5 Reasons You’re Not Losing Belly Fat

Check out my client Brette G’s transformation where he lost a whole bunch of fat.

You’ve been told that if you just cut your calories and take in less calories than you burn you’ll lose your belly fat.

But everytime you try that advice, after a few successful weeks of losing weight you hit a wall, the pounds just stop coming off,

and you’re left stuck there with pretty much the same stubborn belly fat that you started with.

If this sounds like you and you’ve been dieting and working out hard but you’re still struggling to lose that stubborn belly fat I have 5 big tips that can really help.

And all I want you to do, if these tips help you out, which they will is click that subscribe button and hit that bell icon.

Let’s start with one of the biggest mistakes I see which is not factoring in your changing metabolic rate.

Since there’s no way around the fact that your belly fat will be one of the last spots to go,you have to keep your body burning fat for long enough to see the inches coming off your waist.

So most people will say, Easy I’ll just cut my calories by 500 per day and the belly fat will be gone in a few weeks.

However, they’re making the mistake of thinking that their metabolism is going to stay the same week after week,

which it’s not due to a process known as adaptive thermogensis which is essentially the slowing down of your metabolism to make up for the decreased amount of calories that you’re taking in.

This happens independent of muscle loss so you don’t have to lose any muscle and you really don’t need to lose all that much weight for this to happen.

And the simple bottom line is If you’re eating 500 fewer calories per day, but your body is also burning 500 fewer calories per day, you might as well not be dieting at all to begin with.

So I’m gonna tell you exactly how to fix this problem. Studies show that a calorie cycling diet will not slow your metabolism

the way that a more traditional calorie restriction diet would, and cycling happens to also be a lot easier to stick to.Especially when done for longer periods of time. You can cycle your calories a number of ways.

But out of all of the methods if you’re stuck at a plateau your best bet might be to do what’s known as a Matador Intermittent diet plan.With the Matador diet plan you would first apply a more aggressive reduction in calories for 2 weeks.

A normal reduction is around 20% from maintenance, so for a more aggressive one you’ll drop calories by around 30 percent from maintenance.

So if you’re maintenance calories were let’s say 2,000 per day you would subtract 30 percent which would be 600 calories meaning you would only eat 1400 calories per day for 2 weeks.

After 2 weeks of that you’ll bump your calories all the way back up to maintenance levels and eat normally for 2 weeks.

Then repeat. In the matador study they actually compared a group that followed this intermittent 2 weeks on and 2 weeks off approach to another group that just continuously restricted their calories.

After 16 weeks significantly greater weight and fat loss was achieved with the intermittent approach,

while the continuous calorie restriction approach started to plateau. The researchers of the study concluded that

this intermittent approach can reduce the amount that your metabolism will slow down while dieting.

So this can help you not only stick to a diet plan, but it can help you continue to burn fat as the weeks go by.

There are other ways that you can cycle your calories as well. to name a few You can simply eat more calories one day and then less calories the next day,

you can carb cycle by switching between high and low carb days, or you can also do something like an alternate day fast where you don’t eat anything at all one day and then eat normally the next day.

But the matador approach takes into account that your body will take about 2 weeks to adjust to your new caloric intake,

making it the perfect time to switch it up. So it might be the best out of all of these approaches to keep you burning fat.

Let’s move on to the second reason why your belly won’t budge and that’s because you’re not making incremental adjustments to your diet plan overtime.

What I mean is as you lose weight your body will naturally require less calories for everything you do.

So you can’t expect to continue burning fat with the same deficit you started with after losing let’s say 10 or 20 pounds.

You need to continually re adjust your baseline calories as you lose weight. This is easy to see if you use a macro calculator like the one on my website

because you’ll see that if you enter in a lower weight it’ll give you less calories and macros for the day.

So if you’ve lost weight and you notice that you hit a plateau for a week or two you can try reducing your calories by 100 to 200 per day

or just to be certain you can use my macro calculator that’s linked up in the description below to re calculate your macros everytime you lose weight.

Another reason why you’re not losing belly fat is simply because you’ve created a diet plan that’s impossible to stick to.

For example you might’ve completely eliminated an entire macro nutrient out of your meal plan.

Like let’s say you’re doing a keto diet, that means you have to keep your carbs under 5 percent of your daily calorie intake.

That’s pretty much no carbs. And I’m not saying that you can’t lose plenty of belly fat on the ketogenic diet,

but what I am saying is that you won’t lose any belly fat if you can’t stick to your meal plan for the duration of that diet.While some people will do very well giving up carbs all together, there are many people that just can’t do it.

If you love eating carbs it’s probably not the best idea to decide that you’re going to give them up entirely just to lose some body fat.

Burning belly fat is not an overnight process so you will have to be on a plan that you can actually stick to.There is no one right way to eat to burn fat. Carbs and fats are just alternative fuel sources for your body,

you’re not required to completely eliminate one and instead you can just moderately reduce both of them and get the same results that you would by severely restricting or completely eliminating one of them.

It was proven that low fat and low carb diets produce similar results when over 600 people were divided between a low carb diet group and a low fat diet group for a full year.

At the end of the study both groups lost almost the same exact amount of weight. On top of that regardless of whether you go low carb,

low fat or reduce both you don’t have to eat any specific foods like broccoli, sweet potatoes or fish if you don’t like them.

Of course you’ll want to eliminate refined carbohydrates, sugar, and unhealthy fats. And you’ll want to choose whole single ingredient foods that are high in nutrients,

fill your stomach up, and satisfy your daily calorie and macro targets, but there’s a huge variety of food that fits these requirements.

There’s no reason for you to be forcing yourself to eat things that you don’t like or things that don’t make you feel good.

Because if you hate your diet plan you won’t stick to it for long enough to see the belly fat start to come off.

Moving on we have our fourth mistake which is trying to lose your belly fat just by doing a ton of cardio.

And even though cardio can help you lose some belly fat it’s something that you should use sparingly if you want a nice looking physique.

You see if you try to burn all your belly fat off by just doing cardio you’ll most likely wind up skinny fat at the end of it and instead of having six pack abs you’ll still have some stubborn fat covering your midsection.

The first reason for this is because cardio does not provide the muscle preservation effects that weight training provides.When you cut calories and create a calorie deficit your body is more likely to lose muscle mass.

If you lose muscle, your resting metabolic rate will drop, and I’ve already explained how that alone can prevent you from losing body fat.

But what if you do cardio with weight training? Wouldn’t that be an effective strategy against muscle loss, while helping you burn fat faster.

Well let’s take a closer look. When we look at a number of studies on the subject we find that there’s something known as the concurrent training effect or the interference effect.

In a nutshell your body isn’t that great at serving two purposes at the same time. Three studies in particular show that combining resistance training and cardio leads to decreased lower body strength gains,

less explosive strength gains, and less strength gains in circuit training. This is believed to be because prolonged and repetitive low intensity endurance like steady state cardio activities enzymes AMPK and CaMK.

While these enzymes play a vital role in regulating your energy during endurance and cardio type training like walking, swimming, and running they’re not so great for building muscle.

This is due to the fact that in most instances AMPK inhibits Akt and mTOR, which is a crucial muscle-building pathway.

So, even though you can do both cardio and resistance training to get the optimal results that each of these provide you will have to lean in one direction over the other.

And if you’re looking to build a nice physique and lose your belly fat it’s going to help you a lot more in the long run to focus on strength training

since strength training is what will help you build more muscle ultimately speeding up your metabolism.

On the other hand not only will doing too much cardio decrease strength gains from your weight training workouts, but it’ll also decrease explosive power by slowing muscle activation speed,

lead to chronic depletion of your glycogen stores, and you don’t want that because you need that glycogen to be able to progressively lift the heavier and heavier weights you need to build muscle.

On top of that too much cardio will change your muscle fiber types from the fast twitch that are better for strength and muscle growth to the slow twitch which are better for endurance.

All of this goes without saying that doing a lot of cardio and weight training together can lead to over training which will further mess with muscle recovery and growth.

So, the bottom line is that you should not be doing cardio only programs to create a nice physique.Instead you should be doing the minimum amount of cardio necessary to help the fat loss process along.

I recommend starting with no cardio, and when you hit plateaus slowly adding in 1 short high intensity interval training cardio session at a time.

These sessions would be made up of on and off activities that cycle between short intervals of explosive bursts and short intervals of rest.

An example would be repeating 8 to 10 rounds of sprinting for 30 seconds and then walking for 60 seconds.

This all brings us to the last reason that you’re not losing belly fat and it’s because you’re not focusing enough on building muscle and strength.

I know you’re probably wondering what building muscle has to do with losing belly fat, but I’ve worked with many clients that could cut their calories really low and do tons of exercise, but still couldn’t get their stomachs to look the way they wanted.

It was only after we spent a good amount of time working on progressively improving strength and building muscle that they were able to start burning fat away from their problem areas.

If you’re skinny fat, the solution to losing your stubborn fat isn’t to continue cutting calories further and further to try to burn fat, the solution is to build muscle.

If you’ve spent a long time not exercising and you’re older than 25 years old you probably lost muscle mass over that period of time.

Rebuilding that muscle and speeding up your metabolism should be your number one priority.

Multiple studies show that the best way to do that is by training with heavy weight. This is because when you lift heavy weights, you’ll primarily target your fast-twitch fibers as opposed to your slow twitch muscle fibers which get activated when you lift lighter weights for more reps.

The Fast-twitch fibers used for heavy weight lifting have a much greater potential for growth than slow-twitch fibers.

Also the number one way to build muscle is by increasing the tension placed on the muscles and the more weight you use, the more mechanical tension you’ll place on your muscles.

This is true up to a certain point. The key takeaway is that for your weight training workouts,

you’ll want to just make sure you’re lifting heavy enough weights for a rep range between 3 and 10 reps.

You will have to be paitent putting in the time to build up muscle, but I promise you ultimately it’s going to pay off and help you lose stubborn fat.

That’s it guys I really hope this tip has helped you out and  if you want a super easy streamlined approach for losing body fat fast that requires no trail and error on your part try my 6 week challenge.

This program has over 1,000 5 star reviews from people that have lost either 20 pounds or 5 percent body fat in just 6 weeks.

With the challenge you’ll get a 42 day fat loss workout plan, a fat burning meal plan that’s based on your body and preferences, a recipe book,

and an accountability coach that will check in with you every week and guide you through the entire challenge.

On top of that we motivate you to actually stick to the program and follow through from day 1 to day 42 by giving you the program for free as long as you complete it.

To find out more you can click the link in the description below, or you can visit my website directly at gravitytransformation.com