Hi, I'm Kevin Don the Get Fit Guy. I'm here to share my accumulated decade of knowledge in the

strength and conditioning industry with you to help you to become the best version of yourself

whilst cutting through the hype and biases. This week I received an email from one of my listeners,

and since this is actually a fairly common question, I thought it would be a great opportunity to address it here on the show.

Email reads as follows. Yes, I know diet is the main thing, but I'm looking for fun, new

exercises that will help my love handles and belly.

I already do all of the regular things, but I need to mix it up.

Any thoughts on the efficacy of weighted hula hoops or anything else that's different and helps those areas?

Okay, so there are a few things to dig into here, so sit back, buckle up and get ready for some facts.

The first is that I don't necessarily believe a diet is the best solution.

A quick search in the Macmillan Dictionary tells me that one of the meanings of diet, and certainly the one that applies here, is a limited amount

of food that someone eats because they're trying to become thinner. As I've discussed several

times here on the show, fitness is the absence of disease in an organism. Whilst it's certainly

the case that being overweight can bring a host of health issues, we can say the opposite

is also true. Cutting entire food groups, under-consuming nutrients, and being underweight

will lead to mental and physical health problems. So I want to distance myself from the diet idea.

However, it's also true that humans are subject to the first law of thermodynamics,

that being that energy is always conserved. Basically, your body is like a bank. If you eat more

calories than you burn, the energy will be conserved in the form of fat. So burning more than we

consume will lead to the usage of the conserved energy. However, they're perhaps

healthier ways of doing this than dieting. Firstly, we could look at increasing neat. Neat is an acronym

which stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which is basically burning more calories during the day outside of dedicated exercise times.

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