How to lose stubborn belly fat
1. Eat fewer carbs.
According to many nutritionists, high-carbohydrate diets are the culprit behind that bloaty midsection. In general, people who eat too much pasta, bread, rice, and potatoes tend to get a little pudgier around their middles than those who stick to the diet plan. Carbs cause levels of insulin (the hormone that regulates blood sugar) to spike. When this happens, your body naturally stores any extra calories you eat away from your middle in the form of fatty tissue. And let's face it, we all know it’s not good to have too many of these areas!
2. Exercise daily.
Exercise helps you burn through calories and rid your body of stored fats, especially if you work out intensely enough. One study published in the Journal of Obesity suggests that overweight women who did moderate cardio three times per week for 12 weeks were able to burn 22% of their visceral fat, while lean women lost just 4%. So don't slack off—fitness guru Tracy Anderson recommends 30 minutes of cardio each day.
3. Drink green tea.
The antioxidants called catechins in green tea can help promote weight loss by boosting your body's ability to metabolize food, according to research conducted at China Agricultural University. Scientists placed obese mice on either a normal chow diet or a high-fat diet; some had access to water only, while others could drink green tea. After four weeks, the high-fat mice who'd sipped on the beverage burned about 20% fewer calories compared to the other groups — even though they consumed the same number of calories overall. Even better, adding green tea to your routine may reduce abdominal fat, lower cholesterol and improve circulation over time, says study author Dr. Li Wenliang at Huazhong Agriculture University in Wuhan, China.
One reason is that stubborn fat has a higher ratio of alpha receptors to beta receptors, causing fat to release at a slower rate from those final obstinate areas. This means that even after you trigger fat loss with diet and exercise, those triglycerides must still be broken down into fatty acids and mobilized through the bloodstream to be burned off, making it much more difficult to release and mobilize fat when there is a lack of blood flow to these sites combined with receptors.
So, how are we going to get to that fat and burn it off for good? If you've been dieting for a while, you'll still lose muscle mass and your metabolism will slow. Your body will require less and less energy to sustain, therefore you'll have to cut your calories even more if you're dieting to lose weight. This means that before you believe you're stuck and start reducing calories more, double-check that you're tracking your calories and that they're accurate.
Adaptive thermogenesis is a word that refers to your metabolism slowing down more than what would be expected from simply reducing fat and muscle mass. This so-called starvation response appears to be a normal response to the reduced number of calories or energy you're consuming, and adaptive thermogenesis is likely to influence you more as you get leaner and closer to burning that stubborn fat.
One group followed a continuous calorie restriction strategy, while the other alternated between two weeks of calorie restriction and two weeks of calorie maintenance in the matador trial. The matador group was far more likely to gain weight than the continuous energy restriction group, and they were also much better at maintaining their weight reduction throughout the six months after the research.
If you've been dieting for a while and have reached a plateau, the next step is to reverse the effects of your diet by lessening your need for high levels of non-exercise activities. In other words, when you get closer to burning the fat that your body doesn't want to let go of, your body will sense that you're eating fewer calories and will try to conserve energy by taking shortcuts when it comes to physical activity. These changes in your non-exercise-related activity levels are subtle and may go unnoticed, such as sitting more throughout the day, not playing with your pets, or simply acting more sluggish in general.
This decrease in physical activity, on the other hand, may cause you to reach a plateau. Setting a daily walking goal is the greatest method to combat this. Walking is a low-impact activity that, unlike more severe kinds of cardio, does not interfere with weight training or dieting. Setting a 10,000 step-per-day goal or a one- or two-mile-per-day walking goal can keep your knee levels elevated, allowing you to continue breaking through this plateau without having to continually decrease calories. Lifting weights is also quite important.
It's not only about dieting and exercising. I won't spend much time on this, but weight exercise, when combined with adequate nutrition, will help you preserve as much muscle as possible. As a result, you'll be able to burn a lot more fat. Additionally, adding muscle to regions where you have resistant fat can stretch those areas out by increasing the fat's surface area. This gives the problem areas a more defined appearance and makes them appear less problematic. Last but not least, research suggests that weight training is considerably more effective than dieting or exercise alone in terms of helping you keep the fat off once you've finished. Next, I have to mention that you must give time for the fat loss to occur in the first place.
You can't say for sure if you have stubborn fat if you haven't dieted long enough. To begin with, losing body fat from your arms, face, and the chest is entirely normal, while belly fat shrinks at a slower rate. That's OK. If you maintain a calorie deficit over time, your body will be forced to burn more fat from stubborn areas like your belly, but only after it has exhausted other more preferential options, so make sure you're giving this time before you drop your calories, try cycling your calories, or make any other changes.
If you give up too soon because the fat doesn't seem to be moving after a few weeks, you'll never know how close you were to lose your lower belly fat or love handles. Finally, even if you can't target fat loss from your stomach, you should still work on your abs. Many individuals assume they have stuck fat when they can't see their abs, but it's just as probable that your abs, like your shoulders, aren't muscular enough to be apparent. You can't just focus on getting slimmer and leaner by working on your abs to obtain powerful shoulders.
Even if spot reduction isn't achievable, strengthening your core can help you look better in your midsection. That's all there is to it.
Thank you very much.