How to Slim Down: Why You Should Focus on Your Abs and Waist

New Year's has passed and, as usual, weight loss tops the list of resolutions that people have made for 2013. That's not surprising. What IS surprising is how little people know about how to slim down in healthy and easy ways. Of course, most people know the usual formula for slimming down: eat less, exercise more, drink more water, and eat healthier. But these days the art of how to slim down has become more of a science. That's why this article is dedicated to the fact that you should focus on your abs and your waist if you want to lose weight this year.

How to Slim Down: Why Focus on Abs and Waist?
If you want to slim down, take a look at your profile in the mirror. Chances are that your mid-section, meaning your abdominal area and your waist, are areas where you would love to lose weight. There might also be other areas in your body where you would like to drop a few pounds, but health-wise, slimming down your waist is much more beneficial than, say, losing that double chin.

When it comes to slimming down, why should you focus on your waistline? Here's what medical experts (WebMD) want you to know:

• waist-size is a good measure of overall health (women should not exceed 35 inches, men 40 inches)
• an excessively large waist increases your risk of type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure
• abdominal fat is worse than other kinds of fat because it wraps around internal organs, increasing your health risks
• your waist is one area you can focus on and specifically lose weight, called spot-toning (as opposed to other areas, like saggy underarms)

That should give you plenty of medical reasons for focusing on your waist when you think about how to slim down this year. There are also some pretty nice benefits when it comes to the "looks" department. Slimming down your waist might get you back into those skinny jeans or allow you to wear that body-hugging wrap that you have hidden in the back of the closet!

How to Slim Down Your Waist: 3 Tips You Can Use
Knowing you need to trim your waist size and actually getting it done are two different things. In this section we offer you 3 simple tips that should make it simple to slim down your waist. These tips are based on a simple principle: a bulky waistline is composed mostly of fat and undigested food.

Tip #1: How to Fight Fat to Lose Belly Weight
As we talked about above, belly fat is more detrimental to your overall health than any other kind of fat in your body. For instance, fat on your hips and thighs rests just under the skin, and doesn't interfere with the function of your vital organs. Belly fat, on the other hand, can wrap around vital organs like your liver, kidneys, and intestines, decreasing their function and increasing all kinds of health risks. So knowing how to fight fat, especially in your belly, is important. Here's what you might not know about fat:

 ** Each pound of fat contains 3,500 calories! **

Yup, that's right. We said three thousand five hundred calories. That is a lot of calories. So to fight fat, you have definitely got to watch what you eat and get more active. That's a general rule when it comes to how to slim down. In addition, when it comes to how to fight fat, you can also:

• eat more fiber and protein
• decrease your intake of carbohydrates and simple sugars
• add cinnamon and hot chili spices to your food
• eat fat-fighting foods like grapefruit (your body uses more calories digesting grapefruit than the fruit has)
• drink coffee and green tea in limited amounts to increase metabolism

If these sound like good methods for how to fight fat, read this post for more details.

Tip #2: How to Slim Down by Getting Rid of Undigested Food
We don't mean to gross you out, but a large portion of what people call a "beer belly" is really not at all related to beer. Instead, it's undigested food that is basically rotting in the intestines, creating a lot of bulk around your waistline. What's the reason for this? The foods we eat don't have enough digestive enzymes that our bodies can fully digest our meals. In addition, our bodies don't produce enough digestive enzymes to process our foods--that's just a factor of aging and the modern environment. That's the bad, icky news.

The good news is that there is a really simple natural solution to take care of the problem. This natural solution is to add probiotics to your daily regimen. Probiotics, such as acidophilus and bifidus, are the friendly bacteria that naturally live in your small and large intestines. These bacteria help your body process and digest the foods you eat, moving them through the digestive system so that they don't become stuck there, adding bulk to your waistline. While these bacteria are natural to our intestines, many factors in life can kill off these friendly bacteria. These factors include drinking chlorinated water, stress, antibiotics, environmental pollutants, taking any of a variety of medications ... and those are only a few of the examples.

To remedy this problem, we suggest taking 2-4 capsules of potent acidophilus in the morning, and 2-4 capsules of bifidus at night. Separating these probiotics between morning and night gives each type of bacteria to reach its natural place in the gut (acidophilus lives in the small intestine while bifidus lives in the large intestine). To get the most bang for your buck, it is important to choose a probiotic that is guaranteed live, is stored in the refrigerator for preservation, and can survive the acidity of the stomach. Our favorites are this form of acidophilus and this form of bifidus.

Tip #3: Add Enzymes to Prevent Undigested Food
The tip above helps you get rid of the undigested food (also called intestinal plaque) that is rotting in your gut. This tip helps you prevent the problem altogether by helping your body fully digest your food the first time around. With enough digestive enzymes, your body can easily digest whatever food you eat so that there's nothing left to sit around in your intestines. Choose a  full-spectrum enzyme that digests carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, plus can withstand the stomach's acidic environment. Taking 1-2 enzymes with each meal (and chlorine-free water, of course!) will not only help your body fully digest your food, but will also prevent you from getting the "after lunch sleepies." That sleepy feeling that you get after lunch is a sign that your body is working really hard to digest the meal you just ate ... and that your body isn't doing a very good job since it is lacking the necessary digestive enzymes. So take enzymes with meals.

If you really want to focus on how to slim down your profile, another way to use enzymes is to take enzymes between meals. When there is no food to digest in your stomach, your body will use digestive enzymes as scavengers, sending them around to clean up any trashy cells, unwanted and undigested food, and clearing up the blood. This general cleaning process applies to your body in general, as well as to your abdominal area.

Our favorite full-spectrum enzyme that has been fully-tested to survive the acidic stomach environment and to digest food is here. If you're not sure about the power of the enzymes you take, just try the oatmeal test. Cook up a small bowl of oatmeal. Open and sprinkle a capsule of enzymes on the oatmeal. Within 15 minutes or so, if your enzyme is up to snuff your oatmeal will turn into a soupy-substance that you could drink. That tells you that your enzymes are actually live, active, and working. We've tried the oatmeal test over and over with our favorite enzyme, and it works every time. Plus, it's fun!

How to Slim Down Your Waist: Not Too Hard, Right?
Adding a few supplements to your daily regimen and really focusing on fighting fat doesn't seem too hard, right? These tips on how to slim down are really pretty simple to incorporate into your daily life, and the results are very beneficial. If you are not convinced, go back to the top and read the list of negative impacts that belly fat has on your life. Then weigh it against the simple steps given here to trim your profile and fight belly fat. Sounds like you don't give up too much (except fat) and you get a lot, right?


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Photo Credit: http://pinterest.com/ayushveda/