Dr Michael Mosley often shares his weight loss advice with others. The nutrition expert is also the creator of The Fast 800 diet – a meal plan that helps dieters lose weight “fast”.
According to Dr Mosley, diet and exercise go hand-in-hand when it comes to weight loss.
Exercise can also help to prevent and reduce belly fat – a stubborn fat that can affect even the slimmest of people.
He said: “Exercise is key for various reasons.
“It is amongst the best things you can do for a long and healthy life.
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“If you don’t use your muscles enough, then over time, fat builds up inside the muscle fibres and insulin resistance develops.
“The best way to reverse this is to get more active – sit less, move more.
“You can start by sitting less. If you spend a lot of time sitting continuously, then the sugar and fat that you eat will just sit around in your arteries causing problems, rather than being dumped in your muscles where they will get burnt as fuels.”
Therefore, Dr Mosley added: “I recommend just 10 minutes on a static bike three times a week, plus quick strengthening exercises which don’t require special equipment.
“In case you’ve never tried HIIT, it involves a few very short bursts of strenuous exercise carried out in succession – exercising in this way can help improve your aerobic fitness in a relatively short time.
“If you don’t have an exercise bike you can try pedalling on your road bike furiously up a hill, running up the stairs, or doing short sprints when out on a run, just pick up your walking pace until you are breathing hard.
“The main thing is that these bursts should be brief – 30 seconds maximum when it comes to the stairs, or running – but hard enough to get your heart rate up.”
Dr Mosley added that studies have shown that HIIT is “much easier to stick to” than other forms of exercise.
The nutrition expert concluded: “So conventional diet and training regimes don’t help you to lose belly fat.
“And let’s face it: surrounded by junk food, dosed with snacks and working in sedentary jobs, we live in an environment that piles it on.
“And yet more and more people are discovering that with the right lifestyle changes, they can burn it off.
“And most amazing? It’s not as hard as you think.”