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Lose Your Gut

Whether you workout consistently, or sit on a couch all day, getting rid of that flab around your waist is critical to long-term health.

That flab (formerly called a stomach) attributes to the overall rise in weight gain for men in America. According to WedMD, a 2004 survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 71% of men 20 years old and over were overweight and 31% were obese. The same survey conducted in the late 1970s had found 47% of men were overweight and 15% were obese.

Your gut has extended far beyond your belt buckle for several reasons. The main reasons are:

• White breads
• Sugar and high-fructose corn syrup
• Fatty and greasy foods
• Oversized portions
• Beer
• Little or no exercise

How do you fix this?

Here are 5 tips to losing your gut. Follow this advice and you will be on your way to a trimmer torso and a healthier lifestyle:

1. Workouts cannot be restricted to lifting weights. You must include aerobic exercises in your routines (i.e. cycling, jogging, brisk pace walking, jump rope).
2. Eat Less Fat. Cutting out sugars, starches and trans fat is a must. If starchy carbohydrates are eaten in excessively, the body converts the extra blood glucose into triglycerides for storage in fat cells--leading to weight gain.
3. Get Rid of the Beer. They call them "beer guts" for a reason. Your body requires a certain number of calories each day and this is usually obtained through eating foods. When you drink high-calorie beer, you're adding extra calories which the body can't use, so it stores it as fat.
4. Add More Protein. Most of your caloric intake from protein is burned during digestion. Your body uses more energy to process amino acids (protein) than carbs, which burns more calories. More protein, less carbs, means a flatter stomach.
5. Eat Breakfast and Don't Skip Meals. Breakfast is probably your most important meal of the day. Skipping it and daily meals puts your body in a catabolic state, which means it starts to break down muscle tissue for its energy source. You want your body burning fat, not muscle.

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