If you’re like me then you must be sick to death with the constant barage of faddy diets claiming to show you how to lose stomach fat – low-carb this, low-fat that, and low-taste everything.

Did you know that 99% of people who start a diet fail to lose weight and stomach fat? Most of them end up actually putting on some 10% more weight than when they started. The average dieter begins and breaks four diets a year.

Something’s wrong with this picture. In most cases the diets were either no good or just inappropriate for the person’s situation. Finding the right diet and exercise plan is therefore paramount when trying to find out how to lose stomach fat.

A good diet that shows you how to lose stomach fat should focus on you eating MORE regularly and not LESS, like many of the fad diets at the moment. They always emphasise some form of deprivation, be it fat, carbohydrates, or just food itself. Unfortunately, many folks are following these diets to try and lose stomach fat, only to find that their weight loss plateaus out after the first few days due to their body going into survival mode.

By not giving your body what it is used to you are actually forcing it to guard your fat deposits more, as it would do if you were starving for real. This obviously is counterintuitive to our purpose of how to lose stomach fat, and is the reason many folks ultimately break and give up on their diets, and then put on more weight than when they started.

You can lose stomach fat by eating 5 or 6 times a day, but making sure those meals are smaller, and full of energy packed, protein-rich food. Low GI foods like oatmeal are favourites among bodybuilders because they are a complex carbohydrate, which is released slowly into the body, giving sustained energy throughout the day.

Avoid alcohol as this is the most calorie dense “food” second only to fat. Not only that, but the calories it contains are empty, meaning they have little to no nutritional or energy value. As if that wasn’t enough, alcohol is also regarded as a toxin by your body and therefore is sent right away to the liver to be processed and evacuated from the body asap. This means that while your body is processing the alcohol, it is not burning fat – the toxin quite rightly takes priority. Once you see how alcohol contributes to stomach fat, you’ll think twice about consuming too much of it. A drink every now and then is ok, just remember how it affects your body.

Get some regular exercise to lose stomach fat. Dieting on it’s own is ok, but you won’t lose stomach fat as quickly as with exercise. Running, cycling, and abdominal exercises are great at toning your abdominal muscles and shredding the fat off them. Weight training is a great way to lose stomach fat, because the more muscle you have the faster your metabolism works, and therefore the faster you lose stomach fat.