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Flattening your stomach is more than about improving your appearance, though that’s undoubtedly a large part of it. Excess abdominal fat can not only make you feel bloated and less confident, but it can also be a risk factor for several diseases, like diabetes.
When looking at how to flatten your stomach, you have many safe, natural, and effective options. The more of these you implement at once, the faster, easier, and more effective your efforts at flattening your stomach can be. While it can be overwhelming to pore through all the methods proliferating the web of how to flatten your stomach, almost all of them can be broken down into the following five basic categories:
Want to Know How to Flatten Your Stomach? Check Out These 5 Tips!
1. Exercise
Perhaps the two most obvious ways to flatten your stomach are through exercise and diet. Both of these methods require time, patience, and a consistent commitment. Because training and diet work more slowly to reduce fat than other methods, you must stay focused on your goal day after day, whether you observe results or not, and avoid letting yourself fall into discouragement or despair and give up too soon.
One of the most common and well-known exercises for toning your abs is crunches, or sit-ups, though it’s far from the only effective exercise for flattening the stomach. You can also do twists, backbends, flutter kicks and hold a position like the plank, boat, or downward-facing dog pose, among other forms of calisthenics.
Lifting weights can also help you lose weight, including around the stomach. Often, the stomach is the last place on the body to lose fat, so by working out the other areas of your body; you help eliminate excess fat from other areas that could be preventing you from losing the fat around your stomach. Strengthening your shoulders, chest, and middle and upper back can help tremendously to improve your posture. This, in turn, removes pressure from your midsection that prevents it from functioning optimally and shedding weight.
Cardiovascular exercise is also extraordinarily effective at burning calories, so be sure to add plenty of walking, running, or other aerobic activity into your stomach-flattening exercise routine. Some creative ways to incorporate cardiovascular exercise into your routine are by climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator, skipping or jumping rope, and playing athletic sports.
2. Diet
To lose weight around the stomach, eat less fat and carbohydrates and more lean protein and fiber. Add probiotics into your diet as well, as they help with digestion. Eating foods high in calcium will ensure your bones remain strong enough to support your diaphragm and abdominal muscles, preventing slumping and keeping the belly from extending. Eat fatty fish regularly to keep your levels of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids high, as they can help prevent fat from accumulating in the abdominal cavity. At the same time, limit your intake of sugar, as all those empty calories only promote, not combat, weight gain.
Be sure to drink plenty of water as well. Not only does this help your bodily systems to function more effectively, and thereby require you to consume fewer calories to meet its energy needs, but water fills you up, so you get fuller faster and eat less.
3. Colon cleanse
In many cases, much of the weight you carry around your midsection is not from fat but rather the accumulated bodily waste that, rather than your body eliminating it, has attached to the inner lining of your large intestines, or colon. The colon has immense elasticity and can stretch to accommodate almost any amount of mass, creating a significant and unnecessary contribution to your overall body weight. By cleansing the colon of this built-up waste, it can shrink back to its original, more proportionate size, reducing the weight around your midsection and helping to flatten your stomach.
You can find many different types of colon cleanses for sale over the counter, some of them more natural and effective than others. Be sure, before you start any colon cleanse, to read all the ingredients to make sure you know what you’re putting in your body and that you’re not allergic to any of it. The best and safest way to conduct any colon cleanse is to speak with your doctor first and let him or her know your intentions to conduct a colon cleanse.
An alternative to doing a colon cleanse on your own at home is to have your colon professionally cleansed. For this, a practitioner uses a large machine that helps to clean out your colon as much as possible in a single session, rather than stretching out the process over a period of days or weeks. Of course, if an at-home colon cleanse can be an intense experience, having your colon cleansed completely all at once can be even more intense, so make sure you are prepared for the possibility you may need to rest and relax immediately afterward.
4. Lifestyle Changes
Certain lifestyle changes can help promote a flatter stomach, notably these:
- Quitting smoking
- Drinking less (or no) alcohol
- Getting sufficient, sound and regular sleep
- Reducing stress
5. Emsculpt
Emsculpt is an effective and non-invasive new technology for both flattening and strengthening your abs. Effective for both women and men, the Emsculpt procedure is performed by a licensed dermatologist while you remain fully-clothed and relaxing comfortably. An Emsculpt treatment involves placing a paddle over your stomach that emits rapid vibrations that produce involuntary muscle contractions similar to those achieved during exercise.
The difference, however, is that Emsculpt delivers 20,000 pulses triggering 20,000 muscle contractions in a 30-minute session, more than you could ever achieve with voluntary contractions from working out. When you expose your muscles to these rapid contractions, you force them to respond and adapt by deeply remodeling their structure. Specifically, and given there are two types of contractions the Emsculpt unit emits, the body responds by both breaking down fat and toning, thickening and strengthening muscles.
In this way, Emsculpt cuts down considerably on the amount of time it takes to get the stomach-flattening results you seek. In fact, a typical Emsculpt treatment is only four 30-minute sessions over two weeks. From there, you’ll begin to notice results for up to the next six months. Meanwhile, there’s no pain during or after the treatment, and there’s no recovery time. The treatment feels like nothing more than an intensive workout, only you don’t have to do any work, and you can return to your regular routine immediately afterward.
Over multiple studies on Emsculpt, researchers found that it reduced abdominal fat by about 19%, increased muscle thickness by about 15%, and reduced waist size by about 1.7 inches.