How To Lose Stubborn Belly Fat In 3 Steps (And How Long It Will Take You)
First, when compared to other areas of your body, stubborn areas like your belly fat consist of a higher amount of a specific type of fat cell that's very resistant to mobilization and a lot more difficult to burn off. Second, the subcutaneous fat covering your abdominal area also receives significantly less blood flow than other parts of your body do. And this makes things more difficult because the less blood flow an area of your body receives, the more difficult it becomes to mobilize and burn off the fat from that area. The good news, however, is that losing your belly fat is not impossible.
When it comes to how to lose stubborn belly fat, the first step is something that most of you are probably familiar with but is hands down the most crucial step. Because to lose fat from anywhere, you need to be in a calorie deficit. And your belly fat is no different. So to start, you need to be eating at a calorie deficit and combining this with regular weightlifting for the best results. But your belly fat, in particular, is where things get a little trickier and are where the next two steps become crucial.
To get rid of stomach fat, the next step has to do with mobilizing your belly fat. But the only way to do this is by adhering to step 1, a calorie deficit, for long enough until fat loss starts to finally come off from your belly. Meaning that you need to ride out the calorie deficit for long enough such that your body has stripped off enough fat from other areas and now needs to rely more on burning off your belly fat for fuel. Also, there seems to be an inverse relationship between your body fat percentage and abdominal blood flow, and as a result of this, leaner individuals exhibit significantly higher blood flow to their belly fat than less lean individuals do. Simply meaning that as you gradually strip off more and more fat from other areas of your body and get leaner, your body will actually start redirecting more and more blood flow to your belly fat so that it can start prioritizing and using that for energy.
There are a couple of things that you can do to burn belly fat faster. First, you want to ensure that you're regularly performing abs exercises and getting stronger with them over time. So what I’d recommend is incorporating various weighted abs exercises into your weekly routine and overloading them overtime to grow them. Also, a 2017 paper has suggested that you can even potentially “spot reduce” fat from your belly. Applying this to your belly fat, you could, for example, perform an ab workout to first increase the blood flow and fat mobilization from that region and then follow that up with 30 minutes or so of low-intensity cardio to selectively burn off the fat that's been mobilized. But at the end of the day, steps 1 and 2 need to be where you put most of your focus and effort.