How to Lose the Fat Around your Belly

We’ve all probably done this before. Joked with a friend about how we need to lose weight, then used both hands to grab a handful of fat tissue around our waist area and squeeze it. I almost guarantee that the first thing that all of us thinks about when it comes to losing weight is our belly fat.

Let’s face it. The belly – or abdomen, or stomach…whatever you want to call it – is one of the prime areas that fat accumulates when we gain weight. While the truth is that fat accumulates all around our bodies, and that how your body distributes fat is dependent on your genes, we don’t notice it as much in other places because the belly is just so dang visible. Especially when you want to wear a bathing suit or something more snug or form fitting, right?

Belly fat can be especially frustrating because, even when you are successfully losing fat, the belly fat is often the slowest to leave! Almost seems like a cruel joke…most noticeable, and last to go, too.

No worries, though. It’s not impossible to lose belly fat. And if you’ve come across this post looking for tips on how to get rid of the tire around your stomach, I got you. If you’re willing to make some lifestyle changes, you can do it. Period.

Now lean in close because what I’m about to say is absolutely crucial for you to understand if you’re serious about peeling the fat off of your stomach. There are way, way too many misconceptions and myths about fat loss floating around out there causing so many of us to waste all kinds of money and time on weight loss programs and plans that don’t work. If you ever want to successfully lose fat, you gotta purge yourself of this misinformation.

Question: Have you experienced any of the following?

• Lost weight on a diet, but gained it all back, with “interest”
• Changed your diet and started an exercise program, but you still didn’t lose weight
• Found yourself frustrated over and over from wondering how to eat
• Jumping from diet to diet because nothing seems to work for your body

If any of this is you, I promise you that yours is not an unsolvable case. You can lose belly fat, IF you understand these things:

• Being on a weight loss roller coaster is not something that you have to experience all of your life
• Losing stomach fat in particular will require a lot of discipline on your part, perhaps more than you’ve previously anticipated
• Knowing how to eat does not have to be confusing at all
• There is no “perfect diet;” there are, however, general principles for what constitutes a nutritious, healthy diet that supports your body and allows you to reach and maintain a healthy weight
• Your health is much more important than your weight! If you focus on improving your health, your weight will take care of itself
• If no diet or exercise program has worked for you, you might need to be more honest with yourself about what you’ve been doing. I don’t say that to be sarcastic; this is the kind of thing you really need to hear if you want to break your weight loss stalemate.

Steps to Take to Lose Belly Fat

Here now are some broad steps that you need to take to get rid of that belly fat. I will go in more depth in future blog posts, but for now, make sure you pay attention.

1. Eat a nutritious diet that is based on lots of non-starchy vegetables, and that is light on starchy vegetables and grains, which are high energy foods that many of us don’t need a lot of – and sometimes aren’t able to tolerate as well
2. Move your body. Either start a workout program, or find “natural” ways to be active everyday (parking farther away, not using your car, doing yardwork and gardening, getting a manual labor job, etc.) To be honest, you should start working out and you should make your life naturally active. Oh, and you need to make sure you move A LOT.
3. Drink plenty of water, and make water your main drink. You probably need to make it your only drink. It’s too easy to gain weight from sugary beverages, even if they’re sweetened with no-calorie sweeteners.
4. Get adequate sleep. Constantly getting too few hours of sleep is not only bad for your health, but it also interferes with your body’s production of hormones in a way that encourages your body to store fat
5. Do 1000 crunches a day. NOPE! If you thought I was going to tell you something like this, while it’s glamorous and all of that, it won’t help you that much. Abdominal exercise may add tone and thickness to your abs, but it won’t have much of any effect on that layer of fat covering your abs. That fat is only going to come off by you regulating the amount of energy your body stores as fat through eating and moving your body
6. Tweak and be persistent. There will probably come a time that your stomach fat loss slows down before you’ve lost all you want to lose. All this means is that your body, which is excellent at adaptation, has adapted to how you eat and exercise. You need to adjust both so that you can further reduce your body fat levels.

As I conclude this, let’s keep this thought in mind: As you lose fat, it is going to come off of everywhere on your body at the same time. You may think that losing fat around your stomach is all you want, but trust me, it’s not. Your body knows what it’s doing. This might mean that you have to be extra diligent at working to trim your belly fat, but as long as you are committed, you’ll get the results you want in due time.

Related Resources

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