How to ACTUALLY Lose Belly Fat (Based on Science)

Belly fat is really easy to gain, yet often the hardest area to lose. And there's actually two types. There's that annoying belly fat we all know that covers your abs. But there's also a more dangerous type of belly fat stored deep within your organs, known as visceral fat, which can create serious health problems. To find the most effective way to get rid of both types of belly fat, I reached out to five of the world's most qualified fat loss scientists and came up with five easy steps anyone could start doing today to lose belly fat. For first and most important step, I spoke to Lane Norton, scientific researcher, champion powerlifter, and honestly, just a really smart dude who calls out BS when he sees it.

So why is stored belly fat so difficult to lose? Once again, we don't know the exact scientific explanation for that, but it may have something to do with the tissue being a little bit more metabolically active than other forms of stored body fat. Now, the real question is, is there any way around that? Well, yes, kind of. Sadly, even though we'd like to think if we do a bunch of crunches and work the area where the fat is stored, it will preferentially target that fat, there is no evidence to support that idea and it's unlikely that that would make a difference overall. Now, there is research showing that exercise can reduce visceral fat without actually causing weight loss. So it is a good idea to exercise in general, but specific exercises are not going to target prefer essentially belly fat per se. I know people don't want to hear this. The real key to losing belly fat is just getting into a caloric deficit consistently and doing it for long enough.

Now, the most effective way to create the calorie deficit Lane talked about is by modifying your diet. That's where our next expert comes in. Alan Aragon. Alan is one of the world's top nutrition researchers and educators with over 30 years of success in the field. He recommends first, find out roughly how many calories you're eating a day. Next, find out how many calories you should be eating to lose fat, which you can do by using the free calculator I made over@builtwithscience.com calculator. Then simply try to close that gap over time. With most of your foods coming from the following sources.

You have to be eating foods that you like and look forward to. People have an idea of what their 20 favorite foods are. That's honestly that that's what they should be eating.

That's what they should be eating.

And people freak out when they Hear that? But hey, man, if you love the foods that you're eating, you're gonna stick to your diet. It helps to have an awareness of the food groups as well, because when I say your 20 favorite foods, I mean your 20 favorite foods that are reasonably healthy choices across the food groups. And there's six of them. There's the, the meat or the high prote group. There's the fat group, there's the fibrous vegetable group, and there's the starch group, and then there's the milk group, and then there's the fruit group. So choose your three favorite foods across. Like in each of those food groups, choose your three favorite. Three favorite ones you like the most. And there's your diet, man. There's your diet. Oh, wait, we have two, two more foods left to get those 20 foods. Choose your two favorite YOLO foods, your two favorite desserts or whatever. What you like wine? Okay, wine and freaking cookies or something. You know, brownies and ice cream, whatever. And that's a healthy diet right there. That'll hold you down for. For life. And not just a dieting phase.

I love that approach. I've never actually heard somebody put it like that. But now, what about protein intake? How important would you say protein intake is for losing belly fat? Just losing fat in general, protein intake.

Adequate protein is crucial among the macronutrients. It helps you preserve muscle mass. It's the potent thereof, because it's protein is muscle mass is protein. And this is sort of a side thing that's a little bit trivial. But protein has the highest energetic cost of processing within the body. And so in, you know, in theory, you take a. A diet that's 100% protein, then your body will spend about 30% of those calories just trying to process it. And so it's like, that's not necessarily the case with carbohydrate and fat. This helps. From the standpoint of a weight and fat loss perspective, it doesn't have to be a tough thing to try to accomplish. I mean, on the low end, if you consume 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, which is 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, then you are at an adequate starting point.

And the last question I had is, what about visceral fat? Are there any kinds of foods that promote the storage of visceral fat? And are there foods that people can eat to avoid getting that?

Yeah, man, that is a great question. And researchers have been fighting over the answer to this question for a really long time. Okay. So the overarching answer that covers a lot of things is that if you're losing fat or if you're getting lean, there's really no concern about visceral fat, because if you're losing overall fat, then visceral fat is diminishing as well. It's not like that's going to hold steady. You know, principle number two is that visceral fat is mainly a concern for people who are, who are gaining fat. And there's actually a study by Rozquist and colleagues where they compared what types of dietary fat most influence visceral fat. They compared a polyunsaturated fat source with a saturated fat source. It was a hyper caloric experiment which, where the subjects were eating more calories and the saturated fat rich diet that resulted in, in greater visceral fat accumulation than the polyunsaturated fat rich diet.

All right, so you've got your nutrition plan, but now let's talk about exercise. As Lane mentioned earlier, exercise can burn off that dangerous visceral fat, even if you don't lose any weight. But the right type of exercise can also help you avoid regaining belly fat as soon as your diet is over. To explain this is Eric Trexler, pro natural bodybuilder and published scientist with a PhD in human movement science. So usually when people are trying to lose belly fat, they automatically think that they have to do a bunch of cardio. But how about resistance training? Like, how important is lifting weights for someone who's interested in losing belly fat?

So I'd say it's really important. There are some major benefits of resistance training if you're trying to lose belly fat and really just trying to lose fat in general. So first of all, if you're lifting during this fat loss phase, there's a very high likelihood that you are going to reduce the amount of muscle loss that occurs during that weight loss. And that can be great. Great for two reasons. So a lot of people who don't lift weights and just do fat loss, they often find that they end up looking more skinny and less shredded than they were hoping at the end. So retaining muscle can be great for maintaining definition. There's also been some really good research in the last couple years indicating that the more muscle or the more lean mass you lose during a diet, the more hunger you tend to experience later on and the higher likelihood that you're actually going to regain some of the fat that you lost later.

Right. And then let's say somebody is, you know, lifting weights regularly. How does cardio now fit into the picture. I mean, it definitely like has a lot of benefits for your health that lifting weights doesn't necessarily provide. But how much does it help when trying to lose belly fat?

The reality is you don't need cardio in order to lose fat or to lose belly fat. But cardio can be a helpful thing. And one of the reasons for that is energy expenditure has a tendency to go down during a fat loss phase. So of course there will be some reduction normally in resting metabolic rate. But non exercise activity thermogenesis is another really key thing that can change during a fat loss phase. So non exercise activity is basically everything that exists between resting and doing structured exercise. So walking to the mailbox, walking around at your work or your school, you know, anything that fits between those two extremes of exercising on purpose and, you know, just kind of totally resting, it's usually the second biggest contributor to total daily energy expenditure for most people. And so unfortunately, when we diet, a lot of people notice their non exercise activity thermogenesis goes down pretty significantly. So cardio can be a really helpful thing in keeping your expenditure higher when that non exercise activity starts to go down over time. So you're just trying to kind of keep things steady by adding some cardio to the mix. For some people, it's even just purely behavioral. We might just say, hey, use the stairs instead of the elevator and park at the back of the parking lot instead of the front. So everything that that gets you moving counts.

But even with proper nutrition of exercise, a recent 2022 study found, there's an often overlooked variable that can still prevent you from losing belly fat. To explain this study is exercise science professor and body composition researcher Bill Campbell.

This new study was very unique in that it was the first ever investigation to assess a lack of sleep and how it affects where body fat is stored. They took 12 healthy males and females who on average slept about seven and a half hours per night. They had these subjects live in a research sleep lab and then place them into two different sleep conditions. The first condition was a sleep restricted condition where they were allowed to sleep only four hours per night. The other condition was a normal sleep condition where they were allowed to sleep nine hours per night. And during this entire process, they were allowed to eat as much and whatever food they wanted to eat. So after two weeks in each condition, here's what happened. The sleep restricted subjects on average consumed 300 more calories per day, and they gained about a pound of body weight when compared to the subjects when they were in the Normal sleep stage. But here's where things get really interesting. The subjects that were sleep Restricted, they gained 8% more subcutaneous body fat. And then the normal sleep condition, they only gained about 4%. The other part of our bellies that stores fat is called the visceral region or visceral body fat. And that's the dangerous body fat because that's associated with a lot of adverse health outcomes. The sleep restricted condition caused an increase in 11% of this visceral body fat. And the normal sleep condition, they didn't gain any. Now, again, we would expect they ate more calories, they gained a little bit more body weight. So we would expect a little bit of a gain in body fat, but not nearly to the extent that we saw as it was localized to the belly region, to the abdominal region. So this study suggests that there may be a link to sleep restriction leading to overeating, which causes a gain in body fat that is preferentially stored in the belly region. So my takeaway from this is to make sure that you prioritize sleep. I would suggest that you get about seven hours per night and that you do not overlook the importance of this.

Now, I know some of you might be thinking, okay, well, the subjects were overeating. What about if I'm still in a calorie deficit, does sleep still matter as much? And that's a valid question. And a 2010 study actually tested this. Researchers put two groups of subjects on a weight loss diet with the same amount of calories. The only difference was one group slept eight and a half hours per night, while the other group slept only five and a half hours per night. The result, both groups lost a similar amount of total weight. Both groups also did lose some muscle because they weren't lifting weights. But the well slept group lost 1.6 times less muscle and lost 2.3 times more fat than the sleep restricted group, suggesting that a lack of sleep alone may in fact lead to more muscle loss and less fat loss during a diet. So you've now got all the tools you need to lose belly fat. But there's one more thing you need to add to your plan. Failure to do this is why so many people start out strong, yet never end up successfully losing their belly fat. Lauren Conlon, a master coach, exercise scientist and IFBB bikini pro, will help explain what this missing piece is.

All right, let's go through what commonly happens. So a client is going to obsess over losing belly fat, even if they have seen some changes on the scale or seen improvements in other areas of their body, since there hasn't been much change in their belly fat, they're going to feel like what they're doing isn't working or it's not happening fast enough. Some clients are just going to give up right then, while others are going to slash their calories or increase their cardio. This increase in their deficit is typically unsustainable though, so they're going to fall off plan and inevitably quit. First, it's important to recognize that unless genetically you have little body fat on your abs and core area, that you will probably need to get leaner than you'd think to lose belly fat. For many people, the belly is the last area where you're going to see fat come off, but in the meantime, you can pay attention and be proud of the progress that you've made in other areas like your face and your shoulders and your legs, and trust that if you remain patient that eventually you'll start to see more and more progress in these problematic and stubborn areas. Second, take multiple measures of progress. You can use scale, weight and measurements as quantitative feedback, but we also want to look at qualitative feedback such as how your clothes are fitting, how you're looking, and how much better that you're feeling. Don't just obsess over your belly. And lastly, and probably most importantly, out of this entire video, be patient and recognize that you're usually quitting right before it gets good, okay? It doesn't matter how perfect your program is unless you are patient and remain consistent. You are shortchanging yourself and your results. You owe it to yourself to make this change. So don't give up, follow or create a great program, adjust it when it's necessary, and take your time. Your belly fat didn't get there overnight, so you're not going to lose it in a few weeks either.

I want to give a huge thank you to all five of the experts who help with the video. Guys, these five truly are the best of the best. I've been following and looking up to them for many years, ever since I started my own fitness journey. So being able to interview them and share their work with you guys is such an honor. And I've put links to all their social media websites down below so you can go give them a follow. And if you're interested in joining a science based plan to transform your body as efficiently as possible, just take my free quiz@builtwithsize.com and I'll let you know what program is best for you. For you and your body. Give this video a watch next for an exercise plan that can help speed up fat loss. And I'll see you next time.