What's A Healthy Diet to Lose Belly Fat?

If you want to bust belly fat, a healthy diet is one of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal.

First, though, let's get rid of the popular notion of "going on a diet" with the intent to going back to eating "normal" once your diet is over. That's a waste of time and simply doesn't work.

When I say "diet", I'm talking about adopting a new way of eating and thinking about food and making that your new normal. This will help you lose your belly fat and keep it off for life.

Unfortunately, choosing a healthy diet can be confusing and overwhelming. So many differing and contradicting opinions. Even "scientific studies" seem to contradict each other.

How do you decide who to listen to and what diet to choose?

The problem with most supposedly healthy diets promoted these days is that they're not actually healthy. Many of the foods suggested as healthy options actually cause you to pack on the fat.

I've found the best strategy is to just use common sense.

The most common sense and effective healthy diet to lose belly fat and improve your health is the whole food diet. On a whole food diet, you cut out processed foods and eat only real foods in their natural form.

What are Whole Foods?

Whole foods (also called real foods, natural foods, and traditional foods) are foods that either grow from the earth or at one time had a mother: fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds; and meats, seafood, and poultry.

• An orange is a whole food. Commercial orange juice that you buy at the grocery store isn't.
• A whole egg that comes in the shell is a whole food. A commercial egg substitute (like Egg Beaters) isn't.
• A steak dinner with salad and mashed potatoes is a whole food meal. A Lean Cuisine frozen dinner isn't.

Whole foods are foods that are given to us by nature, not foods that are really a science experiment cooked up in someone's laboratory.

When you adopt this type of diet to lose belly fat, all the complicated silliness that accompanies most diet programs, like counting calories, keeping track of points, measuring portion sizes, and eating only at certain times of the day, becomes unnecessary. You basically just focus on eating whole foods.

... like people did before the multi-billion dollar diet industry was around.

Before processed foods became popular, nobody needed the diet industry to tell them what to eat. People just ate what came out of their gardens and off their farms.

The take-home lesson here is that, as a general rule, processed foods make your body store fat, and natural, unprocessed foods make you burn fat.

Learn More About This Healthy Diet to Lose Belly Fat ...

One book I found invaluable when I was learning how to eat this way, and that I still refer to to this day, is Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig. Sally and Mary explain in depth the logic behind a whole food diet and provide lots of recipes and wisdom to help you get going.

I got started with the whole food diet in my early 30s, and within just a few months I started feeling better than I had all through my entire 20s. The energy I should have had in my 20s came back, and then some.

Whenever I get lazy and start going back to some of my old eating habits, I can tell the difference within a week. My allergies start acting up immediately, I start getting migraines again, and my energy level plummets, which is how I felt all through my 20s before I discovered the whole food diet.

That gets tiring real quick, but as soon as I cut it out and get back to my traditional foods again, all those aggravating symptoms disappear. It amazes me how it's almost like a light switch I can turn on and off.

Boost Your Results Even More

If you want to boost your results even more, you could try a raw food diet to lose belly fat. A raw food diet is, by definition, a whole food diet, but you don't eat any cooked food.

A raw food diet magnifies the health benefits of a whole food diet even more dramatically:

• Lose fat even faster.
• Have even more energy.
• Live longer.
• Increase your mental clarity.
• Boost your immune system.

You don't have to commit to a raw food diet for life. You could just try it out for 30 days, and see what you think. When I notice previous bad eating habits sneaking back into my life and the sugar sirens singing my name, I'll do a month of raw food only to break the sugar addiction and reset my normal back to where I want it to be.

Even if you don't become a raw foodist (someone who eats only raw foods), I still encourage you to increase the amount of raw foods in your whole food diet.

Yuri Elkaim wrote an excellent book to help you incorporate more raw foods into your day called Eating for Energy. He goes into detail about the logic behind, and benefits of, eating more raw foods and how to get started. He even provides over 100 recipes for you to try and a 12-week eating plan to guide you while you're getting used to this way of eating.

Today's ABS Exercise

Check your Attitude:

Think about your current diet, and answer truthfully: Is your current diet helping you reach your health goals?

Is it a diet to lose belly fat or gain belly fat? Does it help you get a flat belly or is it making you overweight, tired, and sick? Do you eat a lot of processed foods?

If your diet no longer serves you in creating the life you want, it's time for a change. As you cultivate your health mindset, you will automatically want to choose healthy foods.

Apply your Brain Power:

As you read this, do you find yourself thinking things like, "I could never go without pasta!"

How do you know?

Have you ever tried it?

This is just your brain trying to convince you to keep things the same as they already are. Do you want things to stay the same, or do you want things to change? If you want things to change, you have to make a conscious decision to ignore those contrary messages and install new beliefs that serve your new goals better.

When you sincerely believe that you can adopt a diet to lose belly fat, your brain will look for ways to make that happen, instead of finding all the excuses why you can't do it.

How do you install those new beliefs?

One way is to just get started. Then, your subconscious will see that this change isn't so scary afterall.

What can you do today to change your diet?

You could go cold turkey and cut out all processed foods all at one time. I just did this recently after I had been slacking off on my diet for a while and letting bad habits creep back in. (Hey! It happens to me, too!)

This tactic produces the quickest, most dramatic change in your health. Whenever I do this, I notice improvements in my energy, sleep quality, mental clarity, and general allergy symptoms within a few days.

The cold turkey strategy works well if you want results now or for anyone in an emergency type health situation where they need a dramatic change immediately.

Another option is to make small changes a little at a time. This strategy works well if you're still learning about the whole food diet and if you have less-than-willing family members in your home.

Start with easy, obvious baby steps first:

• Replace one meal a day with a big salad or green smoothie.
• Add some foods that burn belly fat.
• Remove obvious offenders like McDonald's, frozen meals, and bakery items.

If you eat out at restaurants a lot, start making your meals at home more often. Once a week add a new whole food recipe to your repertoire. You can look recipes up online or use some from Nourishing Traditions or Eating for Energy.

As you learn new recipes, remove your old, unhealthy recipes from your menu. Over time, your diet will improve, and you will notice your stomach getting flatter and your health improving.

Engage your Spirit:

When you first get started with this healthy diet to lose belly fat, it can be hard to resist your junk food favorites. As with all new behaviors, the more you practice eating this way, the easier it becomes. Stick with it until it becomes habit.

Remember: The search for your ideal healthy diet to lose belly fat is never over. A whole food diet makes for a good starting point. As you continue to learn more, you can adjust your diet to try out different ideas.

Experiment, have fun, and discover what works best FOR YOU!

For a complete plan to lose belly fat, get a flat stomach, and create real, true, amazing health, check out my How to Lose Belly Fat guide.

Resources for Your Diet to Lose Belly Fat

~ ABS Lady

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