Can You Reduce Belly Fat With Fat Burning Meals?

The ONLY way to shed belly fat for good is by first devising a plan that involves removing fat from your entire body. Exercise is vital to accomplishing this goal. But so is a well thought out nutritional plan. You need to understand not only what you can eat that is healthy for you, but what you should eat WITH it.

Knowing which foods should be combined with which to create the healthiest possible meal is something most people give little consideration to when it comes to attacking their grocery shopping for the week. Too often we get sidetracked with the food labels and we forget the larger picture. If you want to eat healthy, and eat for fat loss, you need to understand how to COMBINE foods for the best results. When you do, fat loss will become much easier, you won't have to give up too much in the overall AMOUNT of food you eat, and your waistline will reap the benefits as well.

At first, it might seem strange that HOW you combine the foods you eat might have some bearing on whether or not you lose weight. But once you understand what is going on to cause you to gain weight in the first place, it is very easy to see how this works. Better yet, once you understand the principles involved you will be able to see how to approach your meal preparation so that nearly every meal you create is one that promotes fat loss.

The cause of weight (fat) gain for most people is sugar. More specifically, blood sugar - which is the form that carbohydrates take when they are broken down by the body and digested into the blood stream. Every time we eat it only takes minutes before our blood begins to circulate the digested sugar to the remote parts of our body. We use this sugar for immediate energy needs, and if we have a surplus of it in the blood our body generates insulin to remove it from the blood and store it as fat for later consumption. The more "sugary" the foods we eat, the more blood glucose we generate, and the fatter we become. Foods rich in simple carbohydrates (which are quickly and easily broken down into blood glucose) are very effective at causing us to gain excess pounds of fat. So be cautious when it comes to snacking between meals. That donut or that slice of cake is high in the simple carbs that cause easy weight gain.

The way to mute the rapid digestion of foods that have a high composition of simple carbohydrates is to mix them foods that do not. In particular, protein is an excellent food group to use for this. Protein is rich in amino acids which are used by the body to repair damaged tissue and to build the cellular machinery that keeps your body doing the myriad things it needs to do to sustain itself. Foods high in protein include fish and eggs, and the increasingly popular protein powders, such as whey.

Protein is relatively difficult to break down and digest, compared to carbohydrates, so when you mix a large portion of protein with the carbohydrates you are consuming you slow down the overall conversion of food into blood glucose. Instead of the large spike in blood sugar that takes place when a sugar donut, or even a bagel, is eaten alone, a bagel that is stuffed with salmon or cream cheese is going to take longer to digest and blood sugar levels will be more steady, rising more slowly, not rising so high, and not crashing down again to make you ravenously hungry again before it is time for your next meal.

In fact, by eating small meals of about 300-400 calories, spaced about 3 hours apart, and rich in protein, you can keep your blood sugar level relatively stable throughout the entire day. Because of this there are no spikes in insulin and much less conversion of blood glucose into fat. In this sense, protein-rich meals are fat burning meals.

This is not the full story, of course. It requires a fair bit of work to figure out which are the best sources of protein to combine with carbohydrates and fats to create tasty meals that don't make you feel that you are constantly on some kind of weird diet. Fortunately, others have done the hard work for us and come up with instructional manuals on how to prepare these meals that get us onto the fast track for fat burning and a flatter tummy than we are carrying around at present.

If you need a comprehensive system for trimming your midsection, and even developing your own set of six pack abs, be sure to check out Carolyn Hansen's book Claim Your Six Pack Abswhere she shows you how to take control of your body's fat burning mechanism for optimum belly fat destroying results.