Sunday, January 29, 2012

Is Abdominal Fat Dangerous

Excess Abdominal Fat is Not Only Ugly, but Extremely Dangerous to Your Health - This is More Than a Vanity Issue!




The difference between subcutaneous fat and the more deadly "visceral fat"



by Mike Geary, Certified Nutrition Specialist, Certified Personal Trainer

author of best-selling program: The Truth about Six-Pack Abs







Although this picture depicts an extremely overweight man, this article applies to dangerous types of fat inside the bodies of both men and women... and this discussion also applies even if you only have a slight amount of excess stomach fat.



Did you know that the vast majority of people in this day and age have excess abdominal fat? It's true -- as much as 70% of the population in some "westernized" countries such as the US and Australia are now considered either overweight or obese. The first thing that most people think of is that their extra abdominal fat is simply ugly, is covering up their abs from being visible, and makes them self conscious about showing off their body.





However, what most people don't realize is that excess abdominal fat in particular, is not only ugly, but is also a dangerous risk factor to your health. Scientific research has clearly determined that although it is unhealthy in general to have excess body fat throughout your body, it is also particularly dangerous to have excess abdominal fat.



There are two types of fat that you have in your abdominal area. The first type that covers up your abs from being visible is called subcutaneous fat and lies directly beneath the skin and on top of the abdominal muscles.



The second type of fat that you have in your abdominal area is called visceral fat, and that lies deeper in the abdomen beneath your muscle and surrounding your organs. Visceral fat also plays a role in giving certain men that "beer belly" appearance where their abdomen protrudes excessively but at the same time, also feels sort of hard if you push on it.



Both subcutaneous fat and visceral fat in the abdominal area are serious health risk factors, but science has shown that having excessive visceral fat is even more dangerous than subcutaneous fat. Both types of fat greatly increase your risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, sleep apnea, various forms of cancer, and other degenerative diseases.



Excess stomach fat has also been associated in studies with higher levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), an indicator of inflammation within the body that can lead to heart disease and other health issues.



Part of the reason visceral fat is particularly dangerous is that studies show that it releases more inflammatory molecules into your system on a consistent basis.



One of the major reasons that some people accumulate more visceral fat than others can be from a high carbohydrate diet that leads to insulin resistance over time (years of bombarding your system with too much sugars and starches for your body to properly handle the constant excess blood sugar) ... and studies show that high fructose intake particularly from high-fructose corn syrup can be a major contributor to excess visceral fat.



If you care about the quality of your life and your loved ones, reducing your abdominal fat (including reducing visceral fat) should be one of your TOP priorities! There's just no way around it. Besides, a side effect of finally getting rid of all of that excessive abdominal fat is that your stomach will flatten out, and if you lose enough stomach fat, you will be able to visibly see those attractive six pack abs that everyone wants.



So what gets rid of extra abdominal fat, including visceral fat?



Is there actually a REAL solution beyond all of the gimmicks and hype that you see in ads and on commercials for "miracle" fat loss products?



The first thing you must understand is that there is absolutely NO quick fix solution. There are no pills or supplements of any sort that will help you lose your abdominal fat faster. Also, none of the gimmicky ab rockers, rollers, or ab belts will help get rid of abdominal fat either. You can't spot reduce your stomach fat by using any of these worthless contraptions. It simply doesn't work that way.



The only solution to consistently lose your abdominal fat and keep it off for good is to combine a sound nutritious diet full of unprocessed natural foods with a properly designed strategic exercise program that stimulates the necessary hormonal and metabolic response within your body. Both your food intake as well as your training program are important if you are to get this right.



I've actually even seen a particular study that divided thousands of participants into a diet-only group and an exercise & diet combined group. While both groups in this study made good progress, the diet-only group lost significantly LESS abdominal fat than the diet & exercise combined group.



Now the important thing to realize is that just any old exercise program will not necessarily do the trick. The majority of people that attempt getting into a good exercise routine are NOT working out effectively enough to really stimulate the loss of stubborn abdominal fat. I see this every day at the gym.



Most people will do your typical boring ineffective cardio routines, throw in a little outdated body-part style weight training, and pump away with some crunches and side bends, and think that they are doing something useful for reducing their abdominal fat. Then they become frustrated after weeks or months of no results and wonder where they went wrong.



Well, the good news is that I've spent over a decade researching this topic, analyzing the science, and applying it "in the trenches" with myself as well as thousands of my clients from all over the world to see what works to really stimulate abdominal fat loss.



From my research, two of the most important aspects to getting rid of visceral fat are:



1. The use of high intensity forms of exercise and full-body resistance training. Low intensity cardio exercise simply isn't as effective for removing visceral fat in particular. High intensity exercise such as interval training or full-body weight training are very effective at helping to improve your body's ability to manage glucose and increases insulin sensitivity, a crucial step in removing visceral fat. These types of high intensity exercise routines are also very effective at increasing your fat-burning hormones and creating a hormonal environment conducive to burning off abdominal fat, including visceral fat.



2. In addition, it's vitally important to get blood sugar under control to help restore insulin sensitivity through the right nutrition. This means greatly reducing sugars and refined starches in your diet (including fully eliminating any use of harmful high fructose corn syrup!), and focusing more of your diet on healthy fats (such as avocados, nuts, seeds, coconut fat, olive oil, free-range eggs, fatty fish and fish oils, etc), as well as increasing protein and fiber intake. The standard diet recommended by the government, which contains an unnaturally high grain intake is NOT conducive to controlling blood sugar and reducing visceral fat!



Reducing grain-based foods in your diet and getting more of your carbs from veggies and high fiber fruits such as berries can go a long way to helping to solve this problem.



Learn the Truth about Losing Your Stomach Fat Permanently



You may not realize this, but the entire basis of my Truth about Six Pack Abs program is NOT about abs exercises... instead, it's actually about detailed strategies for both nutrition and exercise that maximize your ability to lose abdominal fat. The entire solution... all of the nutritional strategies, as well as training sequences, exercise combinations, and more have all been compiled in my Truth About Six Pack Abs Program in order to help you to burn stomach fat faster.



Keep in mind that the whole point of this program is NOT abdominal exercises (that is only a very small portion of it). The main point of this program is showing you the absolute most effective nutritional strategies for losing your stubborn abdominal fat, and maximizing a fat-burning hormonal environment in your body so you can get rid of that dangerous health risk, as well as get a flatter more defined midsection.



If you follow the guidelines, you WILL lose your belly fat that has been plaguing you for years. This is not guesswork... it is a proven system that works time and time again for all of my clients on every corner of the globe that actually apply these strategies. If you apply it, the results will come. It's really that simple.



One of the main reasons that most people fail in their fitness goals is that they have good intentions at first to adopt a new lifestyle, yet after a few weeks or months, they abandon their good intentions and slip right back into their old bad habits that gave them the excess body fat in the first place.



I want to help you succeed in finally getting rid of that extra abdominal fat that is not only UGLY, but also DANGEROUS. A lot of people have emailed my support team with questions about whether they need any special equipment for these workouts, if they're too old or too young for this program, if the diet tips will apply to them, etc. I've made a page that should answer all of your questions...



FAQ - Questions about the Truth about Six Pack Abs abdominal fat loss program



Also, I completely understand that you're skeptical if this will actually work for you... so I think you'll want to see some of the reader reviews from people just like you that are using the system and getting killer results...



Reader Reviews of the Truth about Six Pack Abs abdominal fat loss program



Don't waste another day allowing that nasty abdominal fat to kill your confidence as well as contribute to your risk for MAJOR diseases.



Get the solution to rid yourself for life of this problem by reading more details about this unique workout and diet program at the home page -- Losing Dangerous Abdominal Fat



Train hard, eat right, and enjoy life!

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

3 So-Called "Healthy" Foods that You Should STOP Eating

3 So-Called "Healthy" Foods that You Should STOP Eating (if you want a lean healthy body)




by Mike Geary, Certified Personal Trainer, Certified Nutrition Specialist

Author of the best-seller: The Truth About Six Pack Abs





I was reading a statistic in a nutrition book recently, and this is going to shock you...



Now before I tell you the statistic, let's keep an important fact in mind... according to well renowned nutrition author Michael Pollan, and his amazing book called In Defense of Food, humankind has historically consumed approximately 80,000 different species of edible plants, animals, and fungi, and approximately 3,000 of those have been widespread foods of the human diet.



Now get ready for a shocking and appalling statistic...



Currently, the average adult eating a typical modern western diet in countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, etc consumes approximately 67% of their total caloric intake from only 3 foods -- CORN, SOY, AND WHEAT (and their derivatives).



What would be considered a reasonably healthy amount of corn, soy, and wheat in the human diet? Based on 10's of thousands of years of human history, and what the natural diet of our ancestors was (indicating what our digestive systems are still programmed to process), this would probably be in the range of about 1% to 5% MAX of our total calories from corn, soy, and wheat.



Considering that modern humans are eating 67% of their total calories from corn, soy, wheat... you can see why we have massive problems in our health, and our weight!



It's not a surprise that we have so many intolerances and allergies, specifically to soy and wheat (and gluten intolerance)... the human digestive system was simply never meant to consume these substances in such MASSIVE quantities.



Keep in mind that these massively high levels of corn, soy, and wheat in our modern human diet is a relatively new phenomenon that originated from the economics of the multi-billion dollar corn, soy, and wheat industries. It really HAS been all about the money... NOT about our health!



By "derivatives" of corn, soy, and wheat, this means the food additives such as:



•high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)

•corn oil

•soybean oil (hydrogenated or plain refined)

•soy protein

•refined wheat flour

•hundreds of other food additives such as maltodextrin, corn or wheat starch, soy lecithin, mono and diglycerides, etc, etc

This doesn't surprise me... consider how much soda or other sweetened drinks (with loads of HFCS) that the average person drinks daily... this is a LOT of calories from just 1 sole corn derivative. Even marinades, salad dressings, ketchup, breads, and 100's of other foods contain loads of belly-fattening HFCS!



Also think about how many processed foods we have that are either fried in soybean or corn oil... and even if the foods are not fried in these oils, these oils are additives to almost every processed food... chips, candies, cakes, salad dressings, tomato sauces, burrito wraps, corn chips, breaded chicken, etc, etc. This is a LOT of calories from these 2 other corn and soy derivatives... both of them EXTREMELY UNHEALTHY!



On top of that, think about how much breads, cereals, pastas, muffins, and other highly processed wheat products that most people consume each day. Again, this is LOADS of unhealthy, blood-sugar spiking, nutrient-poor calories, that more than half of the population has some degree of intolerance to anyway.



It gets even worse!



Not only are we eating 67% of our total calories from corn, soy, and wheat... but because of the economics involved (specifically with cheap corn and soy) we are also feeding most of our farm animals corn and soy now too... again amplifying the amount of corn and soy that passes through the food chain and (from a biochemical standpoint) ends up in our bodies.



Probably the 2 worst examples of this blatant mismanagement of our food supply is how our factory farmed chickens and cows are fed.



Cows are fed mostly corn in factory feedlot farms, even though their digestive systems are only meant to eat grass and other forage. This makes the cows sick (hmm... E-coli anyone?), alters the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of the fats to unhealthy levels, and also diminishes the healthy CLA fats that would occur naturally in grass-fed beef. All of these problems go away if our cows are fed what they were made to eat naturally - grass and other green forage!



Our chickens are also fed a diet of mostly corn and soy and crowded in tight pens in horrendous conditions... when the fact is that a chicken was meant to roam around the outdoors eating a mixture of greens, insects, worms, seeds, etc. When chickens are kept inside in tight quarters and fed only grains, it leads to an unhealthy meat for you to eat, and less healthy eggs compared to free-roaming chickens allowed to eat an outdoors diet.



Our food supply has gotten so screwed up that we're even feeding our salmon and other farmed fish corn and soy...again because of the economics involved. How ludicrous is this, considering that fish are meant to eat a diverse diet of smaller fish, worms, bugs, etc. Again this makes farm raised fish unhealthy in terms of nutrition compared to their wild counterparts. If you want to see something even scarier about farm-raised fish, watch this quick video about the toxic fish you might be buying.



So even when you're eating chicken, beef, and fish, you're still essentially getting even MORE corn and soy into your body (from a biochemical standpoint) ...considering that the cows, chickens, and farmed fish ate mostly soy and corn.



So it's actually WORSE than just 67% isn't it!



Why is it so unhealthy to consume 2/3rds of our calories from corn, soy, and wheat?



Well, this section could encompass an entire book, so to keep this short, I'll just throw out a few random reasons...



•Skews the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats in our diet to as high as 30:1, when a natural ratio of 1:1 to 2:1 in our ancestral human diet is considered healthy.

•Problems with gluten intolerance (related to heavy wheat consumption that is rampant)

•Problems with weight gain, blood-sugar swings, and reduced insulin sensitivity (and progression of diabetes) due to excessive refined corn and wheat flours, as well as HFCS in our diet

•Soy and corn are the most genetically modified crops (which also allows more pesticides and herbicides to be used, which are usually "xenoestrogens")

•Many of the pesticide and herbicide residues in these crops are xenoestrogens, which can increase "stubborn" belly fat

•Soy products and derivatives contain a double-whammy of xenoestrogens as well as phytoestrogens... again creating an environment in your body for fat storage, carcinogenic effects, and even "man boobs" for some men in very severe cases

•The feeding of corn and soy to animals reduces the health and nutritional benefits (and micronutrient levels) of those animal products

•and the list could go on and on and on...

So how do you avoid all of this overwhelming amount of corn, soy, and wheat in our food supply, and finally take control of your weight and your health?



1. Don't purchase processed foods! It all starts with your grocery cart discipline... choose only 1-ingredient foods such as fruits, veggies, beans, eggs (free roaming), nuts, seeds, and meats from grass-fed or free roaming animals that are raised correctly. Organic is preferred. Only resort to junk foods or processed foods on a 1-day per week "cheat day" but ONLY when dining out... that way, the processed foods aren't in your house to tempt you.



2. Get most of your carbs from fruits and veggies instead of grains.



3. Avoid store bought salad dressings as they almost always contain soybean oil and HFCS (instead, try my homemade healthy salad dressing)



4. Make sure that your tomato sauces don't have HFCS and soybean oils... look for sauces made with olive oil instead. Remember to avoid unhealthy canola oils too!



5. If you like guacamole (one of the healthiest snacks on the planet!), try veggie sticks with guacamole instead of genetically-modified, oil-soaked corn chips



6. If you like hummus, try veggies sticks with hummus instead of pita chips or other bread.



7. Reduce your cereal, bread, and pasta intake by having these foods only on "cheat days" and stick to more of the 1-ingredient foods I mentioned in #1 above. Try some of these healthy snacks as good alternatives (yes, I know that one of the 13 snacks on there has sprouted grain, which is fine on occasion).



I could go on with more examples, but I think that's good for now.



So with all of this said... Is my diet perfect? Well, no of course not! Nobody is perfect, and I can give in to temptation on occasion just like anybody else.



However, I'd estimate that my corn/soy/wheat consumption is only about 2-4% of my total caloric intake compared to 67% for the average person. The way that I achieve this is to simply not bring any corn, soy, or wheat products into my house, so I'm never tempted by it. Therefore, at least 6 days/week, I eat virtually no corn/soy/wheat, except for the occasional piece of sprouted grain toast a couple times a week (which is a better option than typical "whole grain" bread).



I do, however, give in and sometimes eat breads, pasta, and even corn chips, etc. when I'm dining out. I see these as my cheat meals and try to do this no more than once per week. I still completely eliminate sodas and deep fried foods though...they are just TOO evil!



Please share this article with your friends and family on email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, etc... this is one of the MAJOR reasons that we are so unhealthy and overweight as a society... 67% of our calories from just 3 foods (and their derivatives) is an appalling statistic! Don't give in to the marketing machine that is the corn, soy, and wheat industries! Take control of your OWN health instead of letting big corporations take control of your health.



If you liked this article, please Share it with your friends below.



5 Foods that FIGHT Abdominal Fat



Monday, January 2, 2012

14-Day Rapid Fat Loss Guide (print this out)

Here's one of the most popular fitness articles on the web

where you'll get a complete 14-day guide for rapid fat loss

to kick off 2012.



Read it here and print it out -


It's the exact plan fitness expert Craig Ballantyne gave to

his ol' college buddy who had gained 25 pounds since the

birth of his baby boy.



It's your complete 14-day FAST-TRACK guide to fat loss

(if you like it, please forward it to a friend or print

them off a copy too):



Get your 14-day rapid results blueprint here <= share this




It's the perfect way to kick-off the New Year,



Sincerely,



Rafael Moret
http://www.ratedrfitness.com/