How to Lose Belly Fat If You’re a Man Over 40

If you’re a man in your 30s or 40s looking for a proven way to get rid of the fat from your belly, without eating a bunch of weird foods, doing hours of boring cardio, or buying expensive (and often totally useless) supplements, this page will show you how.

Here’s the story:

A while back, one of my best friends asked for my advice on the best way to lose his belly fat.

He’d recently entered the “dating scene” after getting a divorce from his wife of 11 years.

And let’s just say that he wasn’t quite as lean as he was when he met her.

So, rather than wasting time giving him advice that he would promptly forget, I decided to send him a link to an article that explained how to get rid of belly fat.

Problem is, I couldn’t find anything decent.

In fact, much of it was nonsense.

There was even one article that claimed you could literally “burn” fat cells out of your belly using nothing more than the palm of your hand.

I kid you not.

So, to restore some balance to the universe, I took matters into my own hands and wrote an article that explains exactly how to go about losing your gut.

It did end up being slightly longer than I planned.

So if you have the attention span of a trapped fly on speed, it’s not for you.

And, if you’re looking for a magic bullet, be it a special exercise, hormone or food, that holds “the key” to changing your physique, it’s time to hit the back button now.

But, if you’re after some straight talk on exactly how to get rid of your belly fat, here it is.

It’s often said that you should do aerobic exercise to lose fat, and train with weights if you want to build muscle. But that statement is only partially true.

Think of your belly fat like a bank account. But instead of storing money, it stores energy.

If you want the amount of money stored in your bank account to go down, you have to spend more than you’re earning. In much the same way, getting rid of belly fat is all about creating an energy deficit by “spending” more energy than you get from your diet.

The only true requirement when it comes to losing fat is an energy deficit. And you can create that deficit with diet, resistance exercise, or aerobic exercise. You can also use a combination of all three.

Lifting weights isn’t just for people who want to gain muscle, and will improve your body composition in two ways.

Firstly, if you don’t do some form of resistance exercise while you diet, much of the weight you lose will come from muscle as well as fat. Losing muscle means that you’ll lose weight more quickly, as one pound of muscle contains a lot less energy than one pound of fat [3].

But you’ll just end up looking like a slightly smaller version of your current self, with many of the “flabby bits” still intact.

Second, with a properly designed strength-training program, you’ll burn fat both during and after your workout.

In one study, researchers from East Carolina University had a group of eight men lift weights for 40-45 minutes [6]. Each man had a microdialysis probe inserted into his belly. This allowed the researchers to measure the amount of fat that was released from fat cells under the skin before, during, and after the workout.

Here’s what they found:

Metabolic rate was over 10% higher after the men had lifted weights (104 calories per hour) compared with the same time point on the control day (95 calories per hour). The rate of fat burning was doubled (10 versus 5 grams per hour) following resistance exercise.

But that’s not all. The amount of fat being released from fat cells in the stomach was around 80% higher both during and immediately after the workout.

In other words, lifting weights will burn fat, and some of that fat will come straight from your belly.

It’s true that many studies to compare resistance with aerobic exercise show that, on the whole, aerobic exercise works a lot better for getting rid of belly fat [4].

However, many of these studies use resistance training programs with a very low metabolic demand — the exercises are performed on machines, many of them are single-joint movements that isolate small muscle groups, and the overall training volume is relatively low.

A routine based on exercises with a high metabolic demand is another story entirely.

I’m talking about squats, deadlifts, rows, chin-ups (or pulldowns) and presses (bench press and overhead press), using a weight that limits you to between 5 and 15 repetitions per set.

With this type of training, you’ll burn calories both during and after the workout. And unless you have plans to step in the ring with Georges St-Pierre, you won’t need to spend more than 45 minutes in the gym. That’s more than enough to get the job done.

What about so-called “fat burning” foods?

One question that seems to appear in my inbox on an almost daily basis centers on the effect that individual foods have on weight loss.

It seems people want to hear that there are “good” foods and “bad” foods, and if you want to drop fat, all you need to do is eat less of the bad ones and more of the good ones.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the idea there are special foods (blueberries, dark chocolate, avocados and so on) that will somehow burn fat is complete nonsense.

But it’s the sort of nonsense that seems to pop up every so often on daytime TV or in the happy-clappy health magazines when they’ve got no more “declutter your life” or “I’m okay and you’re okay” articles left to publish.

There are certain “hot” foods (such as red pepper) that give your metabolism a lift [10]. But the overall effect is relatively small, and it’s debatable whether the short-term increase in metabolism has much of an impact on fat loss over time.

At the risk of repeating myself, getting rid of belly fat requires an energy deficit, and it’s your overall diet rather than any individual food that will determine your rate of fat loss.

That being said, there is one nutrient – protein – that will make it a lot easier for you to burn off belly fat.

Studies show that protein does a better job at filling you up than carbohydrate or fat. Eat a protein-rich breakfast, for example, and chances are that you won’t eat as much food for lunch.

The figure below is from a University of Washington study where dieters were told to eat roughly twice as much protein as normal [8]. The circles at the top represent daily calorie intake, while the diamonds at the bottom represent body weight.

Reference: http://tinyurl.com/grhcsrk