Hello and welcome to Kettlebell Movement!
Many people ask me how to get rid of fat in a certain area of their body, under the impression that training a muscle burns fat in that specific area. While it is possible to notice better muscle tone from training one muscle at a time, it won’t help you burn fat around the muscle being trained. The specific areas that your body stores fat are based upon hormones and genetics. If weight loss is your goal, eating right and exercising using high energy output exercises are your best bet. For some people, removing hormones from foods, pharmaceuticals or supplements may also be beneficial. If you are using the birth control pill, eating soy, or consuming meats injected with steroids you may want to eliminate these things to see how they have been effecting you. These can make your body store fat in places that it wouldn’t normally want to as well as make it tough to lose.
Once your diet is free of hormones, I recommend focusing on eating the highest quality foods you can find as well as taking in to account your unique biology. Certain foods may cause you to become inflamed in your gut and as a result you might notice that your belly looks bigger. This is different than the fat that accumulates around your waist, this is inflammation from the inside pushing your stomach out. For most, the only way to be certain is to do an elimination diet and slowly introduce potentially inflammatory foods slowly, with a great deal of observation. Our 7 Day Program is a great place to start when trying to remove inflammatory foods.
Personally, I know most grain will cause me to gain weight from inflammation. The moment i eat white flour, I will have a mild allergic reaction in my mouth. For many years, I barely noticed it and just thought that the food was making my mouth feel funny, no big deal. However, after the elimination of grains from my diet, that allergic reaction in my mouth became much more obvious. I was able to notice how the food would cause a reaction all the way down to my stomach and in some cases even cause reflux. Over many days, these foods will make you swell up in the abdomen. Getting your digestion on track by eating only the right foods and potentially adding a probiotic if necessary will help get you back to normal.
Most people have some foods that cause them distress, but many of those foods don’t have any obvious warning signs at the moment of consumption. For this reason, it makes it very difficult to know which foods are causing weight gain or any other kind of distress. When you exercise, train movement, not muscle. This will burn more calories in a given amount of time and also have more carry over to real world movement. I promise you, all the ab crunches in the world won’t help you burn the fat on your stomach, but they might cause bad posture if you do enough of them. Watch my video to learn more about spot training fat and muscle. And most importantly, always listen to your body and respond accordingly.
Thank you for reading,
Peter Hirsh
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