Weight Lifting and Belly Fat

[Dakatsu]

I have gained about twenty pounds over the last three months, and my girlfriend made a slight remark (*poke* \"Your belly is gettting squishy!\" *giggles*). She wouldn't be bothered too bad, but for me bothering her a little bit is enough to take action.

Anyway, would weight lifting get rid of fat around my belly/waist? Main thing is I can do weights indoors at night when I am alone, so that is why I would want to do them, as opposed to spending time I would use with my friends, girlfriend, basically time where I could do other stuff.

[Duper]

It will help, but I've lost about 30 pound over the last 8 months. This is what I've done.

Drink lots of water (64 + oz a day)
Eat only until I'm not hungry, not until I'm stuffed. (remember that it takes 15 minutes for your brain to realize that your stomach is telling it, it's full.)
Don't eat a lot of crap. i.e. Frito's, McD's or any burger stuff (this put 10 pounds on me in one month) Be very sparing with it. It's a treat, not a mainstay.
Get some kind of exercise. Walk for an hour or bike ride ..or lift weights a lot. Get your heart rate up for a while. Chase your tail .. anything. Just don't sit around. I work in shipping and receiving at my job so I move quite a bit and have a nice weight training program.

Just basic stuff.

If you drink a lot of beer (2 cans + a day) back off. There are a lot of calories in beer. Also, if you drink a lot of coffee with sugar and cream, cut that back. That will put weight on you quick too.

[Genghis]

You need to get the overall fat percentage of your body down. This can only be done by burning a lot more calories than you take in. That can only be done by extreme diet, extreme exercise, or a combination of moderate diet and moderate exercise.

Lifting alone probably won't burn the calories you need. It does burn some, and continues to burn them after lifting while your muscles are recovering, but not enough to drop 20 pounds. You'll need to do some cardio as Duper said.

Also, note that there's no such thing as \"isolating\" an area for trimming down. You only lose your belly fat by reducing your total body fat. Ab exercises will build muscle under your belly fat but won't remove it.

All that said, it applies to average body types, and gets harder as you get older. If you're young, have a high metabolism, and have ectomorph genetics, it might be a bit easier for you to lose weight. If you gained 20 pounds because your behavior changed radically in the past 3 months (sitting on your butt, eating worse, and eating more) then you may be able to slowly reverse things by going back to your old behavior.

In any case, don't expect things to happen quickly. It takes a lot longer to lose weight and build muscle than it does to gain weight and lose muscle. Don't get discouraged, just keep at it and slowly the fat will go away.

[De Rigueur]

Maybe try 'long walks on the beach' with your gf.

I do weights regularly and you can keep your heart rate up if you don't rest much between sets. Another thing, if you do it enough to increase the size of you chest, shoulders and lats, your belly will be proportionately smaller. I've also heard that just having extra muscle mass to maintain makes your body burn more calories.

As for diet, don't forget your fiber. The requirement is something like 25-30 grams a day. I also try to minimize refined sugar and flour.

[Diedel]

Twenty pounds in 3 months! Holy crap!

alcohol = 7 cal/gram
fat = 14 cal/gram

The best you can do is to follow Duper's advice on nutrition and exercises getting your heart rate up, like jogging or bicycling.

Weight lifting can reduce your weight if exercised intensely and if you're not eating excessively, but endurance sports is better.

If doing that, keeping your heart rate in the \"fat burner\" area (depends on age, sex and fitness) will burn a higher percentage of fat compared to carbohydrates, but doing cardio training still can burn more fat absolutely.

A simple example (wrong numbers, just for the principle):

fat burner = 30% fat, 500 kcal/hour -> 150 kcal fat/hour
cardio = 25% fat, 1000 kcal/hour -> 250 kcal fat/hour

So if you're fit enough, doing cardio wouldn't hurt. Btw, if you are doing a lot of cardio training over a longer period of time, the fat ratio will increase.

Ofc complementing endurance training with some weight lifting can give you some nice muscles. Be careful not to exhaust yourself so much with weight lifting (because the effect is visually more appealing) that you cannot do proper endurance training.

[Dakatsu]

Okay, glad I got that info!

I think my behaviour just changed radically. Most likley it was because of alot of fast food. Normally we don't have any fast food in my house, but we were getting low on money (vehicle repair cost does that), and a buck for a burger wasn't a bad deal.

Other than that, I guess I can lose it by weight lifting. I don't eat unhealthy, and in fact all foods in my house are home made (we make our pasta dough, we grow half of our tomatoes and veggies, etc). Hopefully it should be easy to lose with a 30min-1hr workout with weights, and I shouldn't be able to gain it back if we don't do a burger binge again.

[Duper]

also, if you're thinkin of doing sit-ups; don't. Do \"crunches\"; sit-ups are bad on the lower back over the long term.

[Dakatsu]

Just to clarify a few things, I meant 30min-1hr a day workout, and that most of our food is homemade, not all of it.

[Diedel]

Doing fat burner/cardio endurance training is far more effective for losing weight than weight lifting.

But if you think you can beat your bio chemistry to it, go for it.

[CDN_Merlin]

Roller blade 45 mins and you'll burn 750 calories. Easy workout for tons of gain.

Even burgers at 1$ a pop is more expensive than buying a pack of meat, and buns and making 10 burgers for 6$

Also, eating things like potatoes and bread will not help.

Eat in moderation.

[Diedel]

Dakatsu,

Merlin is right when he says that cooking your own meals is always cheaper than going to a restaurant (provided you don't want lobsters for lunch every day ).

If you can, get a Weightwatchers cook book and instructions how to compute the recommended food points/day for you. They have very good recipies.

You will not reach want you want with foul compromises.

Merlin,

amazingly you can eat as much potatoes or noodles as you want, according to Weightwatchers (my wife does that stuff), but e.g. bread and rice are limited ... and even a Latte Macchiato has 2 points (!) or so.

[TIGERassault]

Dakatsu,
By the looks of what she said, it sounds like your girlfriend is really, really, girly! I am ashamed at you!

[Testiculese]

Having a girly-girl is different from being a girly-girl.

I have to break out the roller blades now that the state re-paved all the roads around my house. It is great exercise. Move towards the veggie side of the food spectrum, limit your meats to chicken, fish and pork chops, saving a steak for a Saturday night, and get your protein primarily from things like unsalted nuts. Or bugs, if you're into that...

Something I do as a warmup to lifting, or just for stamina is take dumbells and put as much weight as you can extend sideways (arms parallel to the floor) for ~5 seconds, and shadowbox as fast as is comfortable. Jab, crossover and uppercut, utilizing your whole body. I use 20lbs per arm and go at it for 10 minutes, and it's quite tiring. Do that for a few weeks and you'll be surprised how much faster you get with them.

[Duper]

Dakatsu,
By the looks of what she said, it sounds like your girlfriend is really, really, girly! I am ashamed at you!

would you rather her have a crew-cut and muscles? It could be arranged.....

and yeah... what Testi said!

[Diedel]

Testi,

nuts are *very* fat.

[TIGERassault]

nuts are *very* fat.

So's milk products; big time! Especially chocolate!
If you can, drink skim milk or fat-free milk.

[Testiculese]

So, is that where my big ass came from? Didn't know that...I just know they're loaded with protein. Lucky me, I can eat peanuts and drink milk all day and not gain weight.

[Diedel]

Despite their name, peanuts aren't nuts, they are pulse.

[Dakatsu]

Dakatsu,
By the looks of what she said, it sounds like your girlfriend is really, really, girly! I am ashamed at you!

My girlfriend is... a GIRL? OH SNAP! I'll let her know that!

On the excersize thing, lifting weights 30 mins a day, and I also cut all soda from my diet. It was diet, but it should help (I drink about 6 diet sodas a day normally, had nothing but water for the last two days)

I use six-pound weights, lifting ten times each arm, then switch to the other arm, and just repeat. I do it like you would do jumping jacks, lifting from the waist to arms length.

[Diedel]

Dakatsu,

that's completely inefficient training.

First of all, if you want to burn a lot of calories, you have to use the big muscles (upper legs, back).

Second, the most efficient way to burn calories is to get your heart rate up for a sufficiently long time, and that is at least 30 minutes per day.

Why don't you go to some good fitness club and let some experienced trainer there help you get into effective training?

Of course, nobody can help you if you don't have the discipline and the ambition to pull this through.

[Genghis]

In addition to Diedel's comment, if you're going to cut something out of your diet I don't think that zero- or low-calorie sodas are the thing to worry about.

We don't want to discourage you, but it does appear that you're either unmotivated or unknowledgeable about health and fitness. That's OK, you're in the majority. It's just that the whole process, while not impossible, does take more than a trivial change in lifestyle.

[Diedel]

Or to put it more bluntly:

Losing weight is work. You can make foul compromizes to satisfy your innate laziness, talk yourself out of all facts you have been presented here and convince yourself for a while that you will lose weight \"your way\", but eventually you will come to realize that you won't.

I've seen so many people who wanted to lose weight by weight lifting, because it's not as hard as endurance training, especially for the untrained, but none of them lost their belly fat, even if they gained muscles.

Just one hint to comfort you: The fat burner heart rate is very moderate. You can easily do 30 minutes of fat burner geared endurance training every day watching TV or so on a stationary bicycle, cross trainer or stepper. Just don't make the mistake to eat a lot afterwards because you are feeling hungry. Eat some fruit, and drink enough (no sugar (fruit juice contains a lot of sugar!), no alcohol).

Do a proper diet, and work out properly, or forget about it.

[Sedwick]

My tips according to what I understand and have experienced, some of which has been echoed above:

Aerobics are the only exercise that directly burns fat, as the heart is powered by ketones, which are a product of fat metabolism. Raise the heart rate, and more fat energy is needed. Strength training will also build more lean mass that metabolizes more calories. My NordicTrack helped me stabilize my weight, but it wasn't until I hit the Bowflex (with the NT for a 5-minute warmup) that I was able to lose 30 lbs over the next several months.

Eat whole grains instead of refined/white flour products. That whole \"white is better\" idea is just a century-old marketing scheme that our eyes fell for; many good nutrients are removed, including ones that make you feel fuller and keep hunger away longer. Drink only 100% juice, avoid high-fructose corn syrup (which is also present in all but the grainiest breads). And you ever notice how you only see fat people drinking diet soda? Aspartame is fattening because it distracts the liver from metabolizing fat. Enjoy a party, but otherwise CUT OUT SODA!

Good luck with your transformation.

[Diedel]

Sedwick,

what you wrote about the heart burning fat is not quite correct.

Muscle contraction is driven by adenosine tri-phosphate (ATP) in the mitochondria (parts of the cell). A muscle cell can only hold ATP for about 3 contractions, and you can only increase that storage by about 20% by intense training.

To create ATP, the body uses creatine phosphate, the storage of which lasts about 8 seconds.

For continued efforts, the body produces ATP from glucosis (chemically dissected carbo hydrates) and fatty acids in a complicated chemical process. These processes require oxygen, and the fat metabolism requires considerably more oxygen than using glucosis. The body therefore prefers glucosis. You will also notice that your heart rate rises when your body runs out of carbo hydrates/glucosis during long endureance training. You will probably also start to feel hungry here.

If there is not enough oxygen, the body will use exclusively glucosis to create ATP and in that process will also create lactate. Lactate turns the body's chemical environment acidic, hindering the enzymes required for the metabolic work, finally making the muscles stiff.

Highly trained athletes will use a higher percentage of fat for ATP creation. One reason may be that they can deliver more oxygen to the cells.

This all means that every working muscle burns fat and carbo hydrates, not just the heart, which btw. is a rather small and very efficient muscle.

Getting your heart rate up is basically an indicator that the muscles are working more, thus need more energy and more oxygen to produce it. So the heart will pump more blood through lungs and muscles to satisfy the increased oxygen demand.

Working out therefore will also burn calories, but you will have to work out very intensely to start burning fat. Another effect is that working out will get you in the anaerobic range, where your muscles get stiff. That means you burn primarily glucosis and not fat.

Working out therefore is not the best way to lose fat. You can do endurance training during workout by doing many repetitions with low weight, but you will notice that your heart rate will not increase significantly during that, indicating the muscle does not burn a lot of energy.

To increase your aerobic capacity and elevate the transition from aerobic to anaerobic energy production, 30 - 45 mins of endurance training (running/cycling/swimming) three days a week are already sufficient. The effect of such a training is that during normal endurance training the body will preferrably use fat for energy production, which is exactly the intended effect if you want to reduce body fat.

[Dakatsu]

Okay, if weights won't work, what excersize can I do indoors that would burn calories? (Thats the whole thing, if I had a reasonable option of running 30 mins a day around the block in the daytime, I would.)

[Duper]

lots and lots of sex. (220 calories each \"round\")

Weights will work, but it will take some time. Also, if you power train - bulk building rather than reps, you will actually gain weight as your mass increases.

Like eating, it's good to vary your activity. Lift, but do something else. Ride 10 to 20 miles a day. (I assume you will need to work up to that.) Walk for 30 minutes.. a brisk walk. That's all you really need. It isn't necessary to kill yourself.

[Diedel]

lWeights will work, but it will take some time.

You didn't bother to read what I posted above, did you?

[Duper]

lWeights will work, but it will take some time.

You didn't bother to read what I posted above, did you?

probably not. @ 7:30, my mind has already gone to bed and basic motor functions take over so my family won't suspect.

[Diedel]

I call that \"vegetable mode\".