Most people involved in weight loss believe that it's all about the calories. If you burn calories more than you take in, you lose weight. If you take in more calories than you can burn, the body gains fat. While this piece of logic may make sense, it is only partly true. What burns calories nonstop is actually the lean muscle mass underneath body fat that allows more intake of calories without weight gain.

The body actually adapts to the changes it undergoes. Losing weight without exercising increases the risk of losing lean body mass, slowing the metabolism and putting the body into fat-storing mode. People who have lost body fat and muscle mass may notice that they don't have the muscle mass they once had. Worse yet, once they overeat even a little bit, they start filling up on body fat once again.

Building up muscle mass

An important thing to remember when undergoing a weight loss program is to understand what needs to be done. Realistic and achievable goals can help in building the confidence needed to make the necessary leap for the achievement of a desired weight.

Researchers at the Biomechanics Lab at San Diego State University took a look at some popular abdominal exercises and ranked them. Results of the study revealed that exercises that require constant abdominal stabilization and body rotation resulted in the most muscle activity in the abdomen.

Below are the top five belly exercises as ranked by the study:

1. The Bicycle Exercise - best for targeting the six pack muscles and the obliques. To do this exercise, get into a supine position with hands at the back of your head. Bring knees to the chest while lifting shoulders off the floor. Slowly bring your right elbow towards your left knee as you straighten your right leg. Switch sides and continue in a pedaling motion. Do 1 to 3 sets with 12 to 16 repetitions.

2. The Captain's Chair Leg Raise - This exercise requires a captain's chair, a rack with padded arms allowing for the legs to hang free that is commonly found in gyms or health clubs. To do this exercise, stand on the chair and grip hand holds. Press back against the pad then raise knees to the chest to contract the abs then lower them back down. Do 1 to 3 sets with 12 to 16 repetitions.

3. Exercise Ball Crunch - For this exercise, an exercise ball is necessary. In this routine, the abdomen does more exerting but will still need the entire body to stabilize it throughout the routine. To do this exercise, lie on the ball with your lower back fully supported. Place hands behind the head. To lift the torso off the ball, contract the abs to pull the bottom of the rib cage towards the hips. Keep ball stable as you curl up, then lower back down to stretch the abs. Do 1 to 3 sets with 12 to 16 repetitions.

4. Vertical Leg Crunch - Performing this exercise is similar to doing a leg crunch except that the legs are straight up, forcing the abs to work and adding intensity to the routine. To do this, lie on the floor with the legs straight up, knees crossed, and place the hands beneath the head for support. Contract abs lifting the shoulders off the floor and keep legs in a fixed position to crunch. Do 1 to 3 sets with 12 to 16 repetitions.

5. Long Arm Crunch - This is a variant of the traditional floor crunch where the arms are held straight behind you, adding a lever to the move and making for a challenging exercise. To do this, lie on the floor or a mat then extend arms straight behind, keeping them clasped and next to the ears. Slowly contract abs and lift shoulders off the floor carefully to keep the arms straight. Do 1 to 3 sets with 12 to 16 repetitions.

The best strategy to weight loss is to observe a healthy diet coupled with exercise of at least an hour a day. Although there is no sure fire way to deal with belly fat, there are a number of activities from which to choose and enjoy. As long as you're having fun, you can lose weight without realizing it. It is important to look for an exercise you enjoy. If the suggested exercises above do not suit your taste, taking a hike, swimming or biking are just as effective in burning fat and toning muscles.

If you enjoy hearing, as I do, a spirited denunciation of stubborn Republican resistance to Barack Obama over the past three years, then you could do a whole lot worse than have it declaimed to you by Morgan Freeman in his warm and ever authoritative baritone.

"At the outset of Obama's administration, the political right [meaning Senator Mitch McConnell] literally said, out loud: 'The No1 project of this party is to make sure that this guy – this guy – only serves one term.' How do you make sure of that? You don't allow him to do anything good or worthwhile. Every chance you get, block him, and that's what they've done. Which now allows them to say: 'He's failed, he can't get anything done.' If he loses, it simply proves what you always feared, that democracy can be bought, and that the country is owned by the rich. And if everything gets bought, how do we ever get the country back?"

For all the subdued anger in his voice, Freeman is, as expected, a cool and emollient presence as around him the press junket for The Dark Knight Rises noisily unfolds. The last time we met, he stood up and I got a sore neck waiting for him to reach his full height. Now, quite still, with long slender arms on the chair arms, back straight and knees bent, he creates an impression of serpentine undulation, like a slinky-toy spooling itself down steps.

So, the election of an African-American president has not cast us into a sunlit utopian "post-racial" society? "No, not at all, instead the whole thing uncovered" he pauses in sorrow or anger, "plenty of maggots still squirming around there under the stone."

We're here to talk about the concluding panel of Christopher Nolan's Batman triptych, which he resisted directing for a while, having failed to answer for himself the pertinent and sobering question: how many movie trilogies have a triumphant part three? Once all doubts had been cast off and filming began, though, Nolan threw himself into the project, a calm head at the centre of the whirlwind, like Napoleon leading his grande armée film crew across the globe. Not that he's Napoleonic, says Freeman.

"If you walked on the set and I said go talk to the director, you'd have a hard time picking him out. And even then, you might look straight past him. He's quiet, but it's a quiet authority, and he enjoys doing it."

It was always going to be a problem topping Heath Ledger's vivid and unsettling performance as the Joker in the second film. Here, Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne, reclusive, inactive for eight years, weakened and chastened, comes out of his obscurity to tackle Bane (Tom Hardy), a giant who wears an immovable mask that pumps perpetual doses of anaesthetic into his bulked-up body. Where Ledger was chaos embodied, Bane is unstoppable brute strength. As Freeman has it: "Bane is to Gotham what bats were to Batman, a fear the city has to overcome."

What impact did the death of Ledger after The Dark Knight have? "Well, it's a downer when anything happens to an actor in mid-production. In fact, he didn't die during production, his part was wrapped up, but the movie itself wasn't out yet. People connected the character to his death because the character was so ... evil – people imagine that the role leaks into the man or something. And I don't think that was the case at all."

Like its two predecessors, The Dark Knight Rises contains political echoes of the zeitgeist. The League of Shadows had an al-Qaida-ish lust to destroy what they saw as an incorrigibly corrupt Gotham, while The Dark Knight's Joker embodied chaos, which Freeman calls "a quality I associate with the right". For the villain in The Dark Knight Rises to share a name, during this election, with Mitt Romney's increasingly infamous investment group – Bain Capital – seems almost too good to be true, especially since Bane also makes ever more demagogic appeals to a Gotham populace polarised along Tea Party/Occupy-movement lines, even as he is readying the immolation of their city.

I couldn't quite make the timeline work on this, though: surely shooting had wrapped before Occupy took off? Freeman clarifies: "Someone asked Christopher that question yesterday, and he said he didn't intentionally think of anything political in the development of the story. So I think the politics here, if there are any, is like art or beauty, it's largely in the eye of the beholder."

In the midst of all this stand Bruce Wayne's father-surrogates, Michael Caine's avuncular Alfred and Freeman's Lucius Fox, CEO of Wayne Enterprises and personal armourer to the Batman, ever eager to show off his new toys, which this time include "the Bat", a tooled-up helipod that, yes, comes in black. When I remind Freeman that Nolan has expressed interest in doing a Bond movie, he chuckles long and hard, imagining what franchise-invigorating mayhem the director might wreak on Bond. "Funny thing is, with Lucius Fox, Chris is already halfway there – after all, Lucius is Batman's 'Q'."

Father-surrogate to Batman or not, Freeman's career, at the age of 75, is inevitably taking on certain crepuscular, autumnal hues. Recently he featured in the Geritol Generation dream-cast of oldsters in RED ("Retired"), and The Bucket List, his "dream-come-true to work with Jack" [Nicholson], a comedy about facing impending death with dignity, a large scotch and a parachute. His next movie, Last Vegas, features Freeman and fellow pensioners Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Michael Douglas on an old farts' bachelor weekend in Sin City. "Guess which one's the Lothario skirt-chaser?" he asks, and we enjoy a dirty laugh at Douglas's expense.

Many of his co-stars of the same age are walking off into the sunset, including Gene Hackman, Freeman's tormentor from Unforgiven. "Gene and I share the same agent, and he is fully retired. He's like, nah, I wanna stay home and write my novels and paint." And although Unforgiven director Clint Eastwood has also largely retired from acting, Freeman says: "He will keep directing literally until he drops dead. Working for him was three of my happiest times in the movies. He's the same way John Huston was: 'The art of directing lies mainly in casting; once you cast somebody, get out of the way.' I love that. And Huston kept directing right till the last moment, too."

So what keeps Freeman going, now that he's worth an estimated $70m (£45m) and should by rights be sailing his 40ft ketch in the Caribbean, instead of slogging it out with the media?

"What keeps anyone going? I have work. I have things to do. I prefer working to idleness. And I like my job. I'm lucky, I'm not working because I have to; I'm working because I love to."

He especially loved playing Nelson Mandela in Eastwood's Invictus. He has known Mandela for years. "It's funny how we met – he kind of summoned me. When he published Long Walk to Freedom, he was asked: who would you want to play you in the movie? And he said: 'Morgan Freeman.' Which was pretty nice of him, I thought. So I met him at his house in Jo'burg. I said: 'If we do this, I'm going to need to have access to you, to be close enough to hold your hand.' So every time we were in any kind of proximity or I had a shot at being around him for a while, we sat down together." What's he like? "From a distance, he has an aura, that legendary quality. Up close, the reassuring thing is, he's just a guy."

And South Africa? "First time I was terrified, in 1992, I think. Mandela was out of jail, but he wasn't president yet. The Zulus and the Nationals were combining because they knew that the ANC had the numbers behind them. So riots were sprouting up all over the place. We were there to make a movie called Bopha [Freeman's directorial debut, starring Danny Glover, 1992]. It was about a black policeman, a guy his own community basically ostracises as an agent of apartheid, when he's really just trying to keep chaos at bay. We asked permission to film in Soweto, we had two riots to shoot, and we just figured, well, we'll just start a riot today," and he bursts out laughing at the suicidal idiocy of the idea. "We did it elsewhere in the end."

BEIRUT — Syrian activists reported a new massacre late Thursday in the central Hama province, saying regime forces killed more than 100 people in shelling and other attacks.

There were few details on the attack, which was reported by the Local Coordination Committees activist group and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Observatory said it was aware of up to 100 killed from sources on the ground, but the group had only confirmed the names of 30 people so far.

Death tolls are nearly impossible to independently verify in Syria, where the government restricts journalists and where more than a year of violence has convulsed much of the country.

There were few details of the violence in Hama's Tremseh area.

Activists say more than 17,000 people have been killed since the uprising against President Bashar Assad began in March 2011, and he is coming under growing international pressure to stop the violence. But as the bloodshed continues, and the conflict morphs into an armed insurgency, hopes for a peaceful transition are dimming.

The latest report of violence came in the wake of the highest-level defector yet from President Bashar Assad's regime – his ambassador to Iraq.

Defections from the Syrian regime have stirred hopes in the West Assad's inner circle will start abandoning him in greater numbers, hastening his downfall.

But the tightly protected regime has largely held together over the course of the 16-month-old uprising, driven by a mixture of fear and loyalty.


The latest official to flee, Ambassador Nawaf Fares, announced that he was joining the revolution, asserting Thursday that only force will drive Assad from power.

"There is no road map ever with Bashar Assad, because any plan, any statement that is agreed on internationally he delays on and ignores," Fares told the Al-Jazeera satellite channel. "There is no way that he can be pushed from power without force, and the Syrian people realize this."

Syria's Foreign Ministry denounced Fares, saying he should face "legal and disciplinary accountability."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell hailed what he called the "first major diplomatic defection," adding: "We think this a wider sign that the regime is feeling the pressure. The pressure is up and the regime is really starting to fall apart."

Fares is the second prominent Syrian to break with the regime in less than a week. Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, an Assad confidant and son of a former defense minister, defected last week, but has not spoken publicly.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Tlass has been in contact with the Syrian opposition. He would not comment on reports that Tlass was in Paris.

"I know that there is some closeness between the opposition and the general... Contact has been made," Fabius told journalists in Paris.

Assad's regime has suffered a steady stream of low-level army defectors, who have joined a group of dissidents known as the Free Syrian Army, now numbering in the tens of thousands. There have been several high-level defections in the past – including a Syrian fighter pilot who flew his plane to neighboring Jordan during a training mission in June in a brazen move.

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Scientists say a gene variation could contribute up to 155g (5.5oz) to a child's birthweight.

The gene studied is believed to act as a growth suppressor, reducing birthweight.

But the UK-based researchers found a particular variant passed down from the mother can add 93g (3.3oz) to the birthweight, or 155g if passed down from the maternal grandmother.

Details are published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Professor Gudrun Moore of University College London and colleagues looked at a gene called PHLDA2 in nearly 9,500 DNA samples taken from mothers and their babies, collected in three separate studies.

They found a gene variant called RS1 appeared to change the way in which the gene functioned, leading to higher birthweights.

"The gene is already known to have a profound effect on birthweight by acting as a growth suppressor," Prof Moore told BBC News.

"We have found a genetic variant of PHLDA2 that when inherited from the mother, causes the baby to be 93g bigger on average, or even 155g bigger on average, if inherited successively from the mother's mother."

The RS1 variation was found in around 13% of the individuals studied, with 87% possessing the RS2 variation.

"We suggest that the more common RS2 gene variation, which is only found in humans, has evolved to produce a smaller baby as a protective effect to enhance the mother's survival during childbirth," said Prof Moore.

"Dad's lack of involvement in evolutionary terms may stem from his own survival not being at stake and he can continue to reproduce with other females."

Gene 'silenced'
The PHLDA2 gene is unusual in that only the copy inherited from the mother is active, while the copy inherited from the father is "silenced". This silencing of the paternal gene results from molecular processes around the DNA known as epigenetics.

Scientists do not know why, but have speculated that it is to ensure birthweight is reduced to ensure the mother survives childbirth.

Dr Caroline Relton of Newcastle University said: "Although this study looks only at birthweight as an outcome, it is possible that this genetic variant may have longer-term health consequences.

"Indeed the long-term health consequences associated with extremes of birthweight might be due in part to this and other contributory genetic factors."