Want to learn how to crush excess belly fat, and get that slim curvy young figure back?
Let's be honest, most of us have a little bit of extra fat around our abdominal region that we could do without. It can be annoying, even embarrassing or unhealthy, and next to impossible to get rid of. Or at least it seems this way.
Belly fat is some of the hardest fat to remove because it is one of the last places your body burns away excess fat, and yet one of the first places it gets stored.
But, there are a few techniques you can implement into your daily life in order to get rid of your excess tummy fat, and keep it off for good!
I wrote this guide to help you learn more about 5 Easy Tips I use to lose belly fat off, and maintain a healthy figure. Read on and learn how to get your dream body back.
5 Ways to Get Rid of Belly Fat
There are literally hundreds of tips and techniques to get rid of belly fat, but we want to only address five of the most effective and long lasting ways to not just get rid of it, but keep it off as well.
1. Improve Your Diet & Eating Habits
The best way to get rid of stomach fat is to improve your diet. The amount you eat (quantity) is important, but just as important is what you eat (quality).
Are you aware of what you put into your body? A lot of people aren't, so an important foundational step is being aware of what and how much you eat.
Tracking your diet on a daily basis is recommended to help you make sure that you're consuming the right foods in proper amounts so that you can shed your fat. Did you know that only 9% of people read nutritional labels on their food, and of this group, only 1% read more than just the calorie content?
Here are some keys to improving your eating habits to shed belly fat:
Set Your Proper Daily Calorie Intake
In order to lose weight (and fat), you have to consume less calories than you burn. This means that calories in should be less than calories out, creating a net deficit.
The recommended caloric deficit for healthy and sustainable weight loss is 10-20% of your total daily energy expenditure. Cutting calories with a moderate deficit like this will help you maintain muscle mass while losing weight.
So how do you calculate this?
First, calculate your normal daily calories. Here is a simple but accurate Daily Calorie Intake calculator:
Second, choose the calorie target for Losing Weight, which is about 10-20% less than your normal daily calories.
Maintain A Healthy Balance Between Carb, Protein, and Fat Breakdown To Lose Fat
Not all calories are created equal. What you eat is just as important as how much you eat.
The main types of energy we consume can be broken down into macros, called protein, carbohydrates, and fat.
Carbs are an important source of fuel for our muscles. Fat is also important, playing major roles in everything from brain function to cell structure. But if you're trying to lose weight, trading some carb and fat calories for protein has the most metabolic benefits for weight loss. Protein increases satiety, stimulates energy use, and preserves muscle.
A healthy, fat burning ratio for your diet based on daily calories:
- 35% protein (1 gram of protein = 4 calories)
- 25% carbs (1 gram of carbohydrate = 4 calories)
- 40% fat (1 gram of fat = 9 calories)
Maintaining a healthy macro ratio will help you keep belly fat off without sacrificing lean muscle mass.
Choose Natural Protein Sources
Get more of your protein from healthy sources like fish, fruits, nuts, and certain vegetables rather than things like hot dogs or pastrami sandwiches. Omega-3 fatty acids, for example, can protect against macular degeneration, cognitive decline, cancers, and heart disease.
You can enjoy a 20% reduction in anxiety levels and inflammation by consuming high levels of Omega-3 fatty acids. What’s more, your brain is physically larger if you do. Aim to make your main source of protein a plant or fish based one.
Cut Back On Sugar, Especially Processed Sugar
The average American consumes over 150 pounds of sugar each year. Sugar accelerates aging and inflammation and fuels the growth of tumors. The more you consume sugar, the more likely you are to develop cancer.
Even those who have “normal” glucose levels but are at the higher end of “normal” (82 to 110 mg/Dl) face adverse effects such as shrinkage of the brain. The more sugar you eat, the higher the rates of inflammation throughout your body. This can also cause increased rates of physical aging. Removing sugar entirely is not feasible, but knowing when and where you consume sugar is key.
For example: Having a cup of coffee in the morning is considered a net gain, a good thing in your health account. But adding processed creamer or sugar to that coffee is a net loss, a bad thing in your health account. The same is true of everything you eat and drink. Salmon is good, healthy for you, but salmon with a sugary, honey glaze is not.
Focus On The Color Of Your Food
When you seek to make net gains in your diet, add more fruits and vegetables, but base them on the color they have. Dark green colors in anything (peppers, spinach, broccoli, cucumbers) are all great for your health. Fruit with vibrant skin, dark-colored especially should comprise the majority of your produce diet.
Avoid Processed Carbohydrates
There is no nutrient value or requirement for refined carbohydrates, and yet Harvard researchers concluded that they are more addictive than cocaine. They are also the main culprit behind fat.
Quitting is hard because the consumption of carbohydrates stimulates dopamine, and of course they are cheap and easy. Still, when you replace refined carbohydrates with things like vegetables, you reduce your cancer growth rate by up to 50%.
2. Exercise Regularly
Another very important way to get rid of belly fat is changing your exercise routine. Exercise is the linchpin of any healthy diet or lifestyle. Without it, you may be able to keep weight and belly fat off, but that is still not indicative of a completely healthy individual. Let’s take a look at some exercises that are designed to get rid of belly fat, and keep you healthy in the long run.
Focus On Core Exercises
Even healthy individuals can often ignore core-focused workouts without meaning to. Many exercise programs today focus heavily on weight training or toning, but they leave out the abs. It is important to focus on more core intensive workouts regularly.
Don’t Neglect Cardiovascular Exercise
Moreover, you need to frequently engage in cardiovascular exercises. Jogging 5 or 6 times per week can add 5 or 6 years to your lifespan. High intensity exercise for just 30 minutes produces a great natural high.
Exercise is important not just because of the normal benefits it reaps, but because high intensity exercise:
- burns calories during the act
- continues to burn calories at a higher level for the following 14 hours on average.
For example: If you exercise heavily in the morning with a stationary bike at high intensity for 45 minutes, it would not only burn the near 500 calories from the exercise itself, but it would increase the total benefit you get throughout the rest of the day by 50%, burning another two hundred extra calories on average thereafter.
Sit Less If Possible, Or Stretch Periodically If Not
Sit less if possible. Working out three times per week is not enough to combat how often we sit thereafter.
Consider this: most people get up and get dressed, then sit in the car, sit at work, go home sitting back in that car, and then sit for meals and to relax while they watch television or talk with their family.
All that sitting means that even if you exercised for an hour per day, you wouldn’t combat the damage being done. The National Institute of Health found that 7 hours per week of moderate to vigorous exercise is not enough to combat sitting most of the time. People who spent most of their time sitting, had a 50% higher risk of death from anything and they doubled their odds of dying from health disease.
Sitting is now the biggest health threat Americans face. Today, sitting for more than 6 hours per day, regardless of literally anything else you do (regardless of how often you work out, or how hard, or what you eat or how much you sleep) is going to reduce your health and cause long term problems. Exercise rates for the last two decades have remained stable while sitting rates have increased. The result is that obesity rates have doubled.
Once you sit, a lot of the electrical activity in your leg muscles turns off. The calories you burn drops to one calorie per minutes. Enzyme production, important in breaking down fat, drops by 90%. After sitting for 2 hours, good cholesterol drops by 20%. Sure, many people have no choice but to sit for work, driving, in meetings, etc… but the key is to get up and move around, take breaks when and where you can.
MRI scans of muscle tissue revealed that sitting for long periods of time put pressure on the cells used to sit, which caused the body to produce 50% more fat than normal. This means sitting causes a lot of fat accumulation on the buttocks and legs.
3. Maintain A Healthy Posture At All Times
People think of their abs or their belly, they picture that iconic six pack but there are so many more supportive and stabilizing abdominal muscles that create an internal corset designed to hold up your body and improve your posture.
The more you focus on better posture, not just while you are sitting but while you are walking around, the more use you will make of these internal core muscles. By utilizing proper posture at all times you tighten your core which requires you to use those muscles all day long. As you target your core via regular exercise you will find it much easier to hold yourself upright throughout the day.
4. Make Necessary Lifestyle Changes
In order to lose belly fat, it is important to reduce anxiety/ stress levels. Research shows stress raises cortisol levels, which leads to increased fat. By using things like exercise, yoga, or meditation to reduce stress, you will help your DNA to continue to reproduce so that you look younger and feeling better all the while decreasing belly fat.
Take Vitamin Supplements
Vitamins from natural sources are not just part of the changes to your diet, but your lifestyle. If you get more vitamin D, you can naturally improve the immune system and the body’s fight against unnecessary fat storage.
Maintain A Healthy Sleep Cycle
Getting 15 or 20 more minutes of sleep can do wonders for all other aspects of your life, including your productivity, exercise, and food choices. One study showed that losing just 90 minutes of sleep reduced alertness by 33%. On the opposite end, don’t oversleep. Sometimes bad food causes oversleep, or stress causes oversleep but more than 8 hours won’t do you any favors either.
Take Breaks Regularly To Reduce Stress
A study by K. Anders Ericsson found that people who practiced something for 10,000 hours achieved greatness, but what goes overlooked in this study is that most of those great performers, chess players, etc… all got at least 8 hours of sleep per night. Also, they took regular breaks from their practice, whatever it might be, and never pushed themselves beyond 90 minutes at a time. Working too long on a task decreases performance. You need to work in bursts, take breaks regularly, and sleep adequately.
Sleep is a natural defense against illnesses. Quality of sleep is more important than quantity alone. Being in bed for 9 hours of sleep, but tossing and turning, going from awake to asleep for four of those hours is bad. A study determined that sleep efficiency is more important than duration, when it comes to preventing the common cold. If you sleep well, you are 5.5 times less likely to develop a cold.
5. Treatments to Reduce Fat
There are still plenty of people out there who struggle to maintain their confidence because of stubborn problem areas. In some situations, genetics or lacking a single element in your diet might simply make it next to impossible to get rid of certain areas of belly fat. That is where fat busting treatments come into play.
For those who need some extra help or still have problem areas after they have done everything that they should, fat busting treatments like CoolSculpting and Liposuction can help you feel more confident and live your best life.
CoolSculpting
CoolSculpting treatments enable you to freeze off your fat without any surgery or recovery time. These are simple outpatient procedures that are non-invasive and ideally suited to target smaller areas that just won't go away.
Liposuction
Liposuction helps to better sculpts the body and reduces any unwanted fat by surgically removing fats in a minimally-invasive manner. Either treatment will help you look and feel your best.
Tummy Tuck
A tummy tuck is a surgical procedure which combines the fat removal of liposuction, and the body contouring of CoolSculpting in order to create a beautifully sculpted abdominal section.
Getting Rid Of Belly Fat Quickly And Keeping It Off
Overall, the key steps to get rid of belly fat and keeping it off start at home. The right food, sleep, posture, movement, and fat burning techniques will not only help thwart diseases, but it will improve your health now, improve the way you look, and increase your longevity. With all of these changes, studies show it is easier to implement them in small ways, often at home.
Thankfully, you can enhance how you feel inside and out by starting off on the right foot with an enhanced diet, exercise, lifestyle habits, posture, and fat busting treatments. If you are ready to kickstart your fat loss, contact us to learn more about our fat reduction treatments.
If you feel that you are trapped in the cycle of constantly trying to trim your excess belly fat, but are seeing no results, it can feel very defeating. Don’t let this get to you. Perhaps you just need one last final bit of help in order to get it off and keep it off. For people in this situation, there is no shame in finding professional help in order to get rid of your last bit of excess belly fat.
This can come in the form of Lipo, CoolSculpting, Tummy Tuck, or other cosmetic procedures. If you feel like you have tried everything, and can simply not get that last bit of belly fat to come off, don’t admit defeat. Get help from a professional who can give you your confidence and figure back.
Learning More About Cosmetic Surgery for Excess Belly Fat
To learn more about these treatment, check out some of the helpful resources below:
Is Cosmetic Surgery Right for You? Take Our Self Evaluation!
If you already understand a bit about these treatments, and want to learn more about which one is best for you, and if you are a good candidate, be sure to take our self evaluation.
Or, you can always contact us to speak with a belly fat expert, who can help you learn more about your options, and find the best way to remove your belly fat today.
