How to lose belly fat and maintain a healthy lifestyle

In a sea of hard-body workout commercials and advertisements for supplements and diets promising a flat, six-pack stomach, it comes as no surprise that you may be on a quest to learn how to lose belly fat. But rather than focusing on the visual impact of a flatter stomach, it's important to understand the health benefits of losing excess fat around the midriff.

Having a higher amount of belly fat — specifically visceral fat, which accumulates around the organs — can increase your risk of chronic health conditions, according to the Mayo Clinic, including high blood pressure, sleep apnea, heart disease, stroke, high blood sugar and certain forms of cancer. That's why it's important to maintain a healthy weight by exercising and maintaining a healthy diet.

If you're looking to achieve results fast, it may be time to adjust your expectations — sustainable fat loss requires time and effort, so it's important to think of your journey as a marathon, not a sprint. Here are some ways to slim your stomach that are backed by science. (Spoiler alert: The first trick is to get your diet under control.)

Not sure how to get started with eating healthy? Here are the 10 best weight loss meal delivery services, tested by nutritionists.

This is not intended to be medical advice. Always consult your doctor before beginning a new workout or diet regimen to find the best program for your specific health needs.

1. Get your diet in check: Eat healthy

One thing I've noticed about many workouts that I've followed is that the fitness instructors often end each session with a reminder not to undo all your hard work in the kitchen. You can train hard and see improvements in strength, conditioning and flexibility, but you may struggle to lose belly fat if you're not following a healthy diet.

A balanced diet that focuses on consuming high-quality whole foods while achieving a negative calorie balance (where you're burning more calories each day than you're consuming) is crucial for weight loss. So if you're looking to lose weight around your midsection, you should work on reducing your simple carb intake and avoiding foods with added sugar while making sure most of your meals have a balance of healthy fats, fiber and protein.

"Maintaining a healthy weight or achieving weight loss, especially combined with regular physical activity, will help reduce overall body fat, including belly fat," Theresa Gentile, a dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, tells Yahoo. She adds that a "slight caloric deficit along with a focus on adequate protein can help you lose abdominal fat.

If occasionally you want to throw a snack or sweet treat into the mix, that's OK. The goal is to control portion sizes to maintain a balanced diet, not to keep you away from your favorite foods.

Of course, knowing how many calories you should be consuming each day to achieve a slight caloric deficit can be challenging. You can use an online basal metabolic rate calculator to help you find a rough estimate or you can ask your local gym or university if they offer metabolic testing. And if you're not sure where to start when it comes to eating healthfully, it's a good idea to sign up for a consultation with a registered dietitian who can give you guidance and a customized meal plan.

Also, don't overlook the importance of staying hydrated. Drinking the recommended amount of water each day can help you reach your goal of losing belly fat. (Just keep in mind that it's not water intake itself that makes you lose weight, but staying hydrated helps support your metabolism, which is crucial for weight loss.) Aim to consume about 3-4 liters of water each day. If you don't already have a water bottle you love carrying around, check out some of our favorites.

2. Exercise: Incorporate HIIT, strength training and lifting weights

Regular exercise is a cornerstone of a healthy lifestyle and it offers many benefits, including supporting fat loss and weight management. When you're on your weight-loss journey, physical activity is crucial for reducing overall fat and maintaining or building muscle, and studies show it to be the biggest factor that helps prevent weight regain.

People who want to lose weight should gradually increase their level of physical activity to around 300 minutes a week of moderate-intensity aerobic activity until their weight is stable, the HHS Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion tells Yahoo. If that sounds like more than you've heard suggested in the past, you're right. For health-related purposes, exercise guidelines for adults suggest accumulating 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise (or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity exercise) each week. But for weight loss, the requirement is often greater than that in order to help you achieve the consistent negative calorie balance that contributes to weight loss.

"A well-rounded exercise routine includes both aerobic and muscular forms of training," Chris Gagliardi, an ACE-certified personal trainer, tells Yahoo. Aim to accumulate 150-300 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity each week, including two days of muscle-strengthening activity to target each major muscle group.

Aerobic exercises include walking, running, dancing and cycling. Strength training exercises often involve resistance training using body weight, bands or weights. One thing to keep in mind is that vigorous-intensity physical activity "counts double" when working toward your weekly minutes goal. In other words, for every two minutes of moderate-intensity exercise you perform, you only need to perform one minute of vigorous-intensity exercise for the same level of benefit. Using a fitness tracker or a heart rate monitor during exercise can help you determine whether the minutes you're accumulating are considered "moderate" or "vigorous" intensity.

One good way to increase the amount of vigorous-intensity exercise you perform is with high-intensity interval training (HIIT). This involves short bursts of intense exercise followed by low-intensity rest periods. In addition to helping you save time on your weekly workouts, HIIT has also proven to be effective at decreasing visceral fat and abdominal fat deposits, according to the National Institutes of Health.

3. Sleep: Give your body plenty of time to rest

I have great news: Getting enough sleep on a regular basis can help you lose weight (yay!). This is because it helps support metabolic processes and keeps your "hunger hormones" — leptin and ghrelin — in check. On the flip side, if you're not getting quality sleep, it could lead to metabolic disorders, weight gain and an increased risk of obesity and other chronic health conditions, SleepFoundation.org says. In fact, according to a 2022 study published in the journal Nutrients, short sleep duration is associated with obesity and the risk of future weight gain in both adults and children.

If you're struggling to get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep at night, make sure you're prioritizing your sleep hygiene. It's important to sleep in a cool, dark room, reducing light and ambient noise that could interfere with a good night's rest. If your sleep environment doesn't lend itself to these conditions, consider investing in a sleep mask, sleep headphones or earplugs and a cooling fan to better support your rest. If you still can't seem to fall or stay asleep, consider talking to your health care provider to find out if there's an underlying health issue — for instance, sleep apnea.

4. Manage stress

When you're stressed out, it can contribute to weight gain in your abdomen, as well as other areas of your body. This is because chronic stress can cause your cortisol levels to rise. Once you're able to bring your stress levels down, your cortisol levels should return to normal.

Of course, you may not be able to prevent or control every anxiety-provoking situation in your life — life is full of positive and negative stressors, from planning a big event to caring for an elderly parent. But if you want to help manage how your body responds to the stress you experience, there are tools you can put to use. First, you should focus on maintaining healthy habits — getting more sleep, exercising regularly, practicing meditation and other mindfulness techniques, eating a well-balanced diet and limiting your intake of alcohol and caffeine. All of these habits help support hormone regulation that can keep the negative effects of chronic stress in check.

For those times when you're still feeling overwhelmed (it happens to everyone), you can try talking to a therapist to work through your stress. Many therapists focus on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which provides you with tools to identify and work to change how you think about the stressors you're facing. (Here are some online therapy services worth checking out.)

5. Limit alcohol

While alcohol may be tempting when you want to wind down with friends, if you're having multiple alcoholic beverages per day, whether it be beer, wine or hard liquor, you're dehydrating your body and slowing down your metabolism.

Alcohol is composed of empty calories and can lead to weight gain around the midriff. Gentile says it's possible that moderate alcohol consumption may correlate to more abdominal fat in women due to a corresponding increase in testosterone levels seen in women who drink alcohol daily. So if you're drinking on a regular basis, you may need to cut back your daily intake of alcohol in order to lose weight around your belly. According to the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans, women should limit themselves to one drink or less per day, and men should limit themselves to two drinks or less per day.

Also, keep in mind that those alcohol calories can really add up. As an example, if you're consuming 2,000 calories per day in healthy meals and snacks to align with your weight loss recommendations, then you cap off your night with five light beers at an additional 100 calories each, your daily calorie consumption goes up to 2,500 — 500 more than your goal. Over the course of a week that could add 3,500 calories — the equivalent of a pound.

What is belly fat and what causes it?

Abdominal fat is a combination of subcutaneous fat (the layer of fat directly beneath the skin) and visceral fat (the deeper layer of fat that's stored around your organs). Having excess visceral abdominal fat is considered dangerous as it can lead to numerous health complications.

Belly fat in women and men can be caused by age, genetics and excess calorie consumption, the Mayo Clinic says.

Men typically have more visceral fat than women, Gagliardi says. Men's visceral fat cells have the capacity for a higher dietary fat uptake due to specific lipoproteins that transport fat from the intestines to specific storage sites.

Why is abdominal fat so hard to get rid of?

It always seems like it takes no time to pack on the pounds but can take months of hard work and discipline before we lose it. Of course, fat loss is regulated by multiple factors including genetics, calorie balance, muscle mass, activity level and age. If you have a naturally slower metabolism, lower muscle mass, a less active lifestyle or you struggle to consistently eat a healthy diet, it can be incredibly challenging to achieve the consistent calorie deficit that's required to lose abdominal fat.

Gagliardi explains that hormones can also play a role in making fat loss a challenge. "Leptin, for example, is a hormone found in fat cells that decreases when fat cells decrease in size which sends a signal to the brain telling us we need to eat more, making the fat loss process harder."

Do targeted core exercises work?

Targeted exercises to reduce fat in specific areas is a hotly debated topic, Gagliardi says. "There is no doubt that exercising a specific area will improve the function and fitness of the muscles being worked," he says, "but the debate comes from the utilization of local fat stores in the targeted area." In other words, you may build muscle and strength with targeted exercises, which could lead to more definition, but won't necessarily "spot reduce" the fat levels in the areas you're targeting.

He says that he has his clients focus on total weight and fat loss rather than trying to spot-reduce a specific area. "We focus on all of the health benefits that are being achieved from improving fitness levels, even if fat is not being lost in a specific area." Over time, a well-rounded fitness program should lead to total body conditioning improvements and (when combined with a healthy diet) overall fat loss that will help you experience changes to abdominal fat levels as well. Core exercises such as planks, situps, dead bugs and medicine ball twists should be incorporated into your overall fitness plan to help add strength and definition to your abdominals. This definition will show through when you start to see fat loss results from your overall fitness routine.

What foods help burn the most belly fat?

"Unfortunately, there isn't one food that helps burn belly fat or fat in any one particular area in the body," Gentile says. But she notes that eating a diet that's either balanced in calories, or in a slight deficit, along with consuming adequate lean protein can help increase the amount of calories you burn at rest. This is because protein is harder for your body to digest and assimilate than fats or carbohydrates, so you actually burn about 20% to 30% of the calories you consume from protein sources to digest it.

Also, foods rich in proteins help by suppressing the appetite, boosting metabolism, increasing protein synthesis and stimulating the release of growth hormones, says Gagliardi. These foods can include low-fat dairy products like milk, lean meats, eggs and plant-based protein sources like tofu or soy.

"Protein foods also improve body composition by [supporting the development of increased] muscle mass, which can burn more calories at rest," Gentile says.

Gagliardi also mentions that it's important not to overlook the role that healthy fats play in controlling your appetite. He says that foods rich in good fats can help by making you not feel hungry as often, stimulating specific hormones such as leptin and boosting your metabolism. A few good options are avocados; nuts like peanuts, walnuts and pecans; and fatty fish such as salmon and tuna.