How to eliminate love handles and lifebuoys

A fat waistline is symptomatic of poor insulin sensitivity. You need to attack this with a combination of specific nutritional strategies, diet, exercise and supplements. Here's the right way.

Here's what you need to know...

1. You need a different diet strategy to get rid of the stubborn fat around your waist. The same diet that got you down to a body fat percentage of 25% (if you're a woman) or 15% (if you're a man) won't take you to the next level of slimness.
2. Use dietary tricks to increase your insulin sensitivity. Eat protein before carbohydrates, take two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar a day, use psyllium and take fish oil capsules.
3. Dieting seven days a week is not the best way to improve insulin sensitivity. Instead, use 2 strict diet days per week and eat normally on the other 5 days.
4. You need to adopt exercise strategies designed to increase insulin sensitivity and burn fat. Complexes and modified "wogging" work very well.
5. Take C2G. This natural nutrient partitioning agent burns fat around the waist (and other areas) caused by insulin resistance.

Waist flab and insulin resistance

Any woman can go from 45% body fat to 25% body fat without too much trouble. Similarly, any man can reduce his body fat from 25% to 15% with the help of exercise and a sensible diet plan. At this point, things can get problematic when women try to reduce their body fat percentage below the 25% threshold and men try to break through the 15% barrier.

Unfortunately, the diet that got you to the first milestone probably won't get you to the second. Things get stubborn. Fat becomes sentimental and doesn't want to leave its home.

It may be forced to leave some areas but it often clings to others and usually the area it forms a special bond with is the waistline.

People blame this on all sorts of things including lack of sleep, poor diet, age, gender, genetic predisposition and even cortisol, the stress hormone. While all of these things likely play a role in stubborn lifesavers, they are largely symptomatic of a lack of insulin sensitivity.

Fortunately, there are some things you can do to restore your insulin sensitivity and specifically target the unsightly fat that makes you look like you're spilling over your jeans.

1 - Use simple nutritional tricks to increase insulin sensitivity

Without optimal insulin sensitivity, a lot of the protein (and everything else) you eat will go straight to your fat stores instead of your muscles - and often this fat will happily settle around your waist. While your instincts may tell you to switch to a low-carb diet, this won't solve the problem. What's more, a chronic low-carb diet will impair your muscle-building capacity.

What you need to do instead is optimize your insulin sensitivity. There are several simple dietary strategies that will help you do just that:

• Eat some protein and fat at the beginning of a meal before your lips even touch carbohydrates. According to scientific research, this strategy leads to significantly lower blood sugar levels (29%, 37% and 17% lower 30, 60 and 120 minutes after a meal, respectively) than eating carbohydrates first. (However, you should reverse this strategy for meals around training and consume some carbs before protein).
• Use vinegar as a salad dressing as it moderates the glucose and insulin response to a carbohydrate meal, in addition to increasing insulin sensitivity in general. Continued use can lead to an average weight loss of 2 pounds within 4 weeks. Also consider taking two tablespoons of vinegar before going to bed, as studies have shown that this could lower morning blood sugar by 4 to 6%.
• Take a teaspoon of psyllium husks twice a day. This can lower blood sugar levels by 11% throughout the day.
• Use fish oil liberally. Recent studies have shown that this can not only compete with the effects of exercise on blood sugar, but when combined with exercise, has a synergistic effect on lowering blood sugar levels.

2 - Diet strictly (but smartly) two days a week

When you eat frequently, as weightlifters and bodybuilders often do, blood sugar levels are almost always elevated and your pancreas is dead tired of pumping a near-constant flow of insulin into the bloodstream. Scientific research suggests that this constant flow of insulin makes the body more resistant to the effects of insulin until you begin to resemble a type II diabetic from a metabolic point of view. Fatness follows - especially around the waist.

Certainly a diet is needed that provides enough protein, carbohydrates and calories to keep muscles growing, which at the same time makes the body more sensitive to insulin. Welcome to the 5/2 fat loss diet for strength athletes. In a nutshell, you eat normally on 5 days of the week, but on the remaining 2 non-consecutive days you eat only two meals, each providing about 400 kcal, 12 hours apart. These two "fasting days" should be non-training days so as not to interfere with the tissue remodeling process after training.

In addition, on these two semi-fast days, you drink two scoops of a fast-digesting protein powder either as part of each 400 kcal meal or 30 minutes before each meal to ensure that there is absolutely no possibility of muscle breakdown during the low-calorie phases.

This diet works because the fasting days - irregular as they are - cause the body to be more sensitive to insulin than it would be with seven diet days a week. This may seem to defy logic, but science shows that it works.

If the 5/2 fat loss diet for strength athletes is followed correctly, you should get steadily more defined with each passing week without losing muscle mass. Most importantly, this diet directly addresses the underlying insulin problem for anyone suffering from stubborn love handles and love handles.

3 - Your training should address the problem

You're no doubt already training with weights and that's obviously a good thing for the waistline challenge. Extra muscle mass reduces blood sugar levels as it gives carbohydrates a different destination than fat storage. In addition, resistance training generally increases insulin sensitivity just like most forms of aerobic exercise. However, there are a few types of exercise that are particularly effective for targeting stubborn fat:

Complexes

A complex is simply a series of exercises performed with a barbell, dumbbells or kettlebells where you first complete all repetitions of an exercise and then quickly move on to the next exercise in the sequence. This is a fantastic way to burn fat and increase insulin sensitivity.

Typically, you don't take your hands off the weight until the complex is complete. A typical kettlebell complex might consist of 6 squats with the weight overhead, 6 conventional squats, 6 reps of kettlebell swings, 6 reps of bent-over rowing and 6 reps of Romanian deadlifts with no rest between exercises. And then repeat the whole thing. And then again - until you're almost so done that you need a defibrillator to start your seizing heart. Perform complexes at the end of each training session as a finale.

Wogging and Wunning

Don't skip this type of exercise just because it has a silly name that makes you sound like you have a speech impediment. As you may have guessed, wogging is a combination of walking and jogging, and it's not just an exercise program for wannabe long-distance runners.

Wogging utilizes the results of new research showing that people who change their speed while walking burn up to 20% more calories than people who walk at a constant speed. By slowing down or even stopping and then speeding up, you change the kinetic energy and your body needs more energy, i.e. calories.

Simply walking in this stop-and-go manner is effective for burning fat, but when you combine the concept with running/running instead of walking, you turn it into an extremely effective fat loss program. As such, it should more accurately be called "Wunning" (walking and running).

Simply walk at a steady pace for a while and then accelerate into a fast race. Once you start to tire and the pace begins to slow dramatically, start walking again until you are recovered enough to run again. The distance you cover is irrelevant. Instead, you should walk and run for a predetermined amount of time, say 30 minutes. Three 30 minute workouts a week will do wonders when it comes to melting that ugly flab around your waist.

RKC Planks

Okay, RKC Planks won't do much to burn off life preservers or love handles, but if we're already concerned with developing an attractive waistline, let's take it a step further and "tighten" the waistline so that maybe, just maybe there's something worth seeing there.

To perform RKC Planks, lie on your stomach and support your upper body with your elbows. Press your shoulders down and pull them close to your ribs. Then contract the gluteus (butt) as hard as possible, straighten your knees and assume the standard plank position. Now contract everything as hard as possible and concentrate on controlled breathing for the entire duration of the exercise. Try to hold this position for 8 to 10 seconds. If you have performed this exercise correctly, you should then more or less collapse to the floor.

Remember, this is not one of those mindless endurance competition planks where you hold the position until your back mosses up. RKC planks will make your abs stronger and they might even make for a slimmer waistline. Do these harder RKC Planks between sets of other exercises or even during commercials while watching TV.

4 - Use a powerful insulin-controlling supplement

Cyanidin3-Glucoside or C3G is a naturally occurring anthocyanin. When isolated and taken in a highly concentrated form, it has powerful blood sugar lowering properties that can make a big difference in treating the fat waistline caused by insulin resistance.

One of dozens of studies conducted with C3G showed that C3G caused a 33% and 51% dose-dependent drop in blood sugar levels, leading the study authors to emphasize how advantageous it is compared to powerful pharmaceutical agents for blood sugar control.

Apart from modulating insulin, C3G increases glucose and fat uptake specifically in the muscles, which is good news for strength athletes and athletes in general. It also increases adipokinectin levels while lowering leptin levels, resulting in less body fat. People who use C3G can usually consume more calories - including carbohydrate calories - and see these nutrients end up in their muscles instead of their fat cells.

Take 400 to 600 milligrams before your biggest meal of the day or right before you start eating your pre-workout diet. C3G, especially when combined with the other strategies described above, can act as a sort of metabolic/chemical "liposuction" that strategically attacks your stubborn fat.

From TC Luoma | 02/10/17

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/how-to-eliminate-love-handles-muffin-tops