Doing these 3 things, however, can keep you from ever reaching your goals to get fit.

1. Consuming Alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are more fattening than any protein or carbohydrate because of all the sugar they contain. Beer and mixed drinks have so many sugars and carbs it's no wonder they call it the "beer belly"?

This is what it does to your system: Alcohol also slows down how fast your food is metabolized because your body processes it before any of the carbs, fats or proteins you eat. So if you're drinking at dinner, the food you eat will be easily stored as extra body fat.

You end up wasting your calories on ones that have zero nutritional value instead of ones that can fuel your body. Alcohol is immediately digested and sent to the bloodstream, before your food. Why do you think it hits so quickly?

One last thing on drinking alcohol, hangovers are nightmares! The last thing ANYONE wants to do when they have a hangover is go exercise. When you hurt all over from too much the night before, it's impossible to get motivated to workout. All you want to do is sleep and be lazy.

2. Working Out Lightly. If you think weight lifting will "bulk you up" like a body builder, allow me to give you some assurance. Your body has a size limit that is predetermined by your genetics and it will typically not grow anymore than that. Body builders do extreme workouts and even take body enhancers. If they didn't, they most likey wouldn't have their build.

Here's what a light workout will not do for you.

Working out with light weights doesn't build up your muscles enough to make them work to your advantage. In other words, when your body has a lot of lean muscle mass, it burns fat throughout the day to maintain itself- even while you sleep. It uses food for energy PLUS stored fat reserves. Talk about a fat burning machine!

By not doing any real strength training you also won't lower your body fat percentage. This is because you don't increase your heart rate enough to burn calories. There's a popular myth in the fitness world that you have to do "cardio" exercises to burn fat- like running, spinning, etc. However, there are many strength training routines that actually increase your heart rate as much as "cardio" routines do.

The principle behind burning fat is to get your heart rate up and make your body work harder so that it uses more energy. This raises your body temperature inside creating more heat. And as we all know, heat causes things to burn.

Working out lightly will not give you the dramatic results you desire. By doing them, you're wasting time and effort with useless techniques. My best tip to get the results you want: Make your workouts more intense and i know you'll start to see far better results.

3. Eating too much "junk" food. When consuming too many foods that don't have a lot of nutritional value, you're not providing good nutrients to your muscles. When they're not fed properly, your muscles don't become your own personal fat burning machine.

By not eating a healthy diet, you'll be consuming foods that promote body fat gain, like processed foods and fast foods that contain hydrogenated oil (trans fats) and high fructose corn syrup. These 2 poisonous ingredients are put in food to lengthen the shelf life (putting more money in the manufacturer's pockets) and are known to increase your chances of getting coronary heart disease and obesity. Doesn't sound healthy to me.

Besides everything I just laid out for you, if you exercise but you don't eat right, you're just wasting away your precious time and energy! I have a saying, "DIET IS KING" when it comes to burning body fat and revealing those hidden muscles! Don't waste your workouts on just working off what you ate!

My suggestion to you is that if you want that body fat gone, strictly limit or completely eliminate the alcohol you consume, don't be afraid to push yourself to strength train, and do all you can to feed your muscle with healthy food. If you can't stay away from fast food, you might as well get used to having all that belly fat around.