Find 8 Ways to Lose Belly Fat and Lead a Healthier Life. Find out how nutrition, exercise, and easy lifestyle adjustments can help you attain a flatter tummy and enhance overall health.
Maintaining a trim midsection does more than just improve your appearance; it can also help you live longer. Larger waistlines are linked to an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Losing weight, particularly abdominal fat, enhances blood vessel function and increases sleep quality.
It is impossible to target abdominal fat directly while dieting. However, losing weight will help shrink your waistline; more importantly, it will help reduce the dangerous layer of visceral fat, a type of fat within the abdominal cavity that you cannot see but that increases health risks,
Here’s how to prioritize what’s most important.
- Try reducing carbs rather than fats.
When Johns Hopkins researchers compared the effects of losing weight with a low-carbohydrate diet versus a low-fat diet for six months, both containing the same number of calories, those on a low-carb diet lost an average of 10 pounds more than those on a low-fat diet—28.9 pounds versus 18.7 pounds. Stewart adds that the low-carb diet also resulted in higher-quality weight loss. Weight reduction reduces fat, but it also results in a loss of lean tissue (muscle), which is undesirable. On both diets, around 2 to 3 pounds of healthy lean tissue were lost along with the fat, indicating that the low-carb diet resulted in a substantially higher fat loss percentage. - Think about an eating plan rather than a diet.
Finally, Stewart recommends choosing a healthy eating plan that you can stick to. A low-carb approach has the advantage of requiring no calorie counting—it simply includes learning to make better eating choices. In general, a low-carb diet steers you away from problem foods—those heavy in carbs and sugar with little fiber, such as bread, bagels, and sodas—and toward high-fiber or high-protein options, such as vegetables, legumes, and lean meats. - Keep moving.
Physical activity promotes the loss of abdominal fat. “One of the biggest benefits of exercise is that you get a lot of bang for your buck on body composition,” Stewart said. Exercise appears to take off belly fat in particular because it lowers circulating insulin levels—which would otherwise tell the body to store fat—and causes the liver to use up fatty acids, particularly those found near visceral fat deposits, he claims. The amount of activity required for weight loss varies depending on your goals. For most adults, this translates to 30 to 60 minutes of moderate to strenuous exercise almost every day. - Lift weights.
Even moderate strength training combined with aerobic exercise helps grow lean muscle mass, causing you to burn more calories throughout the day, both at rest and while exercising. - Become a label reader.
Compare and contrast brands. Some yogurts, for example, claim to be low in fat, but they include more carbohydrates and added sugars than others, according to Stewart. Gravy, mayonnaise, sauces, and salad dressings are typically high in fat and calories. - Avoid processed meals.
Packaged products and snack meals frequently contain high levels of trans fats, added sugar, and added salt or sodium—all of which make weight loss harder. - Pay attention to how your clothes fit rather than checking a scale.
The number on your bathroom scale may not vary much as you gain muscle mass and reduce fat, but your jeans will become looser. That’s a better indicator of progress. To lower your risk of heart disease and diabetes, your waistline should be less than 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men. - Hang out with health-conscious friends.
According to research, if your friends and family are eating healthier and exercising more, you are more likely to do so as well.
