Losing abdominal fat, or belly fat, is a common weight loss goal. Larger waistlines are linked to a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer. Losing weight, especially belly fat, improves blood vessel functioning and also improves sleep quality.
It’s almost impossible to target belly fat specifically when you diet. But losing weight overall 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 can’t see but that heightens health risks. Here are five simple ways to lose belly fat.
Avoid Sugar and Sugar-Sweetened Drinks
Foods with added sugars are bad for your health. Eating a lot of these types of food can cause weight gain. Sugar is half glucose and half fructose. When you eat a lot of added sugar, the liver gets overloaded with fructose and is forced to turn it into fat. Try minimizing the amount of sugar in your diet and consider completely eliminating sugary drinks. This includes sugar-sweetened beverages, sugary sodas, fruit juices, and various high sugar sports drinks.
Avoid Processed Foods
The ingredients in packaged goods and snack foods are often heavy on trans fats, added sugar and added salt or sodium—three things that make it difficult to lose weight.
Exercise Often
Physical activity helps burn abdominal fat. Exercise seems to work off belly fat in particular because it reduces circulating levels of insulin —which would otherwise signal the body to hang on to fat—and cause the liver to use up fatty acids, especially those nearby visceral fat deposits. The amount of exercise you need for weight loss depends on your goals. For most people, this can mean 30 to 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise nearly every day.
Eat More Protein
Research shows that proteins can reduce cravings by 60%, boost metabolism by 80–100 calories per day, and help you eat up to 441 fewer calories per day. If weight loss is your goal, adding protein may be the single most effective change you can make to your diet. Not only can protein help you to lose weight, but it may also help you to avoid regaining weight. Protein may be particularly effective in reducing abdominal fat.
Eat Healthily
Ultimately, you need to pick a healthy eating plan you can stick to. The benefit of a low-carb approach is that it simply involves learning better food choices—no calorie-counting is necessary. In general, a low-carb way of eating shifts your intake away from problem foods—those high in carbs and sugar and without much fiber, like bread, bagels and sodas—and toward high-fiber or high-protein choices, like vegetables, beans and healthy meats.
