How to Get a Smaller and Thinner Waist

Shrinking the waist involves lowering the overall level of body fat.

"Learn the secret to weight loss." "Lose weight fast." "Burn belly fat." Everywhere you look, you are bombarded by offers to sell you the secret to a smaller and skinnier waist. The secret is there is no secret. Developing a smaller and skinner waistline comes from understanding the principles of weight loss and fitness. For those willing to put in the effort they will find their waistlines naturally shrink just by making healthy changes to their lifestyles.

Instructions

1. Calculate your daily caloric needs, a combination of your basal metabolic rate (BMR) and your normal daily activity level. BMR indicates how many calories your body needs just to survive each day. Calories are how the energy potential in different foods is measured. Moving around, breathing, even your heartbeat burns calories. There are several different free calculators available on the Internet that will help you calculate your daily caloric needs based on your age, height and current weight.

2. Eliminate unnecessary calories from your diet. Calories that come from junk food such as candy or sugared soda drinks are empty calories. Your body cannot convert them to energy very efficiently and most of them are stored in your body as fat. For men, the largest deposits of fat tend to collect around the waist and belly. Remove the empty calories and replace them with healthier, minimally processed foods.

3. Add more physical activity to your lifestyle. The best results, both aesthetically as well as for health, come from combining eating correctly with exercise. Expending extra calories every day creates a greater deficit between calorie intake and calorie expenditures, which forces the body to use up fat stores for energy. It also builds muscle and strengthens the body's inner workings. Take walks or jog. Lift weights or engage in an active hobby to help your body fat levels decrease, which will in turn shrink your waistline.

Tips & Warnings

• Significant sources of calories should never come from liquids. Remove items such as sodas or sweet teas from your diet to lower calorie intake. Even drinking natural fruit juice is detrimental to weight loss. Fruit juice does contain beneficial vitamins, but it does not provide essential fiber and does nothing to satisfy appetite. Eating the fruit whole or blending your own fruit smoothie is a much healthier choice. Drinking one calorie-laden drink per day adds over 700 extra calories a week that serve very little purpose.

• Ignore fad or crash diets. Extremely low-calorie diets can be very damaging to the health and even detrimental to weight loss, triggering the body to hold on to fat stores. Fad diets do work in some cases because people are somehow limiting the amount of food they eat; however, they may be depriving their bodies of a crucial nutrient. Make good choices about what you eat, and get out and move. That's the only secret to shrinking your stomach.

References

• American Heart Association: Quick-Weight-Loss or Fad Diets
• BMI-Calculator.net: BMR Calculator
• BMI-Calculator.net: Overweight Treatment
• Scientific America: Why does fat deposit on the hips and thighs of women and around the stomachs of men?
• FitDay: Weight Loss Myth? Don't Drink Juice, It's Full of Too Much Sugar