Get a Flat Stomach – Health Guide On Losing Stubborn Belly Fat Fast?

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With the beginning of 2017, many of us have resolutions to lose some fat around the midsection and trim waistlines. This, however, can feel like such a struggle to accomplish. Excessive abdominal fat creates feelings of uncomfortable bloating, discouragement, as well as risks of cardiovascular diseases.

Luckily, several science-backed strategies have been derived to help you more effectively reduce your waist size. If you want to get a flat stomach this year, this article might just help you get there.

The following are 30 methods to help you reach your goals:

1. Cut Calories, But Don’t Overdo It

The fundamentals of dietary theory say that you need to cut your caloric intake to lose weight.

One of the most popular plans of doing so is to reduce your daily consumption by 500–1,000 calories in order to shed roughly 1–2 pounds (0.5–1 kg) a week (1).

However, overdoing it and restricting your calorie intake by too much can actually make it harder to lose weight.

Not eating enough calories can result in major decrease in your metabolic rate, that is, the number of calories you burn on regularly on a resting basis.

In one study, a group of people who ate only 1,100 calories per day saw a metabolic rate decline more than twice as much as those who ate about 1,500 calories per day, for four straight days. Worse, this decline in metabolic rate may continue even after you return to normal consumption behavior. This means you might get a lower metabolic rate than before you put up the severe caloric restrictions.

Therefore, the most efficient way to lose weight requires you to avoid cutting your intake by too much or for too long.

2. Eat More Fiber and Soluble Fibers

Soluble fibers absorb lots of water and slow down the movement of food down the digestive system. This delays stomach emptying, which causes the stomach to expand and make you feel fuller, reducing your hunger for food (7, 8). Also, consuming soluble fiber can lower the amount of calories your body absorbs from food (9). In short, fibers make you less hungry and reduce the calories in other foods.

By eating soluble fiber, you gain less fat around your internal organs, which reduces your waist circumference and the reduces the probability of several diseases (10). One observational study found that each 10-gram marginal increase in daily soluble fiber intake decreased midsection fat gain by 3.7% over a five year timespan (11).

Good sources of soluble fibers include avocados, flax seeds, Brussels sprouts, legumes, oats, and blackberries.

3. Consume Probiotics

Probiotics are living bacteria colonies that are known to play an important part in weight loss and weight maintenance (12, 13).

It has been found that obese and overweight and people have have different compositions of gut bacteria than normal-weight people, suggesting that bacterial content influences fat distribution and weight gain(14, 15, 16). A regular intake of probiotics can shift the balance over towards the beneficial gut bacteria, reducing the risk of weight gain and fat accumulation in various areas.

Some strains of probiotics have found to be particularly effective at reducing belly fat. These include (17, 18, 19, 20, 21):

  • Lactobacillus fermentum
  • Lactobacillus amylovorus
  • Lactobacillus gasseri

Some probiotics can naturally be found in foods. Some of these probiotic foods include yogurt, kefir, tempeh, kimchi, and pickles.

There are also a large selection of probiotic supplements available on the market. However, different products have different strains of bacteria, so make sure to pick one that contains one or more of the aforementioned strains.

4. Do Cardio Exercises

Cardio, sometimes referred to as aerobic exercise, is an effective way to burn calories and improve general physique. Furthermore, studies have shown that cardio exercise has a particular effect of strengthening the core regions and is quite effective at reducing your waistline (22, 23, 24, 25). Experts recommend between 150–300 minutes of mid to high intensity aerobic exercise every week, or about 20–40 minutes per day (26, 27).

Examples of cardio include running, power walking, biking and rowing.

5. Drink Protein Shakes

Protein shakes are a quick and easy way to add additional protein to your diet. Getting adequate amounts of protein in your diet helps boost metabolism rates, reduce your appetite and hunger, and aid with fat loss, particularly around the belly (28, 29, 30, 31). Studies furthermore suggest that drinking protein shakes increases the efficiency of your weight loss diet and helps reduce waist circumference faster (32, 33, 34).

On the bodybuilding side, proteins are known as a necessary ingredient in building up muscle, accomplishment of which further increases your metabolism.

6. Eat Foods Plentiful in Monounsaturated Fats

Monounsaturated fatty acids are liquid at room temperature and usually considered as one the “good fats”, along with Omega-3 fatty acids and a few others. Studies show that diets with high monounsaturated fat consumption may prevent the accumulation of fat in the body (35, 36). One example of a high monounsaturated fat diet is the the Mediterranean diet. Studies have linked the Mediterranean diet to many health benefits, including a reduced risk of obesity (37, 38).

Some great foods containing high monounsaturated fatty acid content include olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds.

7. Limit Your Intake of Carbs, and Cut Refined Carbs

Limiting intake of carbohydrates has been connected with a multitude of powerful health benefits, especially in the area of weight loss (39, 40). More specifically, studies find that low-carb diets are particularly effective at targeting the fat which lodges around your organs and results in your waistline expanding (41, 42, 43, 44). Research shows that people with the highest intakes of whole grains are statistically 17% less likely to have excess abdominal fat than those who consume a large quantity of refined carbs (46).

Some studies also report that replacing refined carbs with whole food carbs in your diet can significantly improve your metabolic system and thus further reduce your waistline (47, 48).

8. Do Resistance Training

Dieting often comes with the detrimental side effect of losing muscle mass. This comes as a negative modifier to your metabolic rate because losing muscle decreases the number of calories you burn on a daily basis (48).

Doing resistance exercises regularly can halt this loss of muscle mass and perhaps even increase your muscle mass, which would help you maintain or improve your metabolic rate (49, 50). Resistance training may also be especially effective at tightening up your midsection and mechanically reducing your belly protrusion (51, 52).

When done in tandem with cardio exercise and protein intake, it establishes an effective workout regimen that can help you reach and exceed your goals (53).

9. Perform Exercises Standing Instead of Sitting

Performing exercises while standing brings more benefits and results than doing the same things while sitting down or using weight machines. When standing, your body utilizes more muscles to stay in balance and hold up your weight. This means you’ll spend more energy working out, and get more gains in the same amount of time (54).

A study comparing the effects of standing and sitting showed that for some particular exercises, performing them standing instead of sitting activates muscles by an extra 7–25% (55). Another study suggested that standing may help regulate and improve your breathing, due to posture differences compared to sitting (56).

Although this may seem like a minor adjustment, it definitely has profound effects on your exercise routine results and is worth the try.

10. Add Apple Cider Vinegar to Your Diet

Apple cider vinegar, due to its high concentration of acetic acid, is linked to many impressive health benefits concerning weight loss and the accumulation of fat throughout the body. Several studies on animals have suggested that acetic acid plays a role in the biological processes that yield a reduction in body fat accumulation (57, 58, 59).

Although acetic acid studies on humans are relatively scarce and unexplored, one study in obese men found that taking one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar every day for three months reduced their waistlines by an average of 0.5 inches (1.4 cm) (60).

11) Walk at Least 30 Minutes Each Day

Experts unanimously agree that a combination of diet and exercise is the fastest and most effective way to achieve weight loss and improve your health overall. Interestingly, studies have shown that you don’t necessarily need very intense effort to reap the health benefits of exercising. Brisk walks done regularly have been shown to effectively reduce total body fat and the fat located around your midsection (61, 62).

In fact, walking speedily for about 30–40 minutes (about 7,500 steps) each day links to a substantial reduction in dangerous tummy fat accumulation and a slimmer waistline (63).

12. Avoid High Caloric Liquids

Sodas and soft drinks, fruit juices, and energy drinks are generally packed with sugar and useless liquid calories. One of their dangers is that is very easy to drink large quantities of them at a time, resulting in an abundance of empty calories to compensate for. The issue with liquid calories is that your brain doesn’t register them into fullness calculations like it does with solid calories. Thus, you’ll end up consuming these extra calories on top of everything else that you eat and drink (64, 65).

One study showed that daily servings of sugar sweetened beverages to children increases the risk of adult obesity by a staggering 60% (66). These drinks are also generally loaded with fructose. Fructose is a sweetener which replaces sugar in many mass-produced drinks, and also the origin of the ingredient “high fructose corn syrup”. High fructose intake has been linked directly to belly fat gain (67, 68, 69).

13. Eat Whole, Single-Ingredient Foods

Telling someone to base their diet around eating more single ingredient whole foods is the best single piece of advice you can give them. This is because whole foods are packed with essential nutrients, fiber, water, vitamins, and minerals. Such high content density makes it very difficult to overeat with these foods, and some of them even have their own benefits for preventing weight gain (70, 71).

You should try to eat plenty of whole grains, nuts, legumes, fruits, vegetables, dairy, fish and, unprocessed meat.

14. Drink Plenty of Water

There are at least three big ways in which water consumption may help you achieve a flat stomach.

First, it helps with weight loss by temporarily increasing your metabolic rate with no extra effort. In fact, drinking water can increase your total energy usage by up to an additional 100 calories per day (72, 73).

Secondly, drinking water before meals can make you feel fuller, so you’ll ultimately eat less food and take in fewer calories (74, 75, 76).

Third, it has positive effects in relieving and preventing constipation, which may also reduce belly bloating (77, 78, 79).

So try drinking a large glass of water before each meal. It can deliver great strides in helping you achieve your goal.

15. Practice Mindful Eating

Mindful eating is a mealtime technique which helps you recognize, cope with, and control your emotions and physical sensations regarding food and hunger (80, 81). It calls for slowing down, eating without distractions, keeping physical hunger cues in continuous focus, and eating only until you feel full (82). Most studies agree that mindful eating contributes to weight loss by changing your eating habits and reducing stress-related behavior, such as stress eating, boredom eating, and binge eating (82, 83, 84).

Furthermore, it is more likely to help you keep the lost weight from ever returning in the long run, as it focuses on changing your fundamental behaviors.

16. Avoid Swallowing Air and Gases

Carbonated beverages such as soda are the largest source of gas in diets Its bubbles contain copious amounts of carbon dioxide, which becomes released from the liquid into your stomach. This can cause stomach distention and bloating. The same things can also happen when you chew gum, drink through a straw or talk while eating.

Eating in silence, drinking from a glass, and regularly replacing carbonated drinks with water may help you achieve a flatter stomach.

17. Do High-Intensity Training

The method by which many people do high-intensity training is to perform intervals of very intense activity, such as sprinting, rowing or jumping, and take short breaks in between reps. This form of exercising allows your body burn more fat and increases your metabolic rate, which remains heightened even long after you’ve finished your workout (85, 86, 87, 88). High-intensity training has been shown to have superior fat burning rates compared to other types of exercises, such as cardio and endurance. High intensity is also found to be especially effective for slimming the waistline (89, 90, 91).

Moreover, this mode of exercise takes up much less of your time than the other types of exercise, and a session can usually be completed in 10–20 minutes.

18. Reduce Your Level of Stress

Stress and anxiety are commonplace afflictions in today’s society, and most people experience it at one point or another in their lives. Stress is linked as a catalyst for the development of many diseases, and it is also a frequent reason why people tend to eat or binge on food, often without even being hungry or otherwise needing food (92, 93).

Also, stress instructs the body to produce a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is known to increase appetite, hence binge eating, and leads to fat storage specifically in the midsection (94, 95, 96). This can be especially detrimental to women who already have a larger waist, as they tend to produce more cortisol than men in response to stress, and further adds to belly fat gain (97).

Try to add some stress relieving activities into your routine schedule, such as meditation, and work to solve or avoid the original cause of the stress.

19. Eat More Protein

Protein is the most essential nutrient when it comes to losing weight. Your body requires more calories to digest protein than processing fat or carbs. Therefore, simply the act of eating a high protein diet could account for an extra 80–100  calories burned per day (98, 99).

High protein diets can also reduce your appetite, keep you feeling full longer, and help you conserve your muscle mass while losing weight (30, 100, 101, 102). Furthermore, studies have frequently connected slimmer waistlines for people who eat more protein compared to those who consume less protein (32, 34, 103).

The amount of protein you need varies depending on many factors, such as your age, gender, and level of activity. Generally, you should strive to have 20–30% of your daily caloric intake come from protein. This can  be easily achieved through incorporating a source of protein in every meal.

Some especially protein-rich foods include beans, eggs, lean meat, as well as the protein shakes mentioned earlier in this guide. Remember, the protein shakes should only be a supplement to your protein consumption, not the main source of protein itself.

20. Track Your Food Consumption

When you’re trying to lose weight, it can be quite useful to track your food intake. There are multiple ways to do this, but the most common and effective ways to keep track are counting calories, keeping a food diary, and taking pictures of your food (104, 105, 106, 107).

This routine doesn’t have to be followed religiously, but it is a good idea to keep track of your consumption for a few consecutive days every few weeks. This will make you better informed on your calorie intake and allow you to adjust your weight loss diet if found to be overeating or undereating. Knowledge is power; studies generally agree that people who keep records of their food intake are more likely to achieve their weight loss goals (108).

There are a multitude of free apps and website available to help you keep records, and they are easy to find as well.

21. Eat Eggs

Eggs are healthy, high in protein, and have a few unique properties which help out weight loss.

A single large egg is rich in important nutrients and only contains about 77 calories (109). Studies find that eating eggs for breakfast as part of a calorie restricted diet may cause greater weight loss by up to 65% over eight weeks, as compared to other breakfast foods (110, 111). Eggs breakfasts have also been shown to significantly reduce calorie intake over the next 24 hours, all unintentional and effortlessly (100, 112). Furthermore, eggs have been shown to be more useful at reducing waist size than other foods of comparable calorie content (111, 113).

22. Get Enough Rest

Getting sufficient amounts of sleep and rest are very important for weight loss. Studies have frequently reported that adults sleeping less than five hours a night and less children less than 10 hours are at an increased risk of weight gain (114, 115). In women, short sleep duration is consistently connected to larger waist sizes, compared to those who frequently get a good night’s sleep (116, 117).

Similarly sleep-deprived people are around 55% more likely to become obese than their well-sleeping counterparts (114, 118). Simply adjusting sleep duration from shorter lengths to optimal lengths has been shown to eliminate and revert these effects (119).

23. Try Out Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is a dietary method in which you cycle between eating and fasting for specific amounts of time. The most popular approach to intermittent fasting calls for two to four repetitions of a 24-hour fast per week. The second form is the 16:8 fast, where you limit your eating window to eight hours each day, most often located between lunch and dinner.

This makes you eat overall fewer calories without having to consciously count and calculate. While intermittent fasting has only been shown to be equal to or slightly inferior to regular calorie restriction diets at reducing tummy fat, many people find intermittent fasting as a simpler and easier system to stick to than the complicated traditional diets (120, 121, 122, 123).

24. Eat More Fish or Fish Oil

Dietitians generally recommend to eat fatty fish once or twice per week. Fatty fish are the breeds of speech with higher oil content, such as salmon and tuna. These fish are very healthy and rich in essential omega-3 fatty acids with high protein content as well (124, 125).

Protein, as established previously, has been shown to significantly help with weight loss. Many studies have also suggested that omega-3 fatty acids helps reduce the accumulation of fat in the liver and abdomen (126, 127, 128, 129).

If you don’t like eating fatty fish, you can get you necessary omega-3 needs from fish oil or fish oil supplements.

25. Limit Your Intake of Sugar

Added sugar is the definitive enemy of a healthy diet. Although natural sugar foods such as fruit are acceptable in moderation, much of our foods today have been inundated with loads of extra sugar. Overconsumption of sugar links to most of the common diseases in society today, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and fatty liver disease (130, 131, 132).

The intake of added sugar is way too high in most societies, especially in America, in which people consume about 15 teaspoons of added sugar each day (133). Studies show a direct links between a high intake of sugar and large waist sizes, especially drinkers of sugar-sweetened beverages such as juices and sodas (134, 135, 136).

Also, added sugar lies hidden in various foods, so it is very important to check foods’ nutrition facts and ingredient lists.

26. Replace Some Fats With Coconut Oil

Coconut oil consists of a unique combination of fatty acids, and it is one of the few foods that are plentiful in medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs).

Studies have determined that replacing some of the fat content in your diet with MCTs may increase metabolic energy expenditure and make you feel fuller (137, 138, 139, 140). Moreover, coconut oil has been shown to more effectively decrease waist size than recommended consumptions of other types of fat (141, 142).

Remember to still consider that coconut oil is still fat, containing 9 calories per gram. Therefore, it is important to replace other sources of fat from your diet, not just adding coconut oil and keeping the rest the same.

27. Strengthen Your Core

Crunches, sit ups, and other abdominal exercises benefits your overall health and appearance when added as a supplement to the previously established workout recommendations.

Regular doing core training strengthens abdominal muscles, which makes them more massive and can function to prevent backaches that may often result from weak posture.

A strong core improves your posture and the muscles prop up your spine, which makes you appear taller and more confident. Concerning waist sizes, core exercises help you bolster the muscles that hold in your belly, ultimately making you appear leaner.

28. Drink Unsweetened Coffee and Green Tea

Unsweetened coffee and green tea are some of the the healthiest beverages in the world, as well a great and tasty addition to a diet.

Drinking coffee has been found to increase the number of calories you burnt through metabolism in the range of 3–11% (143, 144, 145). Similarly, drinking tea (green, black, and/or oolong) or taking green tea extract supplements has the capability to increase fat burning by up to 17% and resting caloric usage by 4% (146, 147, 148, 149).

Most importantly, studies in both humans and animals have shown that drinking tea and coffee helps reduce your waist size by helping prevent the accumulation of fat in your belly (150, 151).

29. Avoid Drinking Too Much Alcohol

Alcoholic drinks are loaded with empty liquid calories, containing seven calories per gram of alcohol, as well as the calories from the sugars it contains. Comparing ounce for ounce, beer contains a similar calorie content as a sugary soft drink, and red wine contains a surprising double of that amount (152, 153, 154).

Although controlled, moderate drinking does not affect weight gain very much, heavy drinking is connected to increased weight gain, especially around your midsection (155, 156, 157). If you want a flat stomach, you should really cut back on or skip the alcoholic drinks entirely.

30. Sneak In Extra Activity Throughout Your Day

You can easily sneak in extra levels of activity by increasing the amount of non-workout actions throughout your day. This includes walking, standing, fidgeting, moving around, and pretty much everything other than the facets that have been explored in this guide (158). Studies have shown that calorie expenditure can be increased by up to five or six times by simply standing, fidgeting, or walking around, compared to sitting still (159, 160).

Another study suggested that these said activities could burn up to 2,000 extra calories per day, depending on your weight and activity level (160).

Make it your goal to take the longer walks at the parking lot, take the stairs whenever possible, use a standing desk at your office, and add in other small amounts of effort throughout your day.

Get a Flat Stomach Summary

The main strategy to get a flat stomach is to eat and exercise intelligently and with control. By incorporating some of the tips mentioned above into your daily routine, you will greatly speed up your progress in getting to a better body.

Your goals will almost certainly take quite a bit of time and effort, but it will all be worth it in the end if can pull it off.

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