woman measures her middle
by Dr. Mercola, June 15, 2012
If you’re looking to shrink and tone your belly, there’s a better way to do it than trying to do crunches. In fact, research has shown that doing abdominal exercises alone—even when performed five days a week for six weeks—has no effect at all on subcutaneous fat stores and abdominal circumference.
In an op-ed piece for Forbes Magazine, Jennifer Cohen suggests using strategies that burn up cortisol instead. Cortisol is a hormone in your body that depletes lean muscle and holds on to fat in the abdominal region.
One of the most important ways to help this process is to reduce stress in your life, because stress causes cortisol levels to spike. Cohen also delves into a number of other strategies that help reduce your cortisol levels, such as the following.
1.Getting enough sleep
2. Reducing or eliminating refined sugars from your diet
3. Slowing down your breathing
4. Doing short bursts of exercise (high-intensity interval training)
5. Supplementing with vitamin C
6. Eating fats―the good kinds such as the omega 3’s found in salmon, avocados and walnuts
Thanks Dr. Mercola for an excellent article. If you follow this advice you will not only shrink your belly but you will also save your brain.
It is now clear that excessive fructose from sugar and HFCS drives insulin resistance and central obesity. When you consume rapidly absorbed carbohydrates and have insulin resistance, your brain is subjected to toxic glucose spikes. These glucose spikes cause mitochondrial dysfunction and lead to depletion of important neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin.
Initially this leads to craving sweet and starchy foods—the very foods that are frying your brain. At this point you have a condition we call “sugar-brain”. Because it takes a healthy brain to auto-regulate fat stores, with sugar-brain you start to store extra total body fat even when you are dieting to lose weight. In a sense people with sugar-brain are stuck in a bear-in-fall metabolic mode where they store extra fat regardless of how much food they eat.
Over time sugar-brain can transition to a serious chronic medical condition called Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome. People with CARB syndrome develop up to 22 brain dysfunction symptoms that interfere with their ability to function and they continue to store a lot of extra fat. At this stage they are often incorrectly diagnosed with depression, ADHD, PTSD, eating disorders, bipolar II, anxiety disorders, fibromyalgia and similar conditions.
Hudson and Pope from Harvard first noticed that these conditions seem to run together 15 years ago and called it Affective Spectrum Disorder. Because they never identified the pathology or triggers of the condition, their concept never made it out of academic medicine. The CARB syndrome model addresses these deficiencies.
to read the rest of the story, go HERE http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennifercohen/2012/03/27/6-ways-to-burn-your-belly-fat-fast/