Grab your gut. Wobble it about. How much is moving? Beneath the wobble, is a big balloony bit not moving?
It is extremely common that part of a ‘fat gut’ is actually bloating – a mixture of fart and inflammation. We can undergo liposuction which will remove the blubber – but leave the fart well alone.
January only too often brings the decision to lose the excess, which is succesfully followed until the call of the cake becomes unbearable – usually not very long at all. What would it be like to get a slimmer waistline without having started some potty diet or other?
The principle cause of a bloated gut is food intolerance. Yes, stress plays a huge part in all this, but that is another subject. The big question is what foods are causing the problem?
The answer partly lies in understanding that if something we eat couldn’t run away because it is a plant or an egg, it will have other defences. In other words, plants either don’t want to be eaten, so will have natural poisons or they do want their seeds to be eaten in order to be pooped out, our poop providing the seed with a food bank: the seed wants to be pooped out, and not to be digested to become part of our body. The same goes for eggs; they can’t run away, so have inbuilt defences. Therefore if we eat any plant food or egg everyday, these toxins build up in our body and start to cause problems. And this goes for lettuce, wheat, lentils or duck’s eggs.
In the book Practical Paleo by Diane Sanfilippo she makes the excellent point that if I said that everyday I ate 3 scrambled eggs for breakfast, had a quiche for lunch then souffle for dinner everyday, people would think I ate an awful lot of eggs each day. So if I eat cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch and a pasta dish for dinner doesn’t this mean I’m eating an awful lot of wheat? All wholegrain, organic, reaped by the full moon, of course. However, most people would not consider this to be an unusual diet – far from it.
Things that can’t run or slither away have built in defences, so if we eat them day after day we will become intolerant to them. And this goes for sprouts as well! In an effort to eat up our greens, we can find ourselves eating sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower – all cruciferous vegetables – and so on every day. Even these relatively benign vegetables will eventually get us in the gut.
So to flatten the abs without exercise or liposuction, pondering on what we are eating every day and aiming to vary each and every meal will kick start fat loss by reducing bloating. As a woeful hint: the stuff we can’t imagine eating is generally the stuff that is causing the great fart build up.