Having Trouble Losing Your Belly Fat?

If you have had difficulty with central obesity ( belly fat ) for a significant proportion of your life, chances are that the cause of the problem is a chemical imbalance known as Syndrome X or Metabolic Syndrome.

This condition is one that makes it nigh impossible to lose that unwanted mass. Even if you have been rigidly following a low fat diet, you may have found that it has made virtually no difference to your waistline.

This is the type of weight gain that develops when you become insulin resistant.

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This is because belly fat is associated with other metabolic changes such as high blood pressure (hypertension), heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimers disease, chronic inflammation, elevated triglyceride levels, high "bad" cholesterol and lowered "good" cholesterol.

Unless you have been living under a rock somewhere, you would be aware that diabetes and heart disease are reaching epidemic levels in the western world and degenerative diseases generally are decimating our populations. We can sit around with fingers crossed hoping it won't happen to us ...OR we can be proactive in ensuring that our body gets everything it needs at a cellular level to combat the onset of "old age".

Determining whether or not central obesity is a problem for you is easy. Doctors and researchers advise that you only need to measure your waistline just below the navel (belly button for those who weren't paying attention in biology).

If a women's circumference is greater than 88cm (34.5in) or a man measures more than 102cm (40in) then significant belly fat is present and a very real danger exists. You can choose to ignore it and life will go on for years with no apparent ill effects. But do not be deceived, you WILL pay for your carelessness somewhere down the road.

Diseases like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimers don't just suddenly pop up one day out of nowhere. They have been silently brewing under the surface, sometimes for decades before the symptoms become evident. The medical system is not geared to avert disasters like these. The focus is on managing the end result.

I don't know about you, but since learning that simple daily choices can significantly DECREASE my likelihood of becoming a statistic and improve the quality of life I can look forward to in the twilight years, I have become much more discerning about my daily habits.

What Causes This Abdominal Weight Gain?

Studies reveal that as your body becomes insulin resistant, the muscle cells are the first to resist before the fat cells.

This understanding is critical to what happens next because it means that the muscles are unable to receive their allocation of glucose that would normally be delivered after a meal. Instead that glucose is redirected to the fat cells for storage in the abdomen.

If you have read the page on Insulin Resistance you will be aware that the body tries to compensate for this situation by producing greater quantities of insulin in an attempt to drive more glucose into the muscle cells. With greater insulin levels circulating in the blood stream, even more glucose is converted to fat and so the snowball rolls.

More than likely this process has been going on within your body for years and the ballooning waistline has just crept up on you. We all think that we will do something about it tomorrow but it still comes as rude shock to realise that the person staring back at you from that full length mirror is what you have become.

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Three simple things are the answer.

High glycemic diet, inadequate nutrition available from foods produced by modern farming practices and a sedentary lifestyle.

So the good news is these are all things we can do something about and reverse the process so our body resembles the image at the top of the page MORE than the one at the bottom!

How to lose belly fat.

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