An Aardvark with Man-boobs

For people who haven’t been formally introduced to Aardvark, it is a service which taps into your existing social networks and capitalizes on the institutional knowledge base you have at your fingertips.

Basics – You put in a question and Aardvark sends it out to people who can help you. On the flip side of that, what are you an expert in? Aardvark also enables you to help people with questions that you know the answers to. It basically relies on that age-old joy of helping people out and maybe to a degree showing off what you know. After all, most everyone likes to at least be asked…

I’ve been working with aardvark for about 6 months and it isn’t invasive. I get a question every week or two and I try to respond intelligently. I claim not to know much but I know something about living in Japan (having been here 9 years) and a bit about fitness. Most of my questions seem to fall into those two niches and the answers aren’t hard to come up with.

So today I got this question from a guy in the US. “”What’s the best way to get rid if man-boobs sans surgery? Push-ups? And if so which form works best?” Tell me your heart doesn’t go out to a dude trying to rid himself of man-boobs so I wrote back.

Dear Aardvark,

There are no magic pills for this. Push-ups will make the muscle underneath whatever fat you are storing stronger but won’t address the issue directly. This is a common misconception in fitness like doing sit-ups to get rid of belly fat.

There are a few things to know…

One is that everyone’s body stores excess energy in fat. You actually need it because the human body can only store approx 800 calories in the blood. Everyone’s body stores fat in different places. For some guys this results in a big ole beer belly, back fat, or for others man-boobs. What you need to do is get your metabolism up (try cycling for burning off calories, hard to beat it), help your body burn off the fat by staying hydrated (drink water), and eat less food/more often like 6 small meals a day of modest portions ie not putting in enough calories in a single sitting where you body will need to store it in fat.

Then work on building some muscle tone like doing push-ups or sit-ups or lifting weights whatever. Muscle tissue burns energy just sitting there so not only will the exercise it takes to build muscle burn calories but having better muscle tone will enable you to burn more energy even when you aren’t doing anything at all.

Those efforts combined will get rid of the man-boobs, bro. Good luck.

In return, I get the satisfaction of helping a stranger during my morning break at work and will probably take my own advice and get out for ride after work.

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