If you’ve been working hard on weight loss but are struggling to shift certain areas of stubborn fat, this can be really frustrating and disheartening. Whether it’s fat that you’re struggling to lose from your belly or your hips, there are some tricks to help you burn off those stubborn areas.
Stop Dieting
To burn fat, you need a calorie deficit and a hormonal balance. If you’re following the approach of eating less and exercising more, this can actually unsettle your hormone balance, slowing down your metabolism and making your fat loss much harder. You get the calorie deficit that you need, but that deficit is hard to maintain.
Instead, try eating less and exercising less, or eating more and exercising more. These both create a calorie deficit and keep your metabolism balanced. This makes maintaining the deficit much easier.
Cycle Your Diet
Dieting for a while can cause metabolic compensation, which is when dieting causes increased hunger, unstable energy, metabolic slowdown and more cravings. The body is also not great at burning fat and building muscle at the same time, which can make things more difficult too.
To combat this, you could cycle your diet between periods of more food and exercise as a muscle building phase, and periods of less food and exercise as a burning phase. Have a day or two of heavy exercise, then follow it with five days of eating less and not going as hard on your workouts.
Target The Area
If you’ve increased your fat burning all over your body, you can start to target the areas of stubborn fat. Depending on where the fat is, there are some different approaches that you can take. You could, of course, try fat loss treatments like coolsculpting to blast those stubborn areas.
Spend some time figuring out your nutrition to get the right balance of fuel for your workouts. Protein shakes can be great to give you some help to build muscle to help stubborn areas look more toned. With your workouts, make sure you are getting in some weight training as well as cardio exercise. While cardio exercise is good for fat burning, weight training makes your body burn fat more efficiently even when you aren’t working out, helping your body to lose weight and tone up.
Look at other factors that might be causing the stubborn areas. Belly fat can actually be impacted by stress so make sure you’re aren’t overdoing your exercise routine to shift the fat, as this can push up your stress. Sometimes, an extra hour in bed can help just as much as an extra hour at the gym.
For any weight loss, the trick can be to mix up your approach so your body doesn’t get used to one approach. Mix up your diet and your exercise routines to keep things challenging, but remember to give yourself a break sometimes too, so you aren’t causing more stress to your body than weight loss help.
