The Best Way to Lose a Gut Without a Gym

You don't need a gym or a health club to remove your gut the all-natural way. Just get a pair of good cross-training shoes, put yourself on a tight diet and get ready for "Gut-B-Gone Boot Camp."

Cut The Fat

• Avoid dairy products, fried foods, and anything processed. Switch your snacking habits and develop a hankering for vegetables, fruits and unsalted nuts. If constant eating is a bad habit of yours, switch it to a sunflower seed habit. The idea is to eat smaller meals, but more of them. Don't gorge yourself on any one item, keep your choices healthy, and don't cheat unless it's a real reward for a killer workout.

  If you're going to eat meat, go with chicken and other poultry. This is the leanest meat you can eat. Just make sure it's not fried and in a bucket. Soups are always a good chicken source.

  Break down your meals into five or six over a typical day, with limited healthy snacking in between. Healthy snacks are a paper cup full of nuts, an apple or a banana, celery with peanut butter (a great metabolism booster) or a small salad.

Fight The Fat

• You can't get away with losing your gut without some sweat and exercise. Stock up on sweat gear. If you want to accelerate the process, wear a few layers of sweats. Start with a light jog. If you haven't exercised in a long time and are starting from scratch, start small. Do as many sit-ups as you can. Look for other abdominal exercises you can do on the floor at home. Work your way up to a daily or every-other-day run or brisk walk, depending on your age and physical ability. It's going to take some time to burn off the fat, and you have to come at it from different angles. You must keep up the intensity to make the effort worth it.

  The idea is to never regress and always strive to push yourself a little bit farther as your condition improves. Always finish the routine or run strong, and time yourself on runs so you can try to beat your mark. Check your weight before and after runs, and make sure each time you finish your clothes are soaked with sweat. You can lose 5 pounds or more on a daily run, and if you can manage to only gain a couple pounds back through meals after that, you're losing 3 pounds a day on running alone. Running by itself won't erase what years of neglect have done to your big belly, though. It's all about the ab workout.

At Home Exercises

• Ab exercises are key to getting rid of your gut and there are many that work well. The first is done from a standing position. Put your arms behind your head, and touch each elbow to the opposite knee. Raise the knee as high as possible each time. This is a really good exercise for the love handle area. Another exercise requires help to maximize the effect. To go solo, you have to play your abs like drums with your fists. Bounce up and down and walk around as you do it to build up a sweat. Do some jumping jacks, touch your toes and mix in punches to your abs all the while. Target the flabbiest areas and try to flex the ab muscles before impact each time. Try to burp up any air in your belly. This helps the metabolism kick into a higher gear. The best results for this exercise occur when you have a partner over you hitting your abs for you as you hold your hands behind your head like you are doing sit-ups. Finally, lie on your back, put your hands under your rear, palms down, one on top of the other. Now kick your legs up and down, over and over again. Open and close them, cross them over each other and put your feet together and move your legs around in a circle. Do this routine until your ab area feels like it's on fire. As you get tired of one method, switch to another, but don't stop until you can no longer hold your legs in the air.

  Believe it or not, even though you can't see them now, you have an intricate system of muscles behind your gut. You have to really put in the time and work to get to them, and you have to push them to the surface through healthy eating and ample exercise.

  Try a few protein powders and shakes for an assist, but don't treat it like a miracle cure. Another supplement that can help is chromium picolinate, which burns fat and builds muscle. Just remember nothing will do all the work for you. Some products might help you along, but you still have to do your daily exercise routine and stick to it. If you do, your gut will be gone in a few months to a year, depending on how hard you work and how big it was to start.