How to Get a Flat Stomach: 10 Tips to Reach Your Goal

No matter how fit you get, some pockets of fat on your body remain stingy to the end. Sometimes it’s the fat on your thighs, sometimes it’s back fat, and quite often it’s that last little bit of fat clinging to your midsection. If you’re here, it’s because you’re trying to find out how to get a flat stomach, and we have 10 tips to help you reach your ultimate goal: a flat belly at long last.

10 Tips for How to Get a Flat Stomach

Stubborn abdominal fat can be frustrating and discouraging. You’ve worked so hard to slim down, stay fit, build muscle, and still it just won’t go away. The following tips may help give you that final edge in your journey to lose weight, and give you the know-how to lose fat from your midsection.

1. Take Probiotics

Probiotics reside in foods like kombucha tea, Greek yogurt, pickles, kimchi, and kefir. These live bacteria contribute to both weight loss and weight management.

Overweight and obese individuals have a different composition of gut flora than people in a healthy weight range, which may contribute to fat distribution. Regularly consuming probiotics may help shift your gut bacteria’s population, reducing your risk of weight gain and belly fat accumulation on your midsection. In fact, specific strains of probiotics have been shown to be particularly adept at reducing abdominal fat, including Lactobacillus gasseri, Lactobacillus fermentum, and Lactobacillus amylovorus. Supplements of probiotics often contain more than one strand, so look for these three particular ones when choosing a product.

2. Choose the Right Foods for Fat Loss

Increase your intake of protein and healthy fats while limiting your carb consumption.

Digesting protein requires your body to burn more calories than the amount needed to break down carbs or fats, so a high-protein diet could burn up to 100 extra calories per day. Protein also contributes to retaining muscle mass while you pursue your weight-loss goals and helps curb your appetite due to its complex digestion requirements.

Monounsaturated fats are healthy fats that actually help to prevent the accumulation of belly fat on your body. Eating foods from the Mediterranean diet, which includes avocados, olive oil, seeds and nuts, has been linked to overall health benefits.

Limiting carbohydrates, especially refined carbs like white flour products and commercially baked goods, helps to target the fat deep inside your midsection, intramuscular fat, and the fat clinging to your organs. Talk about body fat you just can’t reach! A high-protein, low-carb diet can make the difference for those final pockets of fat on your frame.

3. Drink Protein Shakes

If you are pursuing a high-protein diet, protein shakes can be a great way to get started, allowing you to up your protein intake without drastically increasing the calories you eat. For those on-the-go or who are on specific diets, protein shakes can actually increase the likelihood that your weight-loss efforts will succeed, and an increase of protein has been shown to inversely correlate with abdominal fat.

4. Do Resistance Training

In addition to any cardio workout you do (walking, running, cycling classes, or putting in time on the elliptical machine), try including some resistance training. You don’t necessarily need to spend more time at the gym, as some body-weight resistance exercises can be done at home with no equipment whatsoever.

Resistance training helps you retain muscle mass while you burn calories, increases your strength, and improves and maintains your metabolic rate. Combining resistance training with aerobic/cardio workouts in your exercise plan might even be the most effective way of slimming down your waistline and gaining that flat tummy.

5. Add Apple Cider Vinegar and Garcinia Cambogia to Your Diet

Apple cider vinegar has been shown to reduce body fat accumulation in several animal studies due to the effect of its acetic acid content. A human study showed that 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar per day for 12 weeks reduced the waistline of obese men by half an inch on average.

Garcinia cambogia also reduces belly fat in both animal and human studies, and blocks new fat production. Apple cider vinegar combined with our premium Garcinia Cambogia capsules can be an all-natural way to lose that last bit of weight around your waist.

6. Avoid Empty Calories

An easy step to get rid of belly fat is to eliminate calories you don’t need. Empty calories often come in liquid form, in sugary sodas, coffee with creamer, fruit juices, or energy drinks. While what you eat may be hard to ignore, people can drink a ton of calories without even noticing, and these beverages are often nutritionally useless and don’t even fill you up. No matter how many calories you drink from these sweetened beverages, your body will still signal that it is hungry, leading to more calorie intake throughout the day. One studied revealed that a daily sugar-sweetened drink increased the obesity risk in children by a startling 60%.

7. Drink Water

Instead of sweetened drinks, up your intake of water instead. Not only does your body need water, and not only is water calorie-free, but drinking water might also actively help you to achieve a flat stomach. It does so by temporarily increasing your metabolic rate, so much so that drinking water can up your energy expenditure by as many as 100 calories per day, as well as increase your fullness if you drink water before a meal, leading to less calorie intake.

Drinking more water may lead directly to having a flatter stomach. If you find water a bit too boring, try turning that water into green tea, black tea, or oolong tea, as green tea extract has been found to increase fat burning by up to 17%.

8. Try High-Intensity Interval Training

High-intensity interval training, or HIIT, has you perform quick intervals of intense physical activity like jumping, sprinting, and rowing. This style of exercise helps you burn more fat and increase your metabolic rate long after the workout is complete. Especially effective at slimming the waistline, HIIT workouts don’t have to be intimidating if you’ve never tried them before. Check out our 30-minute at-home HIIT workout for beginners and get started right away.

9. Try Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting involves rotating short fasts between when you eat to help train your body to burn through its existing fat resources. There are several approaches to intermittent fasting for weight loss, and some people find it to be an easier form of dieting because they aren’t confronted with constant food choices throughout the day.

This successful weight-loss strategy allows you to abstain throughout the morning and day, and plan for more balanced meals and foods during lunch and dinner. Check out some of the most common questions people have about intermittent fasting if you’re interested in this method, and don’t forget to look at what kind of meals work best for intermittent fasting to see if it’s right for you.

10. Increase Your Core Strength

This tip might have been the very first one that occurred to you when losing belly fat: if you have fat storage on your torso, why not try doing abdominal exercises like crunches? Well good news, because doing strength training with the muscle groups around your midsection is an excellent way to gain core strength, improve posture, and decrease back pain. It’s not that there’s a direct one-to-one ratio to the fat in your midsection being burned up first by crunches (that’s just not how the body works), but it is nevertheless true that core exercises that engage all of your core muscles, like Pilates roll-ups or planks, do help increase your total body strength and thus help you lose weight.

You Can Stomach It

Now you have some tips on how to lose belly fat and get closer to the goal of having a flat stomach! Adding a few of these suggestions could help reveal your six pack sooner than you ever thought possible. Keep in mind that when it comes to advice on how to lose stomach fat, there are a lot of fad diets and get-thin-quick schemes that won’t lead to long-term success. Better to choose clean eating and balanced fitness: that is how to lose body fat and keep it off indefinitely.