(Without stopping drinking beer of course…)
See, last year I was a skinny unhealthy wretch who drank far too much vodka, smoked about 30 a day, and never ever exercised.
Then I turned my life around in January: I have been smoke-free for over 5 months, cycle several miles a day, and drink on average 3 pints of beer a day (this is a giant improvement on the amount of vodka I used to neck).
It’s cool to be healthy-ish again, but I have developed something of a beer-gut. For weeks now I have been doing 40 situps every morning, hoping it’ll trim the fat a little, but the net effect is absolutely zero. I thought situps were the key to a washboard stomach!
So tell me, what DO you do to get rid of a beergut?
Well the only way is to stop drinking so much. I swim, a lot, and even that didn’t help when I was still drinking. I didn’t drink as much as you, but I was drinking 1-2 a night every night for a long time. I guess since you don’t want to stop, cut back a little. I totally stopped except for every other week or so I might have one or two. I’ve lost a good 20 some pounds and kept it off.
You gotta cut way back on the alcohol. There’s no other way. One pint a day is reasonable.
You have to get some kind of cardiovascular exercise. Run, walk, bike, swim, or do a combination of the above for thirty minutes three times a week. Running is not the only way, but it’s good; however, if you start trying to do too much, you won’t stick with it. Push your limits, but don’t push yourself too hard.
Do some weightlifting. High weight, low reps is the way to go, but don’t injure yourself. If you need help designing a program, I can offer a few tips (although not at the moment).
Can the situps, if your only reason for doing them is to get thin. It takes 250,000 situps to burn a pound of fat*. It’s just a waste of time.
On the other hand, situps are good for your abdominal muscles, and it’s very important to have strong abdominal muscles. You might want to consider holding a couple dumbbells on your chest while you do 'em.
Repeat to yourself: There’s no such thing as spot reducing. Situps may burn fat (slowly since you’re excersizing very small muscles) but they burn it off from all over your body. There is no way to target weight loss except liposuction.
Calories are calories. You want to lose weight then you have to eat less than you burn. Doesn’t really matter if those calories come from alcohol, marshmallow Peeps, or brocolli. So, you can consume fewer calories (including by not necessarily only beer), excersize more, or best, do a combination of both.
The cycling is good, you might consider adding some weight lifting to your workout. Muscle burns up more calories just sitting around, this will help. Beer has a lot of calories, if you don’t cut that out consider cutting out something else. Maybe try alternating pints of beer and pints of water.
It doesn’t matter how many sit ups or weights you lift. Unless you do tons of cardio to burn off the fat, you’ll just have a huge wall of muscle behind your fat.
Not true. There’s no substiture for cardio work, but the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn when you’re doing cardio work. It’s true, lifting without cardio will leave you strong with a beer gut, but cardio without lifting isn’t worthwhile.
A study conducted over an eight-week period found a significant difference in fat loss between individuals who rode an exercise bike 30 minutes a day and those who rode the bike 15 minutes and lifted for 15 minutes a day. Individuals in the first group lost three pounds of fat and a half-pound of muscle. Individuals in the second group lost ten pounds of fat and gained two pounds of muscle.
You need to burn ‘body fat’. Males accumulate fat in the beer gut regions, and you need to burn fat.
Ab exercise will actually make it bigger (somewhat).
to burn body fat…let’s say pound, you need to consume fewer calories than you burn. So, if you burn 2000 cals per day, you need to eat less than that regularly until you create a 3500 calorie deficit. 3500 calories is a pound of body fat.
You need to force your body into tapping your fat reserves by consuming fewer calories than you burn.
Just out of curiosity, how many calories does just everyday activity burn? I get up around 4:00 a.m. six days a week, go to work, come back around noon, then work out all before eating anything. I do about 25-30 mins. on a crosstrainer and burn an average of 250 calories there, and then do some wieghts for about another 30 mins. The rest of my day is spent either working some more, or hanging out.
So, after my work out, how much “burn” is my body still doing? When I started working, without exercise, I lost about a good 30 pounds in a few months. Since I’ve started exercising, I’ve lost nothing, and actually think I’m getting fatter. What’s the deal?
A fitness trainer once told me something that was marvelous in its obviousness, yet profundity:
“It’s not that these people are so huge. They just have very low body fat. Everyone’s muscles look like that under the fat. They’re all attached in the same places.”
Of course, we’ve all seen really skinny guys whose muscles are almost nonexistant, but if you can build the mass to be anything appreciable, after that it’s the body fat that keeps you/me from looking great. Think of Bruce Lee: not very big, but what, a 6% body fat or something?
Hi, all. I’m new to the SDMB. I’ve heard great things and am looking forward to a fun and educational experience. With regard to losing a beer belly, my first thought is QUIT DRINKING BEER! Next, I’ve found that sit-ups work well, as long as you stick with it. I look forward to getting to know you, but I’ll probably lurk for a while.
If you’re just doing cardio stuff, then your metabolism is kicked up for about an hour or two after you quit. It’s not the same as actually being on the cross-trainer (btw, the calories it says you burn is not accurate), but it is elevated. Weightlifting will pick up your metabolism a good deal for the next 3-12 hours, depending on how intensely you do it.
That said, how many calories do you eat per day? You have to eat enough to be able to lose weight, or else your body’ll go into starvation mode. That might be what’s happening to you, seeing as you don’t eat anything for the first ten hours you’re up. One thing that pretty much everyone agrees on is that you’ve got to eat breakfast if you want to get in shape, cause the kickstart it gives to your metabolism is very helpful.
