Oh good grief.
First of all, step back from the hyperbole and the emotion. Typing in all caps and making snide comments about how someone knows everything and/or you thought they were smarter than that is just silly. Do you actually want to have a discussion, and maybe learn something, or do you just want to yell as loud as you can in hopes of making someone believe you that way?
e's doing the strength training that apparently you believe is the ONLY thing you need to lose weight
This kind of twisting of what is written is part of the problem why you don't understand. If you read back through what I wrote, I never said that weight lifting was the only way to lose weight. In fact, what I have said since the beginning is that DIET is the key to losing weight. You can exercise until you're blue in the face, but if you're not eating right, you're not gonna lose.
(Please note that throughout what I write, I don't use the word "diet" as in "go on a", to mean a restrictive way of eating or a reduced calorie plan necessarily. I mean "diet" in the holistic sense of what you eat - how much, how balanced it is, what your macros are, how many calories you eat over all.)
Now if you're going to exercise, you're better off doing some kind of strength training to maintain muscle (along with a proper diet - again in the sense of "what you eat" and not in the sense of "go on a") and filling in around that with cardio as you can. Cardio should be secondary to proper diet/nutrition and overall strength training if you're looking for defined abs/muscles.
kay then explain why this dude who posted this isn't losing his belly EXPLAIN THAT TO ME and HIM!.
Since you ask so nicely ...
The "dude who posted" said this:
For about 3 months now I have been wokring out. Mainly Ab exercoses 7 days a week and upper body workouts 5 days a week. My issue is that with the ab workouts I honestly havent seen any results. I eat healthy, so im eating fruits, veggies and all the good stuff
So I still pretty much have my beer belly still but my pecks are there and all. They arent flabby or anything. When I tense up my stomach/chest you can definetley feel the muscles but im just unsure if I keep doing the exercise to tighten my stomach or will I need to do some jogging ot somethig to lose it?
My response to that from the beginning ... and my continued response .. and my answer to why he isn't seeing results is this:
(a) Diet is key. He says he's "eating healthy" but without knowing what he's eating and how much, it's hard to say. I've seen plenty of people say they're being healthy (hell, I used to think I ate healthy - and I did for the most part; I just ate too much healthy food). But when push comes to shove, they're eating too much and not the right kinds of foods to get the physical results they want. In order to lose fat, he's going to need to really focus on his diet - what he eats, how much he eats, how much protein he's getting, where his carbs are coming from. Fruit and nuts are great - but that's high sugar and high fat - so it's possible that despite the amount of exercising he's doing, he's still consuming too many calories to lose fat.
(b) His workout seems to be focusing on visible muscles, which is a common mistake. People tend to work the muscles they can see, and ignore the deeper, larger, supporting muscles and the "hidden" muscles - which means they get surface "tone", but they don't actually build strength and maintain a lot of lean mass. Working with someone (or doing more reading) to develop a balanced, full body plan and combine it with reasonable amounts of cardio (when combined with proper eating) will probably produce results pretty quickly. I'd suggest starting with Steve's thread in the exercise area titled "The Conceptual Side of Weight Lifting" (
http://weight-loss.fitness.com/weig...ise/32836-conceptual-side-weight-lifting.html). Adding some full body work that builds the inner core would probably really help to speed up results.
(c) Belly fat is the hardest for a lot of people to lose. It tends to be the first place people gain fat and the last place they lose fat. When you're already a healthy weight/BMI and are wanting to lose that bit of belly fat padding, what you eat is CRUCIAL to success.
(d) Managing expectation: People get in an "instant results" mindset and don't realize that this is a process. We've become a society that expects things to happen NOW - if we don't lose 10lb in a week, we think we've failed. If we don't get out of college and make $100k a year, we think we've failed. Etc. Our bodies are not instant responders, no matter what shows like The Biggest Loser may make people think. It often takes your body a couple of weeks to adapt to the changes you're making ... especially when those changes are small to begin with. Besides that, he is seeing some results, since he said he can tense his muscles and feel the development and strength. So it's not that he's not seeing results, it's that he's not getting the kind of results he wants becuase he's not tailoring his eating and exercise to those results.
And when doing cardio exercises the calories you burn come mainly from fat,
No, I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Calories are calories - they are a form of energy. They are not physically represented in fat or other tissue, so they don't "come from fat" or "come from muscle". Being in a calories deficit forces your body to use reserved stores of energy. How your body pulls those stores of energy depends on a great many factors.
Couple that with strength training which develops muscle in place of that fat,
That is also incorrect. You don't develop muscle "in place of fat". Also it's extremely difficult (bordering on impossible) to build muscle while eating in a calorie deficit, especially if you're not consuming enough protein (which keys back to why diet is important).
Cardio takes it off, strength training keeps it off.
No, that's not true. Being in a calorie deficit will cause you to lose weight - fat and muscle and water. Exercise of all types can help with both taking weight off and keeping it off ... by helping to regulate calorie levels, to build muscle, and affect other things in your body, including hormone levels.
I don't how else I can say it, but it feels like I'm seriously talking to a brick wall.
Believe me, I feel the same way here. You have some knowledge, but you're not applying it properly. You're repeating a lot of the type of myths that are prominent in magazines and websites that sound good, but aren't really based on scientific fact.
And I KNOW if you eat more than you burn off you won't lose weight...that's not even the topic. Who's talking about eating here?
It's totally the topic, as I mentioned above - if the OP wants to know why he's not losing fat, then he needs to examine what he's eating. You pretty much demanded I tell you why he's not seeing results ... and my answer is that what you eat is important - in fact VITAL to the process. So, yes, I'm talking about eating here.
Seriously. Do some more reading. Hit Lyle McDonald's site, Matthew Perryman's site, Alan Aragon's site, and read anything written here by Steve. I think you'll find that a lot of what you believe is actually strongly based in internet diet myth (and a bit of what's called bro-science).
