Stubborn fat is tough to get rid of, but these tips will help you lose that lower belly fat and love handles that just don't seem to budge. If you are stuck and can't lose any more belly fat regardless of how much you workout and diet please go through, it will help.
There are physiological differences between regular body fat and stubborn fat. Stubborn fat tends to accumulate around the belly and love handles for men, as well as the hips and thighs for women. Stubborn fatty areas around your body just don't seem to burn off or change much even as you see the pounds fall off the scale. You might see changes in your arms, your face, and other areas that are further away from your center of mass while your belly fat or love handles basically stay the same.
There are a couple reasons for this, one is that stubborn fat tends to have a higher ratio of alpha-receptors than beta receptors making the fat release at a slower rate from those last spots that just don't seem to budge. These stubborn areas tend to receive less blood flow than regular subcutaneous fat as well. This means that even after you trigger fat loss with diet and exercise, and that causes your body to release the triglycerides that are found within your fat cells, Those triglycerides still have to be broken down into fatty acids and mobilized through the bloodstream to get "burnt off". So the lack of blood flow to these sites in combination with the receptors makes it much more difficult to release and mobilize fat, making fat loss much slower from these stubborn areas. So how do we actually get to that fat and burn it off once and for all?
Well first I know it might already be obvious but you have to be in a calorie deficit to create the conditions to burn fat, to begin with. If you're currently not burning any fat at all, and you're not losing any weight off the scale for a few weeks or longer, that most likely means that you're currently not in a calorie deficit. This could be for a number of reasons especially if you've already been dieting for some time. For example, as you cut calories to create a calorie deficit, even if you do everything right, you'll still lose some muscle over time, slowing your metabolism. You'll also be losing fat mass over time. Fat cells require energy to maintain. So when you lose fat while dieting you also reduce the amount of energy required to maintain your body. Since your overall body weight or body mass will also go down, basic movements will require less energy further slowing your resting metabolism. So as you burn more fat and get closer to the stubborn areas, your body will require less and less energy, so you'll have to reduce your calories further. To drive this home this means that even if a macro calculator says that you have to eat 2000 calories per day to be in a calorie deficit and burn fat if you're not losing any inches or pounds and you're tracking your calories at 2000 per day, it literally means that the calculator is wrong and you're likely at maintenance, and you'll have to subtract calories further to put yourself into an actual deficit to continue burning fat, and eventually get to that stubborn fat.
And that brings me to tip number 2 before you assume that you're stuck and you start restricting calories further, make sure that you're actually tracking your calories for a full week and that you're tracking them accurately. Too many times people assume they're eating fewer calories than they actually are. This has been a consistent problem for not only average conditioned people but also for more advanced bikini and physique competitors that I've trained. So just spend at least a few days, and track every calorie including the condiments that most people usually leave out, the oils you use, and the sugar in the creamer that you add to your coffee. After tracking if you still haven't lost weight or inches during that week, lower your calories by about another 200 to 300 calories and you'll probably notice more fat loss the following week. Keep in mind this process of dropping more calories is something that you may have to repeat a few times as your body adapts to your diet.
And that actually brings us to the third tip, which is to incorporate refeeds or calorie cycling to blunt and maybe even reverse a process known as adaptive thermogenesis. This is essentially a term used to describe your metabolism slowing down more than what can be expected just from losing fat mass and muscle mass alone. This so-called "starvation response" seems to be a natural response to the decreased amount of calories or energy that you're taking in. And as you get leaner and closer to burning that stubborn fat, adaptive thermogenesis is likely to affect you more and more making it feel like you're taking one step back for every step you move forward.
so one way to combat this is with a 48 hour refeed so you're going to pick two consecutive days like Saturday and Sunday and during those days you're going to raise your calories all the way back to maintenance levels then you're going to take the calories that you would have cut away on those two days and subtract them from the other five days of the week so to provide an example we actually have a study where men and women were divided into two groups and for every week both groups maintain an average of a 25 percent calorie deficit however while the continuous dieting group reduced calories by an even 25 a day the other group incorporated a 48-hour refeed where calories were brought back up to maintenance levels and then they reduce calories for the rest of the week by 35 per day to end up at the same 25 percent reduction as the continuous dieting group by the end of the entire week by the end of the study researchers found that the refeed group was able to preserve their metabolic rate and muscle mass better than the continuous dieting group aside from the 48 hour refeed method the matador method may work even better because it allows you to bring your calories up to maintenance for a longer period of time giving your metabolism more time to readjust back up in the matador study one group followed a continuous energy restriction model while the other group cycled between two weeks of calorie restriction and two weeks of calorie maintenance.
The matador group dieted for a longer period of time since they were taking a break every two weeks but researchers made sure that the total deficits over time between both groups were perfectly matched ultimately researchers found that the participants in the matador group were able to maintain a much faster metabolic rate they preserved significantly more muscle mass and they lost significantly more body fat than the continuous energy restriction group they were also able to maintain the weight lost much more effectively over the course of the six months after the study while the continuous energy restriction group was much more likely to regain significantly more weight of course the matador group did have to die for a longer period of time but you can do this another way to reap those benefits without dieting for much longer so you can still do the same two weeks on two weeks off approach just apply a more aggressive reduction in calories during your two weeks on to make up for the two weeks off at maintenance similar to what we were talking about for the 48 hour refeed just subtract more calories during your two weeks on to achieve whatever your desired calorie deficit is by the end of the month which should be something between about 20 to 35 percent of a deficit from maintenance.
The next thing you should do if you've already been dieting for some time now and you seem to have hit a plateau is to reverse the effects of your diet reducing your need levels need stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis basically your body will recognize that you're eating fewer calories and in response it'll try to take shortcuts to conserve energy when it comes to physical activity especially as you get closer to burning the fat that your body doesn't want to let go of these changes to your non-exercise related activity levels are small changes that you might not even notice like sitting more throughout the day not playing with your pets anymore or just acting more lethargic in general however this decrease in physical activity can actually make you plateau so the best way to combat this is by setting a daily walking goal, walking is a low impact activity that won't get in the way of weight training or dieting the way that more intense forms of cardio would by setting a 10 000 steps per day or a one or two miles per day walking goal you can ensure that your knee levels stay elevated so that you can continue to break through this plateau without having to constantly cut more and more calories.
Another thing that's very important and I'm assuming most of you are already doing this but if you're not you need to be lifting weights not just dieting and doing cardio alone i won't spend much time in this but in combination with getting enough protein weight training will help you preserve as much muscle as possible and that ends up helping you burn a lot more fat also building muscle in areas where you have stubborn fat can actually stretch those areas out by increasing the surface area the fat is spread out more making the problem areas look more defined and like less of a problem.
The last thing that I'd like to say in regard to weight training is that studies show that it's far better at helping you keep the fat off after you're done than just dieting or doing cardio alone, next i have to mention that you must give time for the fat loss to occur in the first place if you haven't dieted for long enough you can't conclusively say that you even have stubborn fat to begin with it's perfectly normal to lose body fat from your arms face and your chest while your belly fat decreases at a slower pace that's okay if you continue to stay in a calorie deficit over time your body will be forced to burn more fat from stubborn areas like your belly but it'll only do this after exhausting other more preferential options. so before you drop your calories or try cycling your calories or make any changes for that matter make sure you're actually giving this time if you spend enough time in a true calorie deficit your body will have to continue burning away fat until there's no stubborn fat left if you quit early because the fat doesn't seem to budge for a few weeks then you'll never realize just how close you might have been to getting rid of your lower belly fat or your love handles.
Finally one last thing that i should mention is that even though you can't target the fat burn from your belly you should still also be training your abs as well many people believe they have stubborn fat when they can't see their abs but it could just as likely be the fact that your abs are not muscular enough to be visible kind of like shoulders you can't just get muscular shoulders by simply focusing on getting leaner and leaner by building up your abs not only will it spread the fat out across a larger surface area like i talked about earlier but it'll also make your abs pop in a way that makes them more visible on top of that strengthening your core muscles like the transverse abdominis will cause more superficial abdominal muscles to be drawn inward giving you a more flat stomach look the point is even though spot reduction isn't possible it doesn't mean you shouldn't be training your core because it can actually help with the appearance of your midsection.