If you carry significant amounts of weight in your abdomen or belly, you may also have increased risks for a variety of serious health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart attack and stroke. Reducing your levels of abdominal fat can help you reduce these risks. While you typically can't limit weight loss to your abdomen, abdominal fat is often the first type to disappear once you start exercising.
Basics
Abdominal fat accumulates both directly beneath your skin and inside your abdominal cavity in the space around your organs. Fat in both of these areas interacts with the rest of your body and makes certain changes in your basic biological function. The fat around your organs, known as visceral or intra-abdominal fat, damages your health by triggering an inflammatory reaction that eventually can lead to the development of significant ailments. Men with waistlines over 40 inches have clear risks for developing this type of inflammation, while women with waistlines of 35 inches or more also share these risks.
Exercise and Dietary Alterations
You can't lose weight in your abdomen with targeted forms of exercise such as crunches or situps, according to the Mayo Clinic. However, counterintuitive as it may seem, visceral fat is susceptible to a more general exercise program that includes both aerobic exercises, such as cycling and walking, and muscle-building exercises such as calisthenics and weightlifting. When you perform these types of exercises regularly, reduce your consumption of saturated fats and refined foods, and control your overall calorie intake, the fat buildup around your organs frequently disappears before fat located elsewhere in your body.
Toning Exercises
While targeted exercises for your belly don't produce abdominal weight loss, they do play a role in improving the appearance of your midsection, according to the Mayo Clinic. Again, counterintuitively, crunches and situps aren't typically the best options for tightening and toning your abdominal muscles. Instead, to tone your lower abdominal muscles, perform exercises called pelvic tilts and pelvic lifts, which require you to lie down and contract your muscles while altering the angle of your pelvis. To tone your deep abdominal muscles, get down on all fours and pull your belly toward your spine for about 10 seconds at a time.
Exercise Considerations
You can fulfill your requirements for aerobic activity by performing set exercises for at least 30 minutes four or five days a week. You can also increase your daily amount of nonstructured activities by walking whenever possible, using stairs instead of escalators and doing basic yard work. You can fulfill your muscle-building requirements by working out two or three days a week. After you lose weight in your abdomen, you can also use your exercise routine and modified diet to keep unwanted pounds off permanently.
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