Q: I have a question. Will speed walking and jogging (sometimes even running) on the treadmill make my body lose fat (i.e. MANBOOBS)?
I also have a gut that pops out. I don't eat that much during the day. I usually have rice and lentils and for lunch and dinner. For breakfast I have a glass of orange juice or milk.

So, will using the treadmill for 30 minutes every day make me lose my gut and/or manboobs? I want to be 'normal.' Please advise.

A: You are going about losing that extra fat in a very wrong and actually dangerous way! If you literally just eat rice with lentils and a glass of milk in the entire day, then you're absolutely starving yourself!!! Such a regimen will seriously endanger your health far earlier than it will burn off your gut and/or man boobs! Here's what's happening in your body daily...

• You probably eat around 500 or 600 calories for the entire day (rice/lentils/milk)! This is three to four TIMES less than you should be eating.
• Your body 'realizes' it's not getting nearly enough calories (not to mention minerals and vitamins) for normal functioning and has a decision to make of how to make up for the calorie deficit.
• It can burn either muscle or fat for energy. Muscle is an active metabolic tissue, meaning that just to maintain itself it requires significant energy. Fat is a passive metabolic tissue that does not require much or any energy to maintain itself.
• Given those facts, your body will choose to burn MUSCLE and NOT FAT for energy as much as possible! By burning muscle it will both get some energy out of it AND lower its energy demands for the future because it now has less of active metabolic tissue to support.

Now you can probably see what is happening. Your body will use up all the muscle available for energy and spare as much fat as possible because it's under such a severe caloric deficit! And the more muscle it loses, the lower its energy demands become and the less likely it is to burn fat at all! These results are all exact opposites of what you want.

So what you need to do is sery seriously change your diet and engage in heavy weight training to rebuild all the lost muscle, and to rev your body's metabolism back up. Good news is that it's something you can and should do. Read this article and also read the two artcles it references. Together they will give you a compelete diet and workout program to follow. Switch to the workout program as soon as you can and switch to the diet one sloooooooowly, over the course of a month. Your new diet program will be very different from your present one and will ask you to eat several TIMES more than you do now. If you jump to it right away, you will gain a good amount of additional fat because your body is so used to eating almost nothing now. So add additional meals slowly over the course of the month.

And please please please don't continue with your present diet. You may even be afraid to eat now because you feel like every calorie goes straight into fat on your body. You'll need to change your mindset. Nutricious food is your best friend and without it you will quite literally kill yourself. As you read the nutrition article, keep that in mind. It will take a couple of months for your body get back to normal and then is when the serious fat loss (and not just weight loss) will start, thanks to a healthy fat-burning diet and weighttraining. Best of luck to you!