Now any enthusiast, must surely be thinking, if we can lose weight by drinking ice water, can we lose a large amount of calories if we drink lots of ice water? Well, to answer this question we have to look at some simple calculations.

First of all we need to distinguish between calories and Calories. Calories (i.e. with a big c) are used to denote the amount of energy that is contained in food. Where as calorie with a small c is used to denote the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius.

Another interesting fact is that it takes, 1 Calorie to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius. So when you are drinking a 140-Calorie can of cola, you are in fact ingesting 140,000 calories in your body. This is the same when you burn say 100 Calories working out, this means that you have actually burned 100,000 calories.

The main purpose of telling you that the definition of calories is based on the rising of temperature is to tell you an interesting fact. We have just seen that when our body raises the temperature, it burns calories, so when you drink ice cold water your body loses calories in raising that ice cold water to body temperature.

Now let us get the math right. Our body temperature is at 37 degree Celsius. The temperature of ice cold water can be safely said to be 0 degree Celsius. There are 473.18 grams in 16 fluid ounces of water. It takes 1 calorie to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.

So, if your body raises the temperature of 473.18 grams of water by 37 degree Celsius it burns 17508 calories.But this is calorie with a small c. It actually denotes only 17.5 calories. You might be thinking that losing 17.5 Calories doesn’t count much compared to the calories we intake.

But, you are not going to drink just one 16 once glass of water are you? Even if you stick to the recommended minimum of 8 glasses of water you will end up burning 70 Calories in a day and that too by doing practically nothing. You can also increase the water intake if you want to shed a few extra pounds.

Even though it’s proven that drinking ice cold water will help you burn calories it must not replace exercise. You must continue with all your weight loss exercises that you already on to. Drinking ice cold water is simply a practical supplement not a remedy.

More than the physical aspect, a flabby belly leads to chronic and life threatening diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and even some types of cancers.

I have created LoseBellyFatQuickly.org to help you fully understand how your body works, how body fat is gained and lost. I’ve assembled a guide here that includes the best tips from my own personal experience as well as other experts in the fields of diet, exercise, and stress-management.

The Best Ways to Burn Belly Fat – The 4 Steps
Despite so many information you read about losing weight, it all boils down to 4 major categories. These include:

Diet
The best way to burn belly fat is lose weight overall and not through spot reductions. Diet works best to reduce overall weight and here are the tips for healthy dieting:

Negative calorie foods
Post workout nutrition
Good trans fat and bad trans fat

Exercises/Workouts
The most important thing to remember if you want to lose belly fat quickly is to rotate your workouts and include exercises for your whole body. This will provide continuous challenge to your body that will result to burning of calories. Here are some recommended reading regarding abs exercises and other body workouts.

Cardio training methods to burn belly fats quickly
Walking and weight loss

Managing Stress
Most people don’t realize that stress is a major trigger for gaining weight. The big challenge is managing stress and coping with all your responsibilities in life. Here are relaxation techniques and other helpful ideas:

Sleep and Weight Loss

Motivation and Hypnosis
Sometimes we start burning belly fat but for some reason we never finish. We get distracted so we switch to another diet hoping to get faster and better results. We tend to give up easily and lose the will to improve ourself. Here are some motivation tips for weight loss:

Why so many people fail to lose belly fat

Growing in use calorie cycling or calorie shifting is quickly becoming the way to go . Calorie shifting is a simple method that involves tricking the body into maintaining a high metabolism, high burn mode even when fewer calories are eaten. It’s been used for a long time by bodybuilders and athletes who have to make weight without losing muscle . The great thing about calorie shifting is that it can work to lose weight even if you don’t cut down on calories.

How does it work? Shift the nutrients and calories eaten each day while maintaining the times you normally eat. It’s a very simple diet to execute because it’s a very well planned diet. Many on line sources include clear instructions and calorie shifting menus.

Now for a few cautions. Of course there are cautions. Calorie shifting diets are generally lacking in vegetables, calcium and fat. All of those are necessary to a healthy body. Originally developed for cases of extreme obesity, calorie shifting was meant as a medical intervention. There would be a great deal of medical supervision along with this diet. That’s not true when used at home. Finally, calorie shifting diets are short term, quick loss diets. Like other such diets you’ll put the weight back on quickly if you go back to the regular eating habits, and most people do.

Moderation is required with diets as it is with most anything in life. Good for a short time, calorie shifting should not be extended beyond a few days. Also make sure it’s followed in conjunction with an overall healthy eating plan and an exercise plan. That way then the few days of calorie shifting is finished, the weight won’t return and return you to square one.

Lack of sleep lowers leptin, a protein that restrain appetite and tells the brain when the stomach is full. Not having enough sleep also slows down insulin production, an agent responsible for regulating blood sugar. In short, not getting enough rest disturbs your body’s ability to burn off extra calories.

Most people need between seven and nine hours of sleep a night. Very few of us actually get the minimum of seven. How do you know how much sleep you really need? Experts say to sleep as long as you want for several days (best done on vacation). Then, your sleep should stabilize and you’ll find yourself waking up after the same number of hours daily, within 15 minutes or so. Once you know about how much sleep you need, start getting into a steady routine. Set a regular time for sleep. Start getting ready ahead of time. And experts say, avoid using the bed for watching TV or doing work.

If you are having a hard time falling asleep, try following these tips:

Get some lovin. Your bed is good for two things: sleep and sex. If you constantly find yourself eating, working, paying bills or doing other activities in your bed, your mind will not associate the bedroom with relaxation.

Limit alcoholic drinks. Alcohol messes with your sleep rhythms of your body and actually increases the possibility of snoring. So, try to limit your cocktails to the weekend when you can get some extra shut-eye. If you’re a regular up the local pub for after-work beer specials, you can bet that the quality of your sleep is impacted.

Make a List. If you find yourself staring at the ceiling with your to-do list running over and over again in your head the try keeping a note pad close to your bed. Write down the things that you need to do. That should give you momentary relief and will help you fall asleep.

Foods that will help boost your metabolism.

Your metabolism is what determines if your body will save the food you eat as waste, or will be used for energy, or as fat. Eating foods that speed up metabolism will in turn help you shake off more fat because your body will need the food for energy.

Foods recommended for burning fat include fish, chicken, pasta and rice. These are called healthy choices because of low fat content but have a lot of nutrients. If consumed in the right portion size, these foods are considered fat burning foods.

Portion size varies among different foods. This should be considered before making a meal. Chicken and fish should be eaten in three to four ounce servings. For pasta, the correct portion size should be the size of a baseball or about three ounces. Pasta is only considered a fat burning food if consumed with very little sauce. That means no heavy marina sauce and too much cheese. Portion control is very important if you want to lose belly fat quickly.

Negative Calorie Foods

Some foods are called negative calorie foods or foods which use more calories to digest than the calories food actually contains! Calories from these foods are much harder for the body to use. In other words, the body has to work hard in order to extract calories from these foods.

These foods are good for your body, and will give you the needed energy that is required for daily routines such as exercise.

Negative Calorie Vegetables include Asparagus, Beet Root, Broccoli, Cabbage, Carrot, Cauliflower, Celery, Chicory, Hot Chili, Cucumber, Garden cress, Garlic, Green Beans, Lettuce, Onion, Radish, Spinach, Turnip, Zucchini

Negative Calorie Fruits include Apple, Blueberries, Cantaloupe, Cranberry, Grapefruit, Honeydew, Lemon/Lime, Mango, Orange, Papaya, Peach, Pineapple, Raspberry, Strawberry, Tomato, Tangerine, Turnip, Watermelon

Before you just give in to this popular belief and become the “hamster on the wheel” doing endless hours of boring cardio, I’d like you to consider some recent scientific research that indicates that steady pace endurance cardio work may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Our bodies are designed to perform physical activity in bursts of exertion followed by recovery, or stop-and-go movement instead of steady state movement.

Recent research is suggesting that physical variability is one of the most important aspects to consider in your training. This tendency can be seen throughout nature as all animals demonstrate stop-and-go motion instead of steady state motion. In fact, humans are the only creatures in nature that attempt to do “endurance” type physical activities. Most competitive sports (with the exception of endurance running or cycling) are also based on stop-and-go movement or short bursts of exertion followed by recovery. To examine an example of the different effects of endurance or steady state training versus stop-and-go training, consider the physiques of marathoners versus sprinters. Most sprinters carry a physique that is very lean, muscular, and powerful looking, while the typical dedicated marathoner is more often emaciated and sickly looking. Now which would you rather resemble?

Internal effect of various forms of exercise on our body.

Scientists have known that excessive steady state endurance exercise (different for everyone, but sometimes defined as greater than 60 minutes per session most days of the week) increases free radical production in the body, can degenerate joints, reduces immune function, causes muscle wasting, and can cause a pro-inflammatory response in the body that can potentially lead to chronic diseases. On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training has been linked to increased anti-oxidant production in the body and an anti-inflammatory response, a more efficient nitric oxide response (which can encourage a healthy cardiovascular system), and an increased metabolic rate response (which can assist with weight loss).

Furthermore, steady state endurance training only trains the heart at one specific heart rate range and doesn’t train it to respond to various every day stressors. On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training teaches the heart to respond to and recover from a variety of demands making it less likely to fail when you need it. Think about it this way — Exercise that trains your heart to rapidly increase and rapidly decrease will make your heart more capable of handling everyday stress. Stress can cause your blood pressure and heart rate to increase rapidly. Steady state jogging and other endurance training does not train your heart to be able to handle rapid changes in heart rate or blood pressure.

The important aspect of variable cyclic training that makes it superior over steady state cardio is the recovery period in between bursts of exertion. That recovery period is crucially important for the body to elicit a healthy response to an exercise stimulus. Another benefit of variable cyclic training is that it is much more interesting and has lower drop-out rates than long boring steady state cardio programs.

To summarize, some of the potential benefits of variable cyclic training compared to steady state endurance training are as follows: improved cardiovascular health, increased anti-oxidant protection, improved immune function, reduced risk for joint wear and tear, reduced muscle wasting, increased residual metabolic rate following exercise, and an increased capacity for the heart to handle life’s every day stressors. There are many ways you can reap the benefits of stop-and-go or variable intensity physical training. One of the absolute most effective forms of variable intensity training to really reduce body fat and bring out serious muscular definition is performing wind sprints.

Most competitive sports such as football, basketball, racquetball, tennis, hockey, etc. are naturally comprised of highly variable stop-and-go motion. In addition, weight training naturally incorporates short bursts of exertion followed by recovery periods. High intensity interval training (varying between high and low intensity intervals on any piece of cardio equipment) is yet another training method that utilizes exertion and recovery periods. For example, an interval training session on the treadmill could look something like this:

Warm-up for 3-4 minutes at a fast walk or light jog;

Interval 1 – run at 8.0 mi/hr for 1 minute;

Interval 2 – walk at 4.0 mi/hr for 1.5 minutes;

Interval 3 – run at 10.0 mi/hr for 1 minute;

Interval 4 – walk at 4.0 mi/hr for 1.5 minutes;

Repeat those 4 intervals 4 times for a very intense 20-minute workout.

The take-away message from this article is to try to train your body at highly variable intensity rates for the majority of your workouts to get the most beneficial response in terms of heart health, fat loss, and muscle maintenance.

Walking for 30 minutes a day seven days a week is a great start. In fact, it’s much better than the five day, or even three day, plan that many people recommend. 30 minutes of exercise 3-5 times a week just isn’t enough. The body needs work every day. That means seven days a week and if walking is the way to make that tolerable every day for the rest of your life, then walk.

But then more can be added. Additional activity, outside that 30 minutes a day seven days a week, is easy. Park the car further from the store or office, then walk. Instead of gobbling a bagel while riding the elevator up to your floor, enjoy a banana while walking up the stairs. When it’s time to rid the yard of leaves use the old fashioned hand rake rather than the leaf blower. Muscle power is exercise. If you have kids get involved in their games of tag, or chase. They’ll love it and so will your body.

After getting accustomed to walking that 30 minutes every day, make some adjustments by adding intervals. Intervals are short bursts of increased activity sprinkled into a normal routine. Start out by running for 30 seconds every 10 minutes of the walk. Gradually increase this to a one minute run every five minutes, which would work like this. You walk for the first four minutes, then run for the fifth, then walk the next four minutes, run the next minute, and so on for the entire 30 minutes. Keep in mind that a run is not a jog, it’s faster, like a sprint. So if you have to work up to run with jog at first.

Walking to lose weight is healthy, no doubt. But it’s also a great way to get around the neighborhood, meet neighbors, and see things you probably miss while driving around everywhere you go. If it gets boring you can ask a spouse or family member to join you. Make it a family affair, or get the whole neighborhood involved.

Hogwash! Americans still spend upwards of $40 billion on weight loss products that mostly don’t work. Failure doesn’t stop new diets from springing up out of the wood work, or people from trying them. Remember Joe Frazier’s diet, chew the food but spit it out? He bragged it made him full and gave him all the nutrients without the fat. See, mimes had the secret to weight loss all the time. Then there are the magic pills, creams, and diet supplements that guarantee to burn pounds without exercise, guaranteed. No that wasn’t a typo, they use the word guarantee so often it starts to lose meaning. And when they don’t mention precisely the details of the “guarantee” it doesn’t have any meaning. It’s simply a tricking people to think the product works.

Studies show that Very Low Calorie Diets, or VLCDs, work. People got wind of this and now try them at home. That’s a problem because of their nature. VLCD’s are extreme diets intended for seriously overweight people. These diets are designed to be used under medical supervision in a closed setting where people can’t cheat. When used outside those parameters people tend to cheat, and what’s worse they can incur serious health issues.

Rapid weight loss, if it works, creates a number of problems with the body. Gallstones, dehydration, malnutrition and even protein poisoning can develop as a result of the severe caloric starvation involved in VLCDs.

Rapid weight loss is a great idea. But it’s not for most people, and should be administered and supervised by qualified medical professionals.

Skipping meals is one of the first things people often try when they want to lose weight. Hey, if eating fewer calories is the goal then why not skip breakfast or lunch. Fewer calories means losing weight, right? Yes, but skipping meals is a mistake, not the right way to reduce calories. When you skip meals your body goes into starvation mode. It starts to retain fat to counteract what it perceives as a food shortage. When you skip meals you’ll end up hungrier at the next meal. This could lead to binge eating. Skipping meals is the worst of both worlds that results in gaining even more weight. Don’t do it.

Know how much to eat. It’s called portion control and it’s as important as eating the right foods. Too much of even a healthy food will still result in weight gain. It’s hard to do when large portions are so common. Restaurants and even most people in home cooking serve portions far larger than needed. Sources such as the FDA list recommended daily allowances. And remember portion size when you eat at restaurants, especially fast food restaurants. Don’t eat the full portion served at the restaurant, or order less than a full meal, such as soup and a salad.

Eat more whole grain foods, skip the white grains such as white bread, sugar and white rice. Whole grains are rich in nutrients and low in fat. The fiber in whole grains helps you become full faster, and feel fuller longer. Finally, whole grains add nutrients that many people lack in their diet.

Drink more water. Drink it instead of juices and sodas which add about 90,000 calories to the average person’s diet each year. Drink it between meals too. The goal is 8 glasses of water each day. It seems like a lot, but it’s not. Drinking water will also promote health in general by keeping you well hydrated and helping to avoid overheating.

In order to maintain proper blood sugar eat healthy snacks between meals since the body needs food every three to four hours. Eating healthy snacks, such as fruits, helps control eating at meal times.

Fast weight loss isn’t impossible with a little knowledge and planning. Keep these things in mind and pretty soon you’ll see a slimmer you when you look into a mirror.

Keep a daily log of everything that passes your lips. Keeping notes helps you eat less. Studies show that people eat 15% less when they track everything they eat. 15% is a lot.

On average Americans consume 245 calories a day from drinks. Switch from juice, soda, and other calorie drinks to water. 245 calories a day add up to 90,000 calories each year. That’s 25 pounds. Are soda and juice really that good? Another fact is that despite their calories, drinks like soda and juice don’t trigger a feeling of fullness the way foods do.

Grazing, eating more smaller meals during the day rather than a few large meals, is another way to drop weight. Eating more meals with smaller portions results in eating 30% fewer calories. Furthermore, even the same number of calories eaten in smaller portions during more frequent meals can result in weight loss. You’re less likely to binge because the body releases less insulin.

Make sure your wardrobe only includes the “skinny” clothes. If you don’t have clothes that are comfortable when you’re fat, you’re more likely to be reminded to keep the weight off every time you dress. And you’re less likely to gain weight if doing so means having to purchase a whole new wardrobe.

Use smaller plates. It’s been proven that people eat more when more food is in front of them, and they eat less when less food is in front of them. Smaller plates mean smaller portions, so put the salad plates into use as the main plate.

Similar to the idea of using smaller plates, serve your food on the plate rather than in bowls on the table. Again, people tend to eat what’s in front of them.

Avoid white foods such as white bread, sugar, and white rice. Those foods are loaded with carbohydrates which lead to higher blood sugar and weight gain. Stick to whole grain breads and dark rice. Don’t be concerned with the sugar, pretty soon you won’t miss it.

Weight loss isn’t easy, but relatively speaking there are easy ways to lose weight. Don’t think it won’t take a little work. If weight loss were effortless everyone would be slim all the time.