For people struggling with emotional eating, exercise has a double benefit. First of all, it helps release any negative emotions, which in turn helps prevent you from turning to food to cope with your emotions.
Finding a way to exercise at night is hugely important. Additionally, people who struggle with emotional eating also report high levels of belly fat. Belly fat is dangerous, and is associated with a wide variety of health risk, including sudden cardiac death.
This is NO JOKE.
Here are the specific exercises you need to do to burn belly fat. The key point here is that you need to become active, consume less sugar and eat more green vegetables.
“Studies suggest that to lose belly fat, exercise is absolutely necessary, and diet alone is not sufficient. This may seem intimidating, but to begin losing belly fat you do not need to run five miles a day. Even a slow start is beneficial, and reductions in belly fat happen in a dose-dependant manner, meaning that the more you exercise the more belly fat will be lost.
There is a minimum amount necessary, which research suggests is 10 METs of aerobic exercise a week. METs are a way to measure exercise using the same principle as the way we measure our resting metabolic rate. Because everyone is different, and has different metabolisms, burning 100 calories takes different amounts of time for different people and is not a useful measurement. METs helps give a scale applicable to everyone.
METs (metabolic equivalent of a task) measure not the calories burned by an activity, but the overall intensity. The more intense an exercise, the more METs are accumulated. One MET is roughly equivalent to sitting for one hour–in other words, if you did nothing at all, all day, you would burn exactly 24 METs, meeting your resting metabolic rate. Activities which require more effort, even slightly, accrue METs faster, reflecting the increased amount of energy required to perform these tasks. Here is a brief chart of activities with MET equivalents (per hour):
Sitting Quietly: 1 MET
Walking: 2-3 METs
Leisure Biking: 4 METs
Biking, light-moderate: 7-8 METs
Biking, vigorous: 10 METs
Swimming, light-moderate: 6 METs
Jogging (4 mph): 6 METs
Running (6 mph): 10 METs
Running (8 mph): 12 METs
Sprinting (12 mph): 19 METs
As the relative intensity of the exercise increases, MET hours also go up. If you could run at 12 mph for an hour, you would burn the metabolic equivalent of 19 hours at rest (19 METs)! Of course, this is probably not possible, but you still get significant benefit from jogging at 4 mph–two hours of jogging at this rate will net you 12 METs, two above the minimum requirement weekly for belly fat reduction!
To be useful for belly fat reduction, the exercise needs to be aerobic–it should make you breathe hard, but not so hard you can’t speak in short sentences. Most light aerobic activities are worth around 6 METs, plus or minus one, meaning you need a minimum of an hour and a half to two hours of this activity each week. If you feel like you don’t have the time to exercise two hours a week, find it! If you still really can’t, then up the intensity. Running at 6 mph is worth 10 METs, as is vigorous biking. If you can sustain these speeds for a half an hour, then you only need two half hour sessions a week!
If time is really an issue, then you can burst train. There are many ways to burst train, but the general idea connecting them is that you should go all out for 45-60 seconds, recover, go all out again, recover again, etc. One minute may not seem long enough to make a difference, and alone it is not, but consider this: one minute of sprinting is worth 19 MET minutes. If you burst train with sprints and lightly jog during the recovery minutes, then you will accumulate a total of about 2.6 METs (1.6 METs from sprinting, 1 MET from jogging). Four fifteen minute sessions a week is all that is necessary–sprinting is not. Any exercise you can only do for about a minute is of sufficient intensity to be worth around 20 METs
The more you exercise aerobically, or the more intensely, the faster the belly fat will be shed. Significant losses only begin at 10 METs per week–much higher amounts can be burned by increased exercise. It is also important to note that even though resistance training has not been directly tied to reducing belly fat, it is an extremely important part a general fitness routine, and will help raise your overall metabolic rate which will help you reduce belly fat.”