Belly fat is without question a risk to your health. It causes inflammation and can lead to obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and more. Losing belly fat is one of the best things you can do for your overall health. There are healthy ways and unhealthy way to lose weight and belly fat, and there are plenty of diets that claim healthy weight loss. Find out why some diets are healthy and others are not.
Diets can work to lose weight, but once the excess belly fat is lost, you have to maintain a healthy diet in order to maintain a healthy weight.
If you go back to the way of eating that caused your belly fat in the first place, you would just gain all that excess belly fat again. A healthy diet should be your permanent way of eating, not just a temporary fix.
There are healthy diets and unhealthy diets. Even though an unhealthy diet might cause weight loss, it doesn’t mean it is healthy for the long term. And it is important to remember that losing weight takes patience. You did not create the excess belly fat in a month, and you will not lose all that excess weight in a month.
Foods That Create Belly Fat
- Oil, especially all of the oil in packaged foods like canola oil, palm oil, coconut oil, and soybean oil. Oil has more than twice the calories than protein and carbs do and that adds up.
- High fructose corn syrup has been proven to cause belly fat and obesity, eliminate it from your diet.
- Refined white flour products, like donuts, cakes, cookies, hamburger buns, chips, crackers, and pretzels. Make sure the ingredients say whole grain.
- Diet soda pop has been shown to cause weight gain and excess fat.
- Processed foods with too many chemical ingredients and artificial flavors can wreak havoc with your hunger and satiety hormones, causing you to eat more food and be hungry when you’re not.
- Any sugary drink like regular soda pop and fruit juice.
To lose belly fat, you must eat nutrient-dense foods and avoid calorie dense foods. Calorie dense foods are those foods that have a lot of calories per ounce. Nutrient-dense foods have a lot of nutrients and fewer calories per ounce.
Having a cheat day once in a great while might be okay for some, but for anyone trying to lose weight, having a cheat day will most likely create a weight loss plateau. A look at the various diets that can help you lose belly fat and if they are considered healthy or not.
The Starch Solution by Dr. John McDougall is one of the best books to learn about eating a healthy whole food plant-based oil-free diet.
Whole Food Plant-Based No-Oil Diet
A whole food plant-based diet is a low-fat / high-carb way of eating. It limits fat from calories to 15% or less daily, with as much as 80% of calories coming from carbohydrates. This diet is a long term way of eating that will help you lose weight and reverse chronic diseases such as heart disease, hypertension, fibromyalgia, type 2 diabetes, and other illnesses
A whole food plant-based diet is just as it sounds, you eat no foods from animals, including fish, eggs, cheeses or dairy. All foods are plant foods including vegetables, fruits, beans, legumes, whole grains, nuts, and seeds.
Which is actually a very large selection of foods you can eat and there are limitless recipes and ways to prepare this food. This is not a raw food diet.
Why no oil? First of all, oil is pure fat, and not healthy. There are many studies that show all oil damages the endothelial cells that line the arteries [1, 2]. Not everyone that eats a plant-based diet eliminates oil from their diet, but most do, especially those that need to lose belly fat.Oil is processed using some rather nasty chemicals, especially canola oil, which is in almost every packaged food on the grocery store shelves. Oil is nothing but pure fat and has twice the calories per gram than either protein or carbs do. Oil/fat has 9 calories per gram while protein and carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram.
That makes oil the most calorie dense food there is. And in order to lose weight, you must eliminate the calorie dense foods and concentrate on nutrient-dense foods. Vegetables are the most nutrient dense foods there are.
Not only will eating a whole food plant-based diet help you lose weight, reverse chronic disease, but it is also an anti-aging way to eat. Recent studies have found that the foods in a plant-based diet will repair DNA and lengthen telomeres (the ends of a DNA strand) [3]. For more about this way of eating, you can read The Basics of a Whole Food Plant-Based Diet.
Keto Diet
The keto or ketogenic diet is the complete opposite of a whole food plant-based diet and is a high-fat / low-carb diet, similar to the old Atkins diet. The keto diet usually allows for the following macronutrients, 70% of calories from fat, 25% protein, and 5% carbohydrates. As you can see this is a very high-fat diet, with few carbs, which are usually non-starchy vegetables.
The goal of this diet is to get your body into ketosis and use ketones for fuel instead of glucose from carbohydrates. Glucose is the main form of energy for the body to use. With such a low amount of carbs eaten, the body has to turn to using fat or ketones for its fuel.
Anyone who tries this diet will notice a quick weight loss at first and then the weight loss can taper off. In the beginning, it will mainly be water weight. The goal is to get your body into ketosis and stay there, trying to not come out of ketosis.
In order to do this, the dieter would have to aim for no more than 50 grams of carbs per day, and usually has to be less than 20 grams. For example, 1 apple is 23 net grams, and that would be all the carbs allowed per day.
The keto diet can cause tiredness, bad breath, and constipation to name a few health issues, not to mention most get what is called the keto flu when they first start.
There are health concerns with this diet. A recent study compared a low-fat diet with a high-fat keto diet and found that after 12 months there was a significant increase in LDL (bad) cholesterol in the high-fat keto diet group while the LDL dropped significantly in the low-fat group [4].
During the study, there were two events that required surgery in the high-fat group, one for kidney stones and the other for diverticulitis. The lack of fiber in the keto diet is another major health concern.
There are other health risks associated with the keto diet other than kidney stones and diverticulitis. A recent study found that there is a risk of atrial fibrillation (A-Fib) with low carbohydrate diets [5].
The Mediterranean Diet
The Mediterranean diet is similar to a plant-based diet and is recognized as one of the healthiest ways to eat. The Mediterranean diet is based on the traditional way of eating in the 1960s from the Greek island of Crete and Southern Italy.
It is important to understand, this is how they ate decades ago, not today. This is a traditional diet before there were fast food places all over.
The basis for the Mediterranean diet is plenty of vegetables, potatoes, whole grains, rice, beans, legumes, chickpeas, lentils, nuts, seeds and herbs, and spices. Contrary to popular belief, this way of eating is not drenched in olive oil. Yes, they use olive oil on salads and in cooking, but their foods are not full of the unhealthy oils we find in today’s processed foods.
Eaten occasionally are cheese and yogurt ranging from daily to once per week. Fish and poultry are eaten two times a week, and no more than four eggs per week, including eggs used in baking and cooking.
The main reason their diet is healthy is because of the large number of plant foods they eat, and the lack of processed foods, junk foods, and foods filled with chemical additives. Another reason this diet is so healthy is that their meals are usually cooked at home which eliminates the heavily processed oils, and chemical additives.
The DASH Diet
The basics of the DASH diet is lower sodium and lower saturated fat. The foods in this diet emphasize plant-based foods with only a small amount of lean meat since meat is high in saturated fat.
For more information, you can read How to Lower High Blood Pressure and Cholesterol with the DASH Diet.
Other Types of Diets
There are countless diets that can help with weight loss including the paleo diet, the MIND diet, the calorie restriction diet, and the Ornish diet. Most of the healthier diets rely on the majority of foods coming from plants and reducing or eliminating meat and dairy from the diet.
If you need to lose a quick 5 pounds or so, I would recommend using what is called the Potato Hack. This is a healthy and simple way to lose those last 5 or 10 pounds and reset your taste buds.
What Makes a Diet Work?
Adherence is what makes any diet work. If a person is not going to stick to the diet for whatever reason than it is not going to work. The main reason a person cannot stick to a diet is that it is just not sustainable.
Some diets just leave you tired and hungry all of the time, and those diets will never work. But if weight loss, health and reversing chronic disease are your goals, you should be motivated to stick with a healthy way of eating, because reaching the goal is worth it.
The Best Diets to Lose Belly Fat
The easiest diet to stick to is the Mediterranean Diet. But you cannot drench your foods in olive oil and eat a pound of cheese each day and expect to lose weight or get healthy. This way of eating is similar to what is called the flexitarian diet, which also emphasizes plant foods.
I would not recommend the keto diet or any high fat / low carb diet. There are too many verified health concerns during the diet and after you quit this diet. Once you lose the belly fat, then what. Continue trying to keep your body in ketosis. I believe that the keto diet will cause weigh loss, but this is mainly due to water weight loss and muscle loss.
Read everything you can about healthy foods, nutrition, and learn to cook most of your meals and you should be able to lose the belly fat and regain your health. Adding a little exercise to lose belly fat can also add some motivation along with your healthy daily diet.
About the Author
Sam Montana is a certified Food Over Medicine instructor from the Wellness Forum Health Center and certified in optimal nutrition from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
© 2010-2019 Sam Montana/Healthy Food and Life
Resources:
[2] UC Davis Integrative Medicine
[3] Forks Over Knives: Telomeres, the Key to Longevity, Show Food May Be the Best Anti-Aging Treatment
[4] JAMA: Gardner CD, et al. Effect of Low-Fat vs Low-Carbohydrate Diet on 12-Month Weight Loss in Overweight Adults and the Association With Genotype Pattern or Insulin Secretion: The DIETFITS Randomized Clinical Trial . JAMA. (2018)
[5] Journal of the American Heart Association: Low Carbohydrate Diets and Risk of Incident Atrial Fibrillation: A Prospective Cohort Study
