and sugars, in short: all tasty snacks. For a flat, tight stomach it is therefore important that you do not eat in the evening after 8 o'clock.
Do you really want something to eat in the evening? Then choose food with low carbohydrates and sugars. Think, for example, of a bowl of nuts or a bowl of yogurt. Here you are also fuller than all those unhealthy snacks. I understand that they are delicious, but for a flat stomach, you will have to sacrifice something!
Tip 9: Put on intermittent fasting
By 'intermittent fasting' I mean fasting with intervals. You have probably heard of certain fasting actions, in which people only live on water and tea for one or more days. Intermittent fasting works in fairly the same way, but now you keep your time between fasting.
The idea of intermittent fasting corresponds to what I have already discussed: switching from sugar combustion to fat burning. If you stuck for more than 12 hours, your fat burning starts. You can keep that up, and then you can just eat like normal again.
You can also intermittently fast as you want. Consider, for example, the following possibilities:
- Eat 5 hours a day. You simply eat every day, but within a timeframe of 5 hours. This can, for example, be between 15:00 and 20:00.
- 1 meal per day. You choose which meal you eat, as long as it is only one. The rest of the day you drink water or (green) tea.
- 5 days of eating, 2 days of fasting. This method is already somewhat more difficult to maintain because you eat up to 500 kilocalories for 48 consecutive hours. You can eat normally the rest of the week.
- To eat the day. This method is simple: one day you eat normally, the other day you get stuck. Please note that on a day of eating you just eat healthy and varied.
Even though you should not see these nutritional tips as a diet, but as a change in your lifestyle, it can be difficult to keep it going . Especially when you are used to eating what you want, it can be very difficult to suddenly deviate from this.
That's why you can eat one day what you want - on your cheat day!
On such a cheat day you can choose for yourself what you eat. However, you have to be careful not to receive more than twice the number of calories and to opt for a fixed day. I would do it once every two weeks, for example on Sunday. Moreover, I advise you to skip your breakfast the day after.
Keeping a cheat day even has a number of health benefits:
- Your metabolism accelerates
- The hormone that causes your hunger goes down
- Your brain receives the signal to burn more belly fat
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