Introduction 3
U
nwanted belly fat is a problem that almost all of us suffer from during
at least one part of our lives. For many, it is an ongoing problem that
only gets worse as we age.
This is especially true for men as they reach the age of 40 years and discover
that their waistline is increasing in size, even when they do not seem to be
eating all that badly.
By the same token, despite its familiarity in our lives, most of us have little
understanding of the nature of belly fat, the reason it is so difficult to remove,
and the consequences of allowing it to hang around for any length of time.
For men, a very real and troublesome consequence of excess belly fat is slow
emasculation. Your body literally transforms itself from a testosterone-producing
machine to one that prefers to churn out the female hormone estrogen.
Man boobs, loss of sexual appetite and performance, loss of sex appeal, and
loss of self confidence in your ability to even interact with members of the
opposite sex are just a few of the issues that arise when your primary sex
hormone slowly disappears from your body.
In this special report I will be addressing the issue of belly fat and revealing
facts about it that very few people have been exposed to before. I promise you
that by the time you have reached the end of this report you will never again
look at your belly in quite the same way!
Of course, I am not going to simply alert you to the facts about belly fat. I also
want to make sure you are able to take action to rid yourself of excess belly fat
if you should need to do so. Although I have written this short guide to help
men see what is really going on with their midsection (and deep within it)
everything I have to say about belly fat is as true for women as it is for men. It
is just that the consequences for men have an extra dimension that only men
who have reached a certain age can truly appreciate.
I hope you enjoy the material that follows. I found the experience of preparing
it to be eye-opening, and I believe that you will find the experience of reading
it to be likewise engaging and just a little unsettling.
i Carolyn Hansen
A
t a very superficial level most of us are hyper-aware of our excess body
fat because it creates a sense of body dis-morphia. When we look
into the mirror each day and see that excess body fat that sits on our
waistline and makes our clothes feel tight and uncomfortable, it does more
than make us wonder about what kind of diet we might try next to remove it.
This fat that hangs over our belts, and which gets called all sorts of namespot
belly, spare tire, love handles, beer bellyit acts as a constant reminder that
we are not fully in control of our own body, that, at least on the outside, we
have become someone who we do not recognize as being us. That realization
nibbles away at our core sense of who we are and what we have achieved.
In short, belly fat takes a toll on our mental health, and this is before we have
even begun to consider the far more serious effects on our physical health,
which I am about to touch on now.
One of the problems we face when dealing with belly fat is that we tend to
under-estimate its potential to do us real bodily harm. When we think of a
protruding tummy we tend to imagine that the fat is just sitting underneath
the skin, like fat elsewhere on our body. But stomach fat is very different in its
composition than fat found elsewhere on your body. It is not just unsightly,
spoiling your physical appearance, and making it hard to attract a potential
mate, or secure the confidence of the boss for the new job promotion, belly fat
is now considered to be seriously dangerous to your long term health.
The fat that makes our bellies protrude actually resides inside the body,
underneath the muscles, and it is of a very different kind to the fat that exists
say on your hips, thighs, or the backs of your arms. This latter type of fat is
quite different, and merely sits on top of the muscles just underneath the skin.
Today, however, with the advent of medical imaging devices that are able to
unobtrusively peer directly inside our bodies to provide detailed images of
every section of the tissues that make us up, things are changing.
Scientists can now get a better look at the nature of belly fat, thereby opening
up insights into its behavior in regards to our hormone balance and its affect
on overall health.
OK, I've just thrown at you an anatomical term that most people will have
never been exposed to before. So do not feel the least bit guilty for having
skipped biology class the day the omentum was discussed, because chances
are your biology teacher overlooked this organ too.
For most people, hearing that they have a physical organ in their belly which
is responsible for storing fat is more than a little surprising. How did we get
through science classes without ever managing to hear about it? The short
answer seems to be that it is NOT one of the vital organs, and that life-
threatening conditions have not been thought in the past to be strongly related
to the functioning of this organ.
When something like our pancreas shuts down and stops producing the all
important enzymes we need for daily bodily functioning, we learn about it
in short order. But the omentum is more of a slow motion regulator of bodily
processes, and has never managed to achieve much of the limelight.
The Omentum
A Strange Looking Thing Indeed
When you are lean, and have a healthy (high) ratio of muscle to fat in your
body, your omentum will be quite thin and certainly in no way noticeable to
you. In appearance, the omentum looks a great deal like panty hose with wide
webbing. But as you begin to become overweight, the organ grows larger as
globules of fat fill up the spaces of the webbing.
Also called the lace apron, the omentum drapes over the stomach area, but
when it begins to clog with fat it becomes bunched up and clumped.
As one of the main fat reservoirs in the body, the omentum varies greatly in
size depending of how much fat has accumulated within it. When swollen
with deposited fat, the omentum is responsible for that well known pot belly
shape we love to make fun of, and it can be quite firm to the touch, not soft
and marshmallowy like you might expect.
Until recently the omentum had been thought to be relatively inert tissue.
Science is slowly revealing the secrets of the omentum, showing that it is actually
dynamic tissue having many functions other than just the storage of fat.
For example, the omentum provides both protective cushioning and structural
integrity (acts as a kind of glue) for our internal organs. So it can be viewed
as something of a safety net for the bits and pieces that make up the complex
biology of the digestive system. Of course, some people have more protective
cushioning than othersmuch more than they need, and much more than is
healthy for them.
Until that time, belly fat was seen as a relatively acceptable health risk, and
was certainly not considered to be potentially very harmful, the way we now
know it to be.
This higher than normal level of estrogen in an overweight man will change his
body from one that is firm and muscular, to one that is flabby and soft.
In all likelihood he will feel fatigued, grumpy, and maybe even depressed.
Your omentum does more than ensure a tight waistband when you over indulge
with food. It is chock-full of important nutrients and hormones that stimulate
growth and repair.
The omentum also plays an important role in disease prevention, and contains
germ-fighting cells that attack infections in the abdomen and seal them off so
they can do no harm to the delicate internal organs.
Some experts have referred to the omentum as the policeman of the abdomen.
So, yes, the omentum should not be viewed as your partner in crime when you
hit the refrigerator late at night during your junk food raids. It is far closer to
victim of abuse than villain.
As I have suggested earlier on, this essential organ of ours can be a source of
terrible problems for us when we mistreat it. If blood flow to the omentum is
disrupted, due for example to an injury, the resulting pain and tenderness can
easily be mistaken for appendicitis.
As with almost all optimized biological systems, the key to long term survival
for each of us is the attainment of a point of balancea dialed back throttle
that is on idle but ready for action at any time.
On the face of it, this seems like the appropriate action, but it has its
consequences, and they are not all good. The stress hormones stimulate the
omentum to store more fat to dissipate and dilute those same hormones.
The end result is stress stimulates the growth of that pot belly, which further
increases your level of stress, leading to a kind of merry-go-around that is
hard to get off.
If this stress into fat response seems like a poorly-designed element of the
overall architecture of human physiology, it really is not.
Most people aged between 35 and 45 years are at risk of developing metabolic
syndrome, and the principal means by which this condition can be avoided is
to reduce belly fat.
So what can you do? The first thing would be to assess your current risk.
A simple blood test can tell you a great deal. If you discover that your vital
statistics are outside the normal range (as discussed below) you will know
that it is time to make some changes to your lifestyle, such as to incorporate a
sensible exercise regime and develop healthy eating habits.'
3. Our bodies were never meant to ingest the mountain of highly processed
and refined foods that fill our supermarkets. Our food has gone from
natural, whole foods, that were eaten raw or cooked from scratch, to empty,
de-natured non-foods which are void of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, and
which instead are full of chemicals, preservatives, and additives. But the one
thing these empty foods do not lack is calories.
4. Many of the chemicals that enter our bodies come in with our food,
but they also get inside us from (unavoidably) interacting with the
environment, through our skin, our breathing, and our water. There are some
90,000 chemicals approved for use in the world and many of them find a way
into our bodies and slowly destroy our health.
As regards that last point, our bodies are tasked with the monumental job of
trying to keep us from being poisoned at every turn.
As the cleansing pathways become overwhelmed the body will isolate these
toxic substances and do its best to shove them into storage places as far away
from major organs as possible.
One of the more convenient and efficient isolation mechanisms involves the
use of body fat as the storage vehicle. When coping with the task of clearing
toxins from the body, generating fat is an easy solution that gets the short-
term cleanup done fast.
What few people realize is that once you get on that merry-go-round of yo-yo
dieting you predispose yourself to ongoing metabolism and hormonal problems.
These will not only trigger more fat storage but make losing that fat in the
future nearly impossible.
So, having read this far into the report you should now be starting to see that
having a fat-clogged omentum inside your abdominal cavity is not at all good
for your health, never mind your appearance.
The only way to properly measure the size of your omentum is with a CT scan,
which is not a practical solution because of the associated expense.
So we generally have to rely on the evidence that your body shape provides,
and the actual size of your midsection. If you have a protruding tummy and
it feels firm when you push it, and you have an apple-shaped body, then it is
likely that your omentum is storing way more fat than it should be.
As more is learned about the harmful conditions that a fat-filled omentum has
on your health, experts are practicing caution and recommending thatto
avoid the attendant health risks you stay within a waist measurement of just
32 inches for women and 35 inches for men.
Now, I promised at the beginning that I was going to shed light on what it takes
to destroy your excess belly fat, and that's exactly what I am about to do.
The good news is that if you lose some fat weight the omentum and the fat
around your vital organs, like your heart, liver, and kidneys, will be the first
things to shrink when you start losing the fat.
In addition to that, as you reduce these stores of body fat you will automatically
be reducing the total amount of inflammatory chemicals that are being
deposited into your body. This in turn will lead to a reduction in the levels of
stress-inducing hormones that are causing your body to gain fat weight.
So by now it should be apparent to you, now that you know about the existence
of your omentum, that losing weight is not something to be embarked upon
simply because you want to change your outward appearance.
You should be wanting to lose the weight in large part because of what it will
mean to the health of your internal organs.
Yes, that sounds all very medical, and not the least bit sexy, but understanding
the difference between why you would want to lose weight to look hot, as
opposed to live longer, may just be the difference between actually living
longer or not.
The key lies with proper exercise and nutrition, and only requires a willingness
to accept that perhaps the time has come to finally get serious and treat your
body with the respect that it deservesafter all, it is the one thing in your life
that has the unique ability to help you reach old age!
In order to destroy the belly fat that caused you to pick up this report in the
first place, the first step is to understand and accept that the human body in
not designed to carry you into old age in an overweight and over fat condition.
To be perfectly blunt our bodies are not even designed to get us to old age.
So if you want to significantly increase your odds of surviving past the first 50
years, you need to shed the weight and slip into that second half century in the
best possible shape you can manage.
You will need this muscle so that you can burn off the excess internal fat.
Avoid the temptation to focus only on abdominal exercises, since these work
only part of the body and you will need to concentrate on total body workouts
in order to get measurable fat loss results.
The bottom line is that only motivation and the willingness to follow a well-
defined exercise and nutrition plan is separating you from the slim trim body
that you now have in your mind's eye. You can lose the belly fat. You do not
have to starve yourself, or do hours of long duration activity. Incidentally,
this low impact cardio-type activity does nothing to keep your muscular
system in good health. What you really need is a proper strength training
exercise program that directly targets the musclesstrengthening them so the
metabolic rate is boosted.
Healthy eating is also a very important part of the belly fat destruction
program. An eating plan that provides your body with all the nutrients it needs,
while only slightly restricting the amount of calories consumed is the way to
go for the best results.
So if your omentum has gathered some momentum (all pun intended) and you
are keen to wave goodbye to it, the old standbys of exercise and healthy eating
are the fastest and most effective way to regain your former shapeliness. Your
omentum will be forced to give up its excess fat naturally and that belly of
yours will eventually flatten out and disappear for good.
I
hope you enjoyed learning about the strange organ inside you known as
your omentum, and how it affects your efforts to rid yourself of belly fat. Of
course, what you have learned today is just the tip of the iceberg when it
comes to putting into action the optimal eating plan and workout routines for
the destruction of belly fat.
As a wrap for this report it seems only fitting that I tell you a little about myself
and how I have used the principles of metabolic exercising and healthy eating
for fat loss to get into shape over the years. Just like you, all I wanted was a
lean, healthy, strong, and shapely body.
Not too much to ask for in your youth, which is when I first became overly
interested in the idea (in fact I became obsessed with it!)
Back in the eighties, when I got started, the fitness experts of the day believed
that to get into good shape one had to starve oneself on low-calorie diets and
do hours of long, slow, repetitive activity.
My friends and I spent many years doing just that. We dieted our socks off. We
walked, jogged, cycled, swam, and attended aerobics classes.
Guess what? Not a lean, firm body in sight. For me, just the same old skinny,
flabby body that measured in at 23 percent body fat. Not much to show for
several years of hard work.
So I did the only thing that seemed left for me to do. I went to the gym and
begun a regimen of strength training.
That is why I have made an effort to put together a system that requires:
No conventional dieting
No self denial
Now that you have discovered, by reading this report, how an enlarged
omentum can lead to metabolic turmoil and the downgrading of your ability
to burn fat the way you once used to be able to do it, you are ready to reverse
the situation and ultimately lose all the weight you want.
It is easy when you know how. And if you would like me to show you the exact
steps and give specific directions to help you shed fat, build back the muscle,
reclaim your waistline, and indeed much of the masculine essence you may
have lost over the years due to the neglect of your body, then you will find
everything you need in my book on how Strong Men Stay Young.
When you allow me to guide you in this weight loss and re-manification journey
you will find the process quite different than anything you have tried before.
This is because we are going to make it about more of everything rather than
less. You will be finally free to feel the energy of a lean and strong body while
enjoying more of everything. More food. More energy. More vitality, strength,
confidence, and quality of life.
Now, doesn't that seem like the right way to go about securing what you really
wanta strong, energetic, and lean body with an enviable flat tummy?