Be healthy and burn fat in the long term
Many people are having trouble getting rid of their belly fat. But you only need to change three things to lose fat: a change in diet, interval training (HITT), and, most importantly, effective strength training.
At 30%, they are the biggest lever for fat burning. Many people think an hour of walking is enough. But they burn maybe 400 to 600 calories, mostly from carbohydrates. Perhaps 10 percent of that, or 40 to 60 calories, is burned from fat. That's less than 10 grams. It's pointless.
The key point is that the energy burned from carbohydrates creates an incredible appetite. If someone walks for an hour and burns energy from carbohydrates, they will replenish that energy with food. When you burn energy from fat, you don't feel hungry because the energy stores in your muscles are still full.
Getting energy from fat is different for everyone.
Fat metabolism is a bodily ability that can be trained. It largely depends on hormones produced in the muscles. When I do strength training and when I use a lot of muscle in everyday life, I produce these hormones. A well-trained person gets 60 percent of their energy from body fat. Therefore, for most people, the biggest lever for weight loss is strength training – not diet or endurance training.
Cutting fat in your diet isn't a good idea because fat is involved in many processes in the body. It's a building block for cells, a carrier of fat-soluble vitamins, and helps produce important hormones. It's important to eat the right fats, like nuts. Those who want to lose weight should pay particular attention to two things in their diet: Avoid alcohol, as it blocks fat burning for days, and give the body a chance to burn fat.
Whenever you eat, fat burning is blocked. This means:
- If you eat breakfast at 8am, there is no fat burning until 11am
- If you drink a coffee with milk at 11am, there will be no fat burning until 2pm
- then you eat lunch and have no fat burning until 5 pm
- then you drink coffee and eat a piece of cake and have no fat burning until 7 p.m.
- then you eat dinner and have no fat burning until 10 pm
- You hardly burn any fat while sleeping anyway
Give your body periods in which it can burn fat. Ideally, only have three meals: morning, noon, and evening. Nothing in between except water or black coffee. You need to eat enough and healthy meals at these meals to meet your energy needs, so avoid sweets as much as possible, and you need long periods without food to burn any fat at all.
Type-appropriate strength training three times a week
Then there's strength training or interval training (HITT). It builds muscle and corrects posture and movement patterns. Interval training only takes six to ten minutes. You do six 30-second bursts of full throttle, for example, on the treadmill, followed by four minutes of moderate jogging. You should be completely out of breath afterward. This suggests to your body that you're in an emergency situation. It should also feel like that.
To do this, it taps into its beloved fat reserves, and that requires an enormous amount of energy. Stored energy from carbohydrates isn't enough; that's perhaps 1,500 calories. Since the body doesn't know whether it might have to run for its life for the next hour, and needs more like 5,000 calories for that, it switches to fat burning.
10 kilos of fat contains 90,000 calories, which is a considerable buffer. Interval training increases the proportion of energy the body gets from fat.
So that it can tap into its beloved fat reserves. The intense exertion could mean running away from a saber-toothed tiger. That requires an enormous amount of energy. The stored energy from carbohydrates isn't enough for that; it's perhaps 1,500 calories. Since the body doesn't know whether it might have to run for its life for the next hour, and needs 5,000 calories for that, it switches to fat burning: 10 kilos of fat contains 90,000 calories, which is a good way to go. Interval training increases the proportion of energy the body gets from fat.
Interval training not only for advanced athletes
No, you can adjust the intensity of the exercises. For beginners, we do something easy, like 30 seconds of squats. Or jumping on the spot, if possible. For advanced users, it gets more intense: For example, they get a 28cm kettlebell and do a 30-second swing, which means they swing the kettlebell between their legs at chest height.
