If sucking it in until your face turns blue it’s already too much, it means it’s about time to start doing something about your belly, to have that flat stomach you dream about.
Excess fat is not only making you feel like the ugly duckling, it’s unhealthy too, as it’s a serious disease factor, such as cardiovascular diseases. If camouflaging your belly fat has become tiresome and depressing, let’s see what you can turn this energy into something more constructive: make your stomach flat.
1). If You Want Nice Muscle Fiber in Your Abs, Eat Fiber
Fiber from vegetables fills up your stomach, suppresses appetite, regulates your blood sugar, boosts your metabolism, and unblock your intestinal transit. You eat less, you shed out more. As simple as that.
Just to do some math, increasing the daily soluble fiber intake by only 10 grams for 5 years, melts away the belly fat by 3.7%.
Soluble fibers like oatmeal, quinoa, millet, brown rice, barley, rye, buckwheat, flaxseeds, leafy greens, broccoli cabbage, blackberries, apples, avocado are great foods to include in your “Say goodbye to belly fat, and hello to flat abs” diet.
2). Befriend Friendly Bacteria from Probiotics
You and probiotics can be very good friends. Probiotics are good, helpful bacteria that is normally found in your digestive system and they help your gut’s health when your inner balance is broken. Simply said, probiotics help your intestinal transit.
Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium strains are the most common probiotics found in yogurt, kefir, tempeh, pickles, or kimchi, but they are also available as Probiotic supplements.
Probiotics help you lose weight and specifically reduce belly fat.
3). Show Your Heart Some Love with Cardio
Cardio or aerobic exercises like running, brisk walking, biking, and rowing between 20 to 40 minutes aerobic exercises daily help you burn belly fat, tone your abs, and boost your health.
4). Shake, Baby, Protein Shake
Proteins boost your metabolism, suppress your appetite, reduces belly fat, and help you lose weight. A great way to introduce them to your daily consumption is to drink protein shakes.
5). Eat Healthy Fat to Melt Away Belly Fat
Monosaturated fatty acids are the good, healthy fats that your body needs. They don’t accumulate as belly fat and it has many health benefits, including a reduced risk of abdominal adiposity. Healthy fat sources include olive oil, avocado, nuts and seeds.
6). Less Carbs for Flat Abs
Low-carb diets, such as the ketogenic diet, increases your metabolic rate, burns fat, helps you lose weight, boost your energy levels, and slims down your silhouette.
7). Don’t Let Sweets Sugar Coat Your Belly
Sugar is sweet when you eat it, but bitter when you see your health degrading. Obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, liver problems, yeast infection are just some of the damaging effect of sugar.
Too much of a good thing is bad, especially if what you think is good as taste (sugar), is not that healthy at all. It’s better to avoid refined sugar at all, or at least, to limit the daily intake. And watch out for the hidden sugar in beverages and canned foods.
8). Train Your Way to Perfect Abs
High-intensity training such as interval training, sprinting, rowing, jumping pushes your body to burn fat, boost your metabolism, and is more effective than other exercises, especially for trimming your waistline and strengthen the abdominal muscles.
9). Drink Water
Drinking one or two glass of water 30 minutes before each meal, also one in the morning and one in the evening, is a very simple and affordable way to help your body lose weight. It makes you feel full, so you won’t eat that much, it reduces bloating, helps you flush out toxins, increases your metabolism, and burns fat.
10). Get Your Abs Flat While You Sleep
As weird as it may sound, sleep is making your stomach flat. No, it’s not about sleeping on your stomach, but having a good night sleep. People who sleep less than 5 hours a night have an increased risk of gaining weight, especially around the waist.
Adults should sleep at least 8 hours, and kids no less than 10 hours a night.
11) Mind Your Abs – Mind Your Eating
Some of the factors that contribute to your weight gain are eating fast, without masticating your food enough, standing instead of sitting, and being distracted by television.
Instead, mindful eating is a method that teaches you to care for yourself, your state of mind, your emotion and the way you’re eating, so you have a better health. Eat slowly, masticate each bite about 30 times, close TV or other distractions, be present in the moment, be relaxed and enjoy your food.
Mindful eating helps you avoid binge eating, reduces stress, and helps you lose weight.
12). Reduce Stress With Meditation and Yoga for a Flat Stomach
Cortisol, the stress hormones, contribute to the development of many diseases, in time, if the stress is chronic, as it leads to false hunger, binge eating, and fat deposits in your body.
Doing meditation and yoga daily, or at least 2-3 times a week, reduce the stress levels, balance your emotions, uplift your mood, reduces the need to overeat and binge eating, regulate your hormones and makes you feel calm, fulfilled, content, and just happy with yourself.