My Belly Makes Me Look Pregnant (But I'm Not!)
I'm thin everywhere, except that I have a roll of belly and back fat.
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Q: I'm thin, 5 feet 7 inches tall, and weigh 125 pounds, but I have a roll of stomach and back fat across my entire middle. I look five months pregnant! I eat fairly well but don't do much exercise. What is the best exercise to do to get rid of my belly and back fat?
A: It sounds as if you may weigh little for your height, but your body may contain a low percentage of muscle and a comparatively high percentage of body fat. Someone who is thin, but technically has a high percentage of body fat, can look great in a pair of tight jeans, but take them off and there are jiggles and wobbles, if not some genetically placed spots of fat. Even though you may have thin arms and legs, are they soft, too? If so, that may be a sign that your body is losing muscle and accumulating fat, and the excess fat is gathering in areas where you're genetically inclined to store it: your middle.
Scale weight is a subject of great debate. Some people feel that it doesn't matter at all (such as serious weight lifters who weigh slightly heavier than what's considered a normal, but have very low amounts of body fat), and some people think that scale weight is the holy grail, judging what shape they are in solely by how much they weigh.
For example, a 50-year old woman might feel proud that she still weighs 120 pounds, just as she did at 20 years old. But if she didn't exercise during those 30 years, her body composition will have shifted so that her body doesn't look as good as it did at 20, despite the fact that the scale weight is the same. That's because her muscle tissue declined and body fat accumulated.
Body weight does matter, depending on the individual. A person with 50 or 100 pounds to lose will need to lose body weight and body fat. Simply building muscle alone won't cause the enormous body composition shift that is required to become a lean and healthy weight.
On the other hand, for someone like yourself who doesn't have much weight, if any, to lose, going by scale weight alone is misleading since it does not reflect how much body fat and muscle the body has.
What's the solution?
To decrease fat anywhere in your body, you need to burn more calories. But the way in which you do so matters.
Aiming for straight weight loss by, say, dieting, can cause you to reduce some belly and back fat, but you may also get skinnier in areas you don't want to, like your butt or face. Also, dieting alone leads to a significant loss of muscle mass, and it sounds as if you need more muscle, not less. Since you are already potentially underweight, trying to drop pounds is not necessarily the way to go.
A better, more efficient approach would be to try to shift your body composition by building muscle and losing body fat through exercise. Ultimately the scale may stay about the same, or you may even gain a few pounds, but in your case, the scale weight is not very important.
So what kind of exercise will do the trick?
What you shouldn't do is spend all your time doing ab moves, or to buy an ab-exercise gizmo that you might see on an infomercial promising to slim down your belly quick. Many people think that if they can pummel away at their abs long enough to feel a burning sensation, that they are making great strides towards a flatter belly. That's simply not true.
The burn is from muscles fatiguing, not fat burning off. And no research has shown that core exercises like crunches, sit-ups, Pilates Hundreds, or those done on any abs machine will whittle fat off the belly. They can strengthen the muscles, but will not do anything about the spare tire around them. And when it comes to building more muscle, you need to build it all over, not just in the belly.
Your first step is to do more cardio (walk, run, bike, use any cardio machine at the gym, dance, etc.). If you're a beginner, you should start slow and easy, building your way up gradually to longer, more intense and higher-impact sessions. If you haven't been doing anything, simply trying to fit in 15 or 20 minutes of cardio on most days of the week (walking five or six days a week, for example), may even make a difference. Generally, research shows that the more cardio you do, the more fat you lose, especially in the belly. So once you've built up your fitness level, aim for 60 minutes or more of cardio on most days of the week.
The importance of strength training
In addition, you should start strength training using resistance bands, dumbbells, or weight machines (if you have access to a health club). You don't need to spend much time on weights as you do on cardio as long as you are challenging your muscles each time. Aim for doing about one 12-repetition set of eight to 10 exercises that target all the major muscles in your upper and lower body two to three times a week. Each session may take you about 15 to 40 minutes depending upon how many sets you do of each exercise. As you get stronger, add another set until you are doing three sets of eight to 12 reps for each exercise. When this gets easier, increase the weight.
Keep in mind that any weight training at all will increase your strength if you're new to it. But once you've been doing it for a few months, if you don't increase the resistance, you won't get stronger or build muscle. It's actually not that easy to build muscle and you will probably need to eat more healthful food to get in more calories per day to fuel your extra aerobic exercise and the muscle growth you are trying to achieve.
Give it a few months of this exercise regimen and you should start to see a firmer, stronger, thinner-bellied you.
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