Originally Posted by
WizardOfBoz
I'm on solid engineering ground when I say that if you burn or excrete more calories than you ingest, you'll lose weight. There's no way around this.
But there are effects of what you eat, when you eat it, and when you exercise. Effects on hunger, satiety, fat storage and use, etc. A guy I've worked with over the years (Kevin Hall) is a tenured researcher at the NIH and does obesity research. One of his points is that we've evolved over many thousands of years to be able to process almost any energy source to use to fuel our activities. That said, we've not evolved to swig "Big Gulps" full of highly refined high fructose corn syrup, or sucrose. When we do that sort of thing, it can muck up the body's feedback loops. And we tend to eat more calories if we eat highly refined foods.
An overview of some of Kevin's points in the context of other's views is
here.
To the OP: any exercise will burn fat. It's pretty much impossible to "target those problem areas" as fad programs claim. You are genetically pre-programmed to store fat where your body wants to store fat. If you want to get rid of belly fat, work to lose adipose (fat tissue) mass in general.
My take-away is this involves
1) Eat a healthy diet that includes a lot of fresh vegies
2) Avoid or at least minimize hyper-refined foods. Yes, that means pretty much all soda pop. Lower your use of oils. And so forth.
3) Get a good amount of aerobic exercise
4) Do strength training to built your lean muscle mass. This mass will help you burn calories, and has other benefits.
5) Get enough sleep
If you really want to have a smaller gut, do the above. If you want a six pack (or if you want to have better general health) make sure your strength training includes core muscle exercises.
As Kevin says, this isn't rocket science. We know what is required. Just have to do it.
It sounds so simple when you put it like that. Yes, lose weight, but the point is to lose fat. So CICO does not tell the whole story; and one reason why I consider a weight scale a "dumb" measurement of weight loss. You don't know whether you're losing fat, muscle, or water.
Having read through most of the comments here, its not so much that they're wrong, rather, incomplete or just partial truths. Is "calories in, calories out" true? Yes, but again its more complicated than that. The body can absorb different types of foods at different rates at different times. So timing is also important.
Do carbs cause you to gain fat and are bad for you? Yes, but simple carbs, and only in excess. Carbs of the complex variety are beneficial in so many more ways. Which is also true with any macro-nutrient. The thing about carbs that makes them seem bad, is that they typically come in forms that makes them so much easier to over-consume (you can literally eat donuts and cookies all day) However, few people will eat a pound of brown rice, or 10 potatoes in a day.
Overall, the biggest deciding factor on feeding and weight management is determined by your genetics. That's the main reason why some people can eat all the bad foods in abundance and still not gain any fat.