Getting rid of tummy fat for good and achieving a lean physic is certainly not easy for a lot of people. Most people do not like being overweight and having excess body fat. Nearly everyone, who is overweight, has tried getting rid of tummy fat, although most without real success. Buy why is that? Is fat loss really so hard that 95% of people always end up failing?

Probably the most significant reasons why getting rid of tummy fat is so hard for so many people, is because a large percentage of these folks use strict and short-term diet to lose tummy fat! It is really important to find out what a diet really is. So what exactly is a diet?

A diet is a severe restriction of calories/food that is temporary. Most of the popular diet programs which are mostly used by people, require you to reduce calories to very low levels. Which is around 1500-1800 calories for men and 800-1200 calories for women. The fact is however that by reducing calories drastically and all at once, you certainly lose weight. So if your idea of success is weight loss and you do not really mind how much of that weight comes from fat and you do not mind that the weight loss is only temporary, then you can call all such strict diets a success.

But surely this can not be success in your mind and it is not what you really want to achieve. Getting rid of tummy fat for good requires a different kind of approach. It is well known that around 95% of people who use conventional diets to lose weight, never manage to keep the weight off. Another major issue is that the weight you lose is not all from fat but from muscle and water as well. The goal should be to lose tummy fat, without losing any muscle mass. And in that sense, those diets people are using don`t work!

If diets would work so well, then why are so many people still overweight? There are over 100 million overweight people in the United Stated alone. The numbers are growing all the time. All this despite the fact that there are countless number of diets, diet programs and weight loss products available.

Eating less doesn`t always work when getting rid of tummy fat is your goal!

A lot of people hate the word “dieting” because they know what it means to them – starving. It is next to impossible to achieve success by starvation in the long-term. Th reason why people gain fat and lose fat is very simple. When you consume more calories than you burn, you gain fat. If you burn more calories than you consume, you lose fat.

The problem that so many people really don`t understand, is that things are not so black and white. When a severe calorie deficit occurs the weigh loss is rapid, but very quickly the rate of weight loss starts to decrease and will eventually stop all together.

The human body has developed excellent defense mechanisms to defend against starvation because starvation is a severe danger to survival. Of course the body can not tell if you are starving because of a real food shortage or because you want to lose weight by dieting.  The body acts the same way in both occasions, which is to redcue energy expenditure to help you survive longer. In other words when you eat too little, you also burn less calories. It is called the starvation response. This is why the rate of weight loss slows down and stops. You can not outsmart your body.

But in order to achieve the necessary calorie deficit, which is required for getting rid of tummy fat, you don`t have to cut your caloories so low. A much better way to achieve the calorie deficit is by burning more calories with exercise and physical activities. By using exercise to create the deficit you avoid the negative side effects of strict diets like muscle loss and starvation response, which you need to avoid. Unfortunately most people cut their calories way too low and exercise very little and some don`t exercise at all.

So if getting rif of tummy fat is your goal, then you need to eat more and burn more. Of course you need to reduce your calories but not drastically and exercise to burn fat. There is no need to starve yourself with crazy diets. You simply need to eat the right foods and make exercise part of your lifestyle.

The trend these days is to make everything easy, effortless and simple. Most of the weight loss programs avoid talking about the hard work it takes to get rid of tummy fat. If you think that getting rid of tummy fat is possible by using some magic supplements, foods or diets and without any real effort, then you are mistaken.

Just to remind you why exercise is more effective than diets, here are some quick points:

1. Exercise helps to create the necessary calorie deficit, without triggering the starvation response.

2. Dieting is harmful to your health, while exercise is very good for your health!

3. Exercise raises your metabolic rate

4. Dieting without exercise can result in up to 50% of the weight loss to come from lean tissue like muscle. While exercise, especially weight training, signals your body to keep the muscle and not use it for energy.

5. Exercsie increases fat burning hormones and enzymes!

Hopefully you have a better understanding why 95% of diets fail and why getting rid of tummy fat is so difficult for most people. When you are serious about achieving permanent fat loss, then you must use a different approach, then you did previously. Most people do the same thing over and over and over, while expecting a different result.