You’re Not Getting Enough Sleep
From scrolling through social media to having a late-night coffee, there are plenty of ways we unknowingly keep ourselves awake at night. Aside from feeling tired and groggy the next day, not getting the recommended 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night can affect weight loss, explains Dr Luke.
“When were lacking in sleep, our bodys hormones get thrown off balance which can impact our hunger levels the next day. We all have two hormones that affect our appetite: ghrelin and leptin. When we dont get enough sleep, our ghrelin levels rise, and our leptin levels drop. This means that when were awake, we tend to eat more but feel less satisfied. Try going to bed a little earlier than usual to avoid this imbalance and remember to remove any distractions that might prevent you from nodding off,” he continues.
Sprinkle Some Cilantro On Your Meal
Another bloat-busting food to have on hand is cilantro. The herb, though polarizing in terms of taste, contains a unique blend of oils that work much like over-the-counter meds to relax digestive muscles and alleviate an “overactive” gut. A study published in the journal Digestive Diseases and Science found that patients with IBS benefited from supplementing with cilantro as opposed to placebo because their bellies weren’t as bloated.
Use Coconut Oil For Cooking:
Coconut oil contains fatty acids but still it that have a positive effect on your body. The fat in coconut oil is used by your body as an energy source. Coconut oil is also thermogenic, so it helps your body burn fat.
Do not add coconut oil to the oils that you already use. You should replace your cooking oils with coconut oil. The health benefits of using coconut oil are similar to that of olive oil. Soo all you need to do is to just cook any food using coconut oil.
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Slow Down Your Eating
Eating slowly will also help cinch your waist, too. Inhaling croissants while run-walking to work will do little to satiate you not that youll do much digesting anyway, with all that cortisol flooding your system. Instead, by making time to eat and focusing on your food , youll wind up eating less and youll feel fuller for longer.
9. Get Quality Sleep
Multiple studies have shown an association between short sleep and weight gain. When youre low on Zzzs, activity in the brains frontal lobe is impaired. At the same time, the more primal parts of your brain that deal with things like desire and motivation are lit up like the Blackpool Illuminations.
Inadequate sleep also wreaks havoc on your metabolism. When the body doesnt get enough rest, it conserves energy by slowing down basic functions. The combination of untameable cravings, little willpower and inefficient processing is an open invitation for fat storage. Follow our advice to improve your sleep tonight.
Watch Your Stress If You Want To Lose Belly Fat
‘Stress may be an evolutionary response that helps keep us alive,’ says performance nutritionist and qualified dietitian, Tom Irving, ‘but frequent and persistent doses can elevate cortisol levels, which is both inflammatory as well as antilipolytic .’
Why? Well, when we’re in “flight or flight” mode, the body releases glucose into the blood to prepare you for a difficult situation, explains Catherine Rabess, dietitian and NHS dietetic manager.
‘Once the adrenaline wears off the blood glucose levels drop, leaving the brain to send signals of hunger and increasing appetite. This could be in the form of sugary cravings. It’s completely normal.’
Often, this kind of stress is associated with unhealthy habits like emotional eating, not getting enough sleep, skipping meals, eating quick and accessible fast food and exercising less, she adds all of which can lead to unhealthy weight gain.
Add a year plus of COVID-19 upheaval into the mix and you’ll understand why you might find it more difficult to lose body fat now than previously. This isn’t something to beat yourself up over. It just means you may need to be more vigilant about managing your stress as much as you can by controlling what’s controllable and reminding yourself that losing body fat needn’t be your biggest priority right now.
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Up Your Exercise Routine
Weight training is your strongest ally against stubborn belly fat. The key to burning fat is strengthening or revving your metabolism, which is largely determined by your body composition , according to the Mayo Clinic.
In order to improve your body composition, introduce strength training into your regular workout routine at least twice per week, the Mayo Clinic recommends. Building your muscle mass will help you burn more calories, even at rest, since muscle mass burns more than fat. Incorporate compound movements for a total-body burn.
While the weight room is your best friend for burning belly fat, don’t totally neglect cardio, either. Aerobic exercise whether it’s jogging, hiking or biking will up your calorie expenditure and promote heart health. Aim for 30 minutes of physical activity each day.
Read more:The Top 10 Calorie-Burning Cardio Workouts to Try
Embrace The Power Of Protein
Protein serves a dual role in helping you trim down belly fat by increasing muscle mass and metabolism, while also helping stave off hunger. Research shows that a higher-protein diet increases thermogenesis, which means you burn more calories. Further, eating protein leads to an increased feeling of satisfaction after the meal, often causing you to eat fewer calories later in the day. These High-Protein Breakfast Tacos are the perfect way to start your morning and will keep you feeling full until lunch.
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Change Your Lifestyle And Combine Different Methods
Just doing one of the items on this list wont have a big effect on its own.
If you want good results, you need to combine different methods that have been shown to be effective.
Interestingly, many of these methods are things generally associated with healthy eating and an overall healthy lifestyle.
Therefore, changing your lifestyle for the long term is the key to losing your belly fat and keeping it off.
When you have healthy habits and eat real food, fat loss tends to follow as a natural side effect.
SUMMARY
Losing weight and keeping it off is difficult unless you permanently change your dietary habits and lifestyle.
There are no magic solutions to losing belly fat.
Weight loss always requires some effort, commitment, and perseverance on your behalf.
Successfully adopting some or all of the strategies and lifestyle goals discussed in this article will definitely help you lose the extra pounds around your waist.
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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Reduce Your Alcohol Intake
Its no surprise that overindulging in alcohol can lead to a beer gut .
If youre serious about getting rid of belly fat, you need to cut back on the booze. Limit yourself to one drink per day, including on the weekends!
Seven calories per gram may not sound like much, but one or two G& Ts later, and they soon add up.
And because the breakdown of alcohol is prioritized, its energy quickly tops up glycogen supplies with the remainder being stored as fat around your midsection.
There is another reason to cut alcohol.
Drinking reduces your inhibitions. When you are drinking, it is easy to order unhealthy meals and massively increase your carb intake.
Is Putting On Weight Just Part Of Getting Older
Its true that as we get older, we need less calories to keep our body working well. Changes to our hormones during this time mean that we start to lose muscle and gain fat. This makes it harder to keep to a healthy weight but thats not to say its impossible. In fact, people who are aged 65 and over are healthier than their ancestors and are living longer.
Although you cant escape the ageing process, when it comes to managing your weight, there are other factors that are within your control. These include your lifestyle habits, choices and behaviours and how active you are.
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Don’t Let Diets Take Over
If you find every spare second is given over to thinking about calories, plans and cutting, then maybe the best thing you can do is to take a break from dieting. Research by the University of Tasmania revealed that people who broke from their diet every two weeks and aimed to just keep their weight stable during that period lost more weight and gained less back when their diets had finished.
Effective Tips To Lose Belly Fat
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Belly fat is more than a nuisance that makes your clothes feel tight.
Its seriously harmful.
One type of belly fat referred to as visceral fat is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and other conditions .
Many health organizations use body mass index to classify weight and predict the risk of metabolic disease.
However, this is misleading, as people with excess belly fat are at an increased risk even if they look thin .
Though losing fat from this area can be difficult, there are several things you can do to reduce excess abdominal fat.
Here are 20 effective tips to lose belly fat, backed by scientific studies.
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How Do I Know If My Belly Fat Is A Problem
An easy way to assess if there may be a problem is to measure your waist. Experts suggest that for women a waist measurement more than 80cm and for men more than 94cm suggests there may be an issue. These guidelines are adjusted for ethnicity with South Asian, Chinese and Japanese men recommended to have a waist circumference no more than 90cm. If your measurements exceed these guidelines and you are concerned, refer to your GP for further guidance.
How To Lose Belly Fat: Takeaway
Just keep in mind that weighted ab training is the icing on the cake. It should not be implemented until youve nailed down the previous 4 things. Once you get all 4 implemented, youll start experiencing fat loss. Keep this up for long enough and stay consistent with it, and eventually, the fat will come off from stubborn areas like your belly.
And for those looking to take this one step further with a program that puts all of this together for you, such that you know exactly how to train and what to eat week after week to lose stubborn fat for good and build lean muscle just like thousands of our members have done, then:
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Switch To Sprouted Bread
While it’s often assumed that bread is off-limits when you’re trying to lose belly fat, the right bread may actually expedite the process. Switching to sprouted bread can help out carb-lovers eager to get their fix without going up a belt size, thanks to the inulin content of sprouted grains. The results of a study published in Nutrition & Metabolism reveal that found that pre-diabetic study subjects whose diets were supplemented with inulin shaved off more belly fat and total weight than those whose meal plans didn’t pack this healthy prebiotic fiber.
Week : Monitor Weekly Average Weight
In week 1, you need to start weighing yourself every day. You’d need to use a specific method that’ll significantly improve the accuracy of your weigh-ins. But wait – why do you need to weigh yourself in the first place? That’s because consistently tracking weight has been found in several studies to be a significant predictor of those who successfully lose weight. You need to get this step right before we cover diet tweaks to kickstart fat loss in the next week.
To do so, weigh yourself every morning after waking up and after using the bathroom. Dont drink or eat anything before. After 7 days, take an average of your weight. This 7-day average will then be your weight for that week. Every week you will repeat this process. You will then compare these weekly averages to assess how much fat youre losing with what we will implement next in weeks 2-4.
Its important to weigh yourself in this fashion because your weight will fluctuate day-to-day. Factors such as:
- The timing of your weigh-in
- How much you’ve slept the night before
- How hydrated you are
- The timing of your last meal AND
- How much you ate during the weekend
… Can all affect your weight by up to 10 lbs! If you’re just weighing yourself whenever you feel like it, these fluctuations make it next to impossible to assess if you’re losing fat or not.
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How Much Body Fat Should You Have
The way in which women could and should lose belly fat is different to that of men. Women need somebelly fat to function fat cells store oestrogen, so having too little can cause your whole hormonal function to go out of whack, causing serious health issues such as irregular periods and even infertility.
To that end, striving to lose fat from your stomach with the aim of getting a six-pack, for most females, wouldn’t be healthy. Instead, aim to sit within the 21-30% body fat category. This is what’s considered a healthy body fat percentage range for women.
Accept That Your Behaviors Will Adjust
A big part of weight loss is simply being aware of the decisions youre making. For example, when out at happy hour with friends, you may lose track of how much you’re eating or drinking. But if you take a split second to step back and become aware of that fact, youre able to course correct. The awareness and then planning for what else I can be doing, that might give me the same benefit of eating comfort foods, says Gagliardi.
2. Track your calories.
The most basic approach to weight loss is burning more calories than you consume. For instance, since 3,500 calories equals one pound of fat, a weight loss appor even just a pen and papercan help you decide how many calories you need to cut from your diet or burn at the gym in order to meet your goals. If you were to burn 500 more calories per day seven days a week, that would lead to 3,500 calories in a week and one pound of weight loss, says Gagliardi.
If you’re not up for crunching numbers every day, you can take a more generalized approach. For some people, its knowing, Typically I eat a whole sandwich, says Gagliardi. Now, Im going to eat half a sandwich at lunch and save the other half for my dinner and cut my calories in half.” To get started, consider these 25 ways to cut 500 calories a day.
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Add Some Calcium To Your Meals
Increasing your calcium intake does more than just improve the strength of your bonesâit’s also an easy way to keep those extra pounds from congregating around your waist. Researchers in Shanghai found that college students with low calcium intakes who increased their calcium and vitamin D consumption and engaged in moderate exercise lost more visceral fat than the control group. While many people assume that dairy is the best way to boost your calcium intake, there are plenty of vegan-friendly ways to do that very thing, too. Sunflower seeds, oranges, almonds, beans, and green vegetables, like kale, watercress, and broccoli, are all easy non-dairy ways to add calcium to every meal.