Hands up who has a problem body area that they’d like to slim down and tone up.
Keep your hands up if your stomach tops your list of trouble spots.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just lose weight from your tummy?
There’s no shortage of ads promising that it’s possible but is there any truth behind the marketing hype?
Biology and destiny
Your genetics dictate your body shape, whether you’re apple-shaped (with most of your weight around your centre), pear-shaped (bottom heavy) or have an hourglass figure. Where you deposit excess kilos on your body is also influenced by your age, sex, gender and your hormones.
Women naturally carry more subcutaneous fat (fat beneath the skin) than men. It’s an effective store for the high energy needs of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, and is the reason women are larger around the hip, thigh and stomach areas than men.
Men tend to be leaner and put on excess kilos around their middle. This is visceral fat, a type of fat which triggers the release of disease-causing inflammatory molecules that can contribute to heart disease and other conditions.
Women become more prone to abdominal fat after menopause, when their oestrogen levels decline and their risk of heart disease increases. The Biggest Loser Club dietitian, Clare Collins, says “Watching your calories during menopause is especially important – a gain of 2-3kg is normal and this is likely to get diverted to your belly.”
Can you choose where you lose?
In short the answer is no.
When you lose weight, you don’t just lose weight from your “problem areas”, you lose it from all over your body. The fact is, you lose fat from the areas where you store it, and that includes around your tummy.
Dr Collins says, “The bottom line is that if you reduce your calories, your stomach does go down.” So while you’ll lose weight from the tummy and thigh areas, it’ll also come off the breasts, which contain large amounts of fat.
Influencing factors: food, drink and stress
Although you can’t choose where you lose weight from there are a number of factors than can influence it. What you eat and drink contributes to belly fat.
Dr Collins advises that cutting the saturated fat in your diet can help because this kind of fat (from animal foods like fatty meats and full-fat milk and dairy) impairs the action of insulin (which lowers blood glucose) on muscles. Dr Collins explains, “As a result, some excess blood sugar gets diverted to fat storage and as the belly has the biggest storage area, that’s where it will go,” she says.
“Not drinking alcohol can help prevent an increase in belly fat,” adds Dr Collins, “because when you drink alcohol, the body works to clear it from the body before anything else and this slows down your ability to burn fat. The body then needs to store fat in the first available fat store and that’s your gut area.”
Stress is another body fat trigger because it results in the release of the stress hormone cortisol, which also encourages the body to store fat.
Argument for exercise
In addition to eating well, some research suggests that adding vigorous exercise – a combination of intensive cardio and resistance training – may help cut tummy fat. One study from the University of Copenhagen showed that fat cells positioned next to new muscle appeared to reduce in size. That’s because exercise increases blood flow to the area that you are training, and the surrounding fat is broken down to feed the exercising muscles.
Cardiovascular exercise burns calories and resistance (weight) training helps you build up your muscle mass. Having more muscle speeds up your metabolism so that you burn more calories throughout the day, even when you're not working out.
High-intensity cardio is most effective if you want to carve out your middle. Choose aerobic exercise – the kind that makes you sweat and gets your heart pumping – such as running and dancing. If you’re not quite ready to pick up the pace, try brisk walking. US researchers compared two sets of women; one group lost weight with diet alone and the other also used a treadmill three times a week for 30 minutes or more. The walkers cut the size of their abdominal fat cells by 18 percent, compared to the women who didn’t do any exercise.
Certain exercises, such as sit-ups, help firm the muscles in your stomach area and achieve a more toned and sculpted shape, however, doing sit-ups doesn’t mean you’ll lose more weight from your belly.