Reasons For Upper Abdominal Weight Gain
1. You Are Eating Unhealthy Food
We all love to devour fried foods and delightful sweet treats, don’t we? From piping hot samosas, cheesy fries, butter popcorns and chicken patty burger to sugar-dipped jalebis, cheese cakes and chocolate-laden waffles, the list is never ending. Most of these foods have been termed ‘unhealthy’ because they don’t do any good to our body and have zero nutritional value, and end up adding calories in your body. Eating junk and processed foods regularly may reduce our metabolism and contribute to a larger waist size.
Eating junk and processed foods regularly may reduce our metabolism and contribute to a larger waist size.
2. You Are Doing Wrong Or No Work Out
If you think that cardio workouts alone can give you a fat tummy, then you are wrong. A daily run or yoga class are also important for a healthy heart and flat belly. A combination of weights and cardiovascular training could do the trick, in addition to specific exercises that target the upper belly. Strength training increases muscle mass, which further helps our body to burn more fat. Muscle burns more calories than fat, and therefore, we burn more calories throughout the day by having more muscle.
3. You Are Stressed
Stress causes the body to secrete cortisol that forces the liver to release excess sugar.
4. You Have An Erratic Sleep Cycle
5. You Are Getting Older
As we age, our body goes through numerous changes we experience a declining metabolic rate.
What Causes Lower Belly Pooch
- Poor Diet
No surprise! Poor diet is the number one reason more than 59% of adults in the US have belly fat .
Consuming too many processed foods and not enough vegetables and fruits affects your body functions. This leads to slow metabolism and chronic inflammation in the body. Chronic inflammation, in turn, induces fat accumulation in the belly region , .
- Too Much Alcohol
There goes your weekend out the window! Kidding. Limited alcohol consumption is fine. Things go downhill when you consume more than 60 mL of alcohol every day.
Alcohol causes dehydration . Dehydration causes inflammation and inflammation-induced weight gain. Alcohol also gets stored as fat in the body if you dont drink enough water and workout regularly.
- Lack Of Exercise
Exercising is the best way to shed fat and feel great. Leading a comfortable, sedentary life might seem easy, but its not recommended.
To keep your body healthy and active, you have to exercise every day. Your circulation, metabolism, digestion, sleep, and brain function will improve 10 fold. The ultimate result reduced stress and chronic inflammation.
- Stress
With practice, you can be calm and think of a real solution instead of getting stressed about issues. Stress increases the chances of accumulating fat in the lower belly region. The trigger is the same inflammation.
- Pregnancy
- Genetics
You can toss away jeans but not your genes. If you are stuck with genes that add to your belly fat problem, we feel you.
Keep Your Stress Situation In Check
Stress, like that which happens as a result of sleep deprivation, might mess with your weight. Unchecked tension or anxiety can drive you to eat more, especially when it comes to high calorie comfort foods.
Research also shows that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol may encourage your body to store fat around your middle. Warne JP. . Shaping the stress response: Interplay of palatable food choices, glucocorticoids, insulin and abdominal obesity.
Your plan: Seek out stress management techniques that work for your lifestyle.
If you dont have an hour to meditate or do yoga, thats totally fine. There are plenty of short-term, effective strategies for feeling calmer, such as journaling, connecting with friends, or just watching a funny YouTube video.
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So Where Does This Leave My Overhang
If youve read up to this point youve probably realized there is no ONE miracle exercise that will remove excess overhang, however the great news is that if you combine multiple exercises such as walking, jogging, squats, push-ups, crunches and any of the hundreds and hundreds of different movements that your body can perform I guarantee that your stubborn, seemingly immovable overhang will be on borrowed time.
The key point to remember is that it will take time but if you keep going, it will be worth it!
And remember small amounts of progress is still progress so dont ever ever give up and remember to take measurements too and dont just live by the scales.
Work All Of The Muscles In Your Bodynot Just Your Abs
Doing crunches every morning and every night? It’s time to switch it up! When you’re down to your final inches of belly fat, countless crunches won’t necessarily help you reveal a six-pack. “You can’t spot reduce,” Jill says. In other words, you can’t tell your body where to lose fateven if you exercise your abs every day, that doesn’t always make ’em flatter.
Instead, Jill suggests doing functional exercises that use the muscles of your entire coreabdominals, back, pelvic, obliquesas well as other body parts. “These exercises use more muscles, so there is a higher rate of calorie burn while you are doing them,” she says. Planks are her favorite functional exercisethey activate not just your core muscles but also your arm, leg, and butt muscles. Add some movement to the plank, with shoulder taps or leg lifts, and you up the ante even more.
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Thin People Have It Too
Even if you’re thin, you can still have too much visceral fat.
How much you have is partly about your genes, and partly about your lifestyle, especially how active you are.
Visceral fat likes inactivity. In one study, thin people who watched their diets but didn’t exercise were more likely to have too much visceral fat.
The key is to be active, no matter what size you are.
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Do You Poop Alot When Losing Weight
Healthful weight loss diets usually include lots of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. These are all high in fiber. Including more fiber in the diet can increase stool weight and encourage more regular bowel movements. Because of this, a person following a weight loss diet may have bowel movements more often.
Consume A Combo Of Calcium And Vitamin D
Say cheese! Adding some extra calcium and vitamin D to your diet could be the best way to get the flat stomach you’ve been dreaming about. Over just 12 months, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville found that obese female study subjects who upped their calcium intake shed 11 pounds of body fat without other major dietary modifications. To keep your calcium choices healthy, try mixing it up between dairy sources, calcium-rich leafy greens, fatty fish, nuts, and seeds.
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How To Lose The Overhang
The key to ridding your body of both Visceral fat and Subcutaneous fat and ultimately the dreaded overhang is very simple: You need to move A LOT & OFTEN! This does not mean doing endless crunches, sit-ups and planks although these are great exercises when included into a well-rounded diet and exercise routine, you cannot use them to isolate weight loss or target areas.
To help bust this myth a little further it will help to learn that when you perform a crunch or situp exercise youre in fact only working the abdominal muscles which lie beneath the fat on your stomach the fat on top however is doing little to no work at all and has the intention of going nowhere fast!
As such isolating only the abdominals will have absolutely no bearing on the removal of the fat above it as the abdominal muscle and the fat above it are not directly related, other than by being closely positioned anatomically. I know how can this be?
The simple fact is that fat is stored energy just waiting to be burned whether it is located on your stomach, legs, bum or arms, and in 99% of cases when you exercise the last fat to get burned is from your bum and stomach .
What we do know is that when we exercise or perform physical activity our body burns energy from all over our body without bias.
What Is Belly Fat Anyway
The definition of belly fat might sound obviousit’s clearly the fat that sits around your middle, right? Well, not quite. While belly fat does indeed reside around your midsection, it goes deeper than just below the skin, padding your intestines and other vital organs, Lawrence Cheskin, MD, professor and chair of the department of nutrition and food studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, tells Health.
“The reason it’s different than other forms of fat is because it’s more metabolically activeit gets into the bloodstream faster than the stuff under your skin,” Dr. Cheskin explains. “Belly fat has a bad influence on blood cholesterol and blood sugar, and all the metabolic diseases.” So with belly fat also comes a heightened risk of those metabolic diseases, like diabetes.
Belly fat can also be independent from overall body fat, meaning someone who’s not overweight could still have a lot of excess fat around his or her waist. The good news: For most people, when they lose weight, it tends to come off the middle, says Dr. Cheskin. People also tend to shed belly fat a little quicker than other areas, because the tummy is just a temporary holding zone for fat, he adds.
Something to keep in mind: It’s normal to carry some weight around your middle. Dr. Cheskin says a normal waist circumference is less than 40 inches for men and 36 inches for womenbut if you want to trim it down, here are a few things you can do.
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The Realities Of Excess Bellyfat
Abdominalfat is visceral fat, stubborn fat that surrounds the organs deep within theabdomen. Researchers have proved that excess visceral fat increases a personsrisk of metabolic diseases, including:
Dr.Butsch says belly fat affects men and women differently: Men are more likelyto havemore belly fat than premenopausal women. But aftermenopause, women begin to gain more weight in their abdominal area.
Lose Weight With Friends
If you struggle to lose weight on your own, consider making it a team effort. According to a study published in the journal Obesity during a 12-week, team-based weight loss competition, getting encouragement from teammate increased the odds of achieving clinically significant weight loss by 20%.
“In our study, weight loss clearly clustered within teams, which suggests that teammates influenced each other, perhaps by providing accountability, setting expectations of weight loss and providing encouragement and support.”
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Bonus Round: Losing Belly Fat After Having A Baby
Its totally normal for your belly to feel loose or jiggly in the early days and weeks after giving birth. In addition to pregnancy weight gain, your abdominal muscles were stretched to the max to accommodate your growing bundle of joy.
Losing belly fat postpartum starts with the same strategies youd use to lose belly fat at any other time: Eat a little less and exercise more.
It may not happen overnight, but its reasonable to be back to your prepregnancy weight by the time your baby reaches their first birthday.
Does that mean your lower belly will look the same as it did before you got pregnant? Not necessarily. For some women, pregnancy causes the abdominal muscles to separate and create a noticeable bulge, even after theyve fully recovered from giving birth.
This condition, called diastasis recti, is fixable with abdominal exercises. A physical therapist can help you get the hang of them. Just ask your healthcare provider for a recommendation they can point you in the right direction.
How To Lose Belly Fat Fast
Right, by “fast”, we’re going to have to assume you are looking for answers to how to lose belly fat efficiently and safely. That’s the only way we know how to do things at WH and the only way we plan on doing things, too.
One way to make sure you’re as dialled into your belly fat loss journey as possible is to get more granular with your nutrition. Now, ifyou’re already familiar with counting calories, listen up this is how to fine-tune your fat loss efforts to focus on how to lose belly fat in particular. It’s known as learning how to count and calculate your macros.
“Counting macros” is a diet technique to make sure you’re eating the right amounts of each macronutrient protein, fat and carbohydrates. By tweaking the volume of each you can make your fat loss efforts more efficient.
How? Well, each macronutrient plays a different role in keeping our bodies ticking over. In broad strokes: protein helps to build and maintain muscle tissue, carbohydrates provide fast and slow-release energy and healthy fats support hormone function.
Tweaking the volumes you eat can help build muscle and lose body fat more efficiently, as well as allowing you to re-incorporate some of your favourite foods. Because you’re looking at what makes up what you eat, foods that are less nutrient-dense can be incorporated . All you’ll need to do is work out how that impacts the rest of your day.
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Look At The Quality Of Your Sleep
Dont underestimate the power of a good nights sleep, too. Yes, it can help combat under-eye bags but, according to the University of Leeds, adults who get more than six hours of sleep per night are likely to carry 3cm less around their waist.
Head to bed earlier and follow the WHhow to get to sleep guide to ensure a lack of shut-eye doesnt hold you back from losing belly fat.
How To Get Rid Of Lower Belly Fat After Having A Baby
Toning your abdomen after pregnancy may pose additional challenges. Wait until you get clearance from your doctor before jumping into any kind of diet and exercise routine.
Its not uncommon to have loose skin or an additional fat layer over your belly after pregnancy, especially if you had a cesarean delivery.
During pregnancy, many women gain weight. After delivery, youll most likely have an extra layer of fat left as an energy store for breastfeeding and the birth recovery process.
This is part of your bodys natural instinct and is normal. Its important to be patient with yourself.
You can, for the most part, follow the same protocols as you would before you were pregnant to lose postpartum weight, with a few exceptions.
Dont restrict calories while youre breastfeeding. It can reduce your breast milk supply.
If it appears that the muscles in your lower abs have been separated by pregnancy, you may have a condition called diastasis recti.
It can worsen with traditional crunch exercises. Ask your doctor about workouts and physical therapy options if you believe you might have this condition.
Your sex may have something to do with the reasons why you gain belly fat. Females tend to store fat in the lower belly because of hormones, genetics, and age, and may be difficult to reduce in some cases.
However, everyone should take the same basic approach to lose weight, regardless of sex or gender.
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How To Lose Lower Stomach Pudge
If you’ve decided to get rid of your lower stomach pudge, give yourself a pat on the back. That pooch isn’t just effecting your appearance, it also has an impact on your health — because belly fat, particularly visceral fat around your organs, is associated with health conditions, such as type-2 diabetes and heart disease. Before doing hundreds of crunches, understand that spot reduction is too good to be true, and to lose that stomach pudge, you must lose fat from your entire body.
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Avoid Eating After Dinner
Stop treating your kitchen like an all-night diner and you’ll stop seeing those unwanted pounds piling onto your frame, too. The results of a study published in Cell Metabolism found that mice who only had access to food during an eight-hour period stayed slim over the course of the study, while those who ate the same number of calories over a 16-hour period gained significantly more weight, particularly around their middle. When you’re finished with dinner at night, shut the fridge and don’t look back until morning your belly will thank you. When you do head back to the kitchen in the A.M., make sure the best healthy kitchen staples for cooking are there waiting for you.
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You’re Doing The Wrong Type Of Workout
Listen up here. “Only doing abdominal-focused workouts, like crunches, won’t help,” Luke emphasises Belly fat is simply where your body stores energy, so you need to take a whole-body approach to tackle it, he reckons. Try HIIT training he says it’s “a great way to burn fat and get your heart rate up”, with squats, burpees and treadmill sprints all being examples of moves to try.
Emily agrees, saying that, in its simplest form, training abs alone, won’t get you abs. “Focus on the staple movements and progressively getting stronger at them over time. I’m talking about your planks, crunches, twists, holds and v-ups.”
She also points out that compound movements such as squats, deadlifts, overhead press and pull-ups are all effective at activating and working your core. Her final two cents on it? “Moving your body in a way that feels good, and keeps you moving consistently.” Hear, hear.