There is a version of this article on almost every health site, and it usually contains green tea, thyme and the claim that laughing burns calories.
Ours used to as well. We have rewritten it, because the real answer is more interesting than the marketing one and considerably more useful.
The short answer: No food burns fat, and you cannot choose where fat leaves from. But there are two kinds of belly fat, and the kind that matters most for your health is also the kind that responds fastest to a change in what you eat. There is a measurable reason for that, and it is the most hopeful thing in this article.
There Are Two Kinds of Belly Fat
This distinction is missing from almost everything written on the subject, and it changes what you should care about.
Subcutaneous fat sits under the skin. It is the part you can take hold of. Metabolically it is fairly quiet.
Visceral fat sits deeper, around and inside the organs. You cannot pinch it, you cannot see it directly, and it is the one that tracks with blood pressure, blood sugar and cardiovascular risk.
Which means a person can look much the same and be in a very different position, and it means the mirror is a poor instrument for the thing that actually matters.
It also means the honest goal is not a flatter stomach. It is less fat in the places you cannot see.
The Mechanism That Makes This Worth Doing
Here is the part that changed how we think about all of this.
Fat does not only sit in fat cells. It also accumulates inside muscle cells, and when it does, it interferes with the signal that tells those cells to let sugar in from the blood.
It happens quickly. At the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, ten healthy young men, average age 23 and all of them trim, were put on a diet drawing half its calories from fat. After three days there was significantly more fat inside their muscle cells, and it had switched off the genes that build the machinery for burning it.
And it reverses. At the Catholic University in Rome, eight patients were studied after bypass surgery. The fat inside their muscle cells fell by 87 per cent, and their insulin resistance largely resolved while they were still substantially overweight.
Read that last clause again, because it is the whole point. The cells started working properly before the weight came off.
That is why people report feeling different within a fortnight of changing how they eat, long before anything is visible. It is also why a bathroom scale is the slowest and least informative signal on the board.
What Actually Helps With Belly Fat
1. Change the density of the food, not the quantity
Your stomach measures volume. There are stretch receptors in the wall of it, and when enough bulk arrives they report that you have eaten.
Vegetables carry about a hundred calories a pound. Beans, potatoes, rice and oats carry five to six hundred. Oil carries about four thousand.
Build meals from the middle of that range and you can eat until you are full without the arithmetic working against you. The four numbers are here, and they are the most useful thing we ever learned about eating.
2. Eat an apple first
This is the most actionable finding in the whole literature and hardly anybody writes it up properly.
In the Penn State preloading experiments, people were given a pasta lunch and told to eat freely. They ate around 900 calories.
- A vegetable salad first took 100 to 200 calories off the total.
- A large whole apple first took off more than 300.
- The same apples as applesauce took off only about 200.
- The same salad with a fatty dressing and shredded cheese reversed the effect entirely. The meal ended up bigger.
And the timing study that matters most. Dieters who ate a mostly-vegetable salad fifteen minutes before lunch and dinner for three months lost four more pounds than a group given the identical extra food to eat alongside their meals.
Same food. Same calories. Different order.
The rule that falls out of it: a preload has to be under about 100 calories a cup to be worth it. Drown it in dressing and you have made a starter, not a preload.
3. Blend it
Casserole plus a glass of water for lunch: people ate about 400 calories before feeling full. The same casserole and the same water, blended into soup: 300.
Identical ingredients. A quarter less eaten, purely because of the physical form. Half an hour later, stomach volume was 36 per cent greater in the soup group.
The reason is mechanical. Water sitting beside solid food gets strained through the stomach quickly. Water bound into the food empties slowly. Which is why soup is the workhorse of this entire way of eating.
4. Water before the meal, and the timing is age-dependent
Almost nobody writes this correctly, so here it is properly.
- Water with a meal makes you feel fuller and does not reduce what you eat.
- Younger adults: immediately before. Around 20 per cent less eaten.
- Older adults: about thirty minutes before. Around 13 per cent less.
The reason for the split is stomach emptying. In a young adult half the water is gone within ten minutes. Emptying slows with age, so an older stomach is still holding it when the meal arrives.
5. Sleep, which is not a filler tip
Short sleep shifts the hormones that regulate appetite so you feel hungrier on the same food, and it weakens the part of the brain that runs deliberate decisions.
The extra food it drives is reliably the sweet and starchy kind. That is an experimental finding, not a comment on anybody’s character.
6. Beans, for a reason that has nothing to do with your waist
Across five separate populations on different continents, legumes were the most reliable dietary predictor of survival in older people: a 7 to 8 per cent lower death rate for every 20 grams eaten daily. Twenty grams is two tablespoons.
We include it here because it is a better reason to change your dinner than a waistband is, and because reasons that outlast January are the ones worth having.
What Does Not Work, Including Things We Used to Recommend
- Fat-burning foods. No food burns fat. Thyme does not. Cayenne does not. Grapefruit does not.
- Green tea as a fat burner. Tea is a good drink. The measured effects on body fat are small enough that you would never notice them, and they do not survive contact with an ordinary diet.
- Flushing toxins. Your liver and kidneys do the clearing. There is nothing to flush and water does not flush it.
- Targeted exercise. Crunches build the muscle underneath. They do not thin the layer above. Why spot reduction does not work.
- Six small meals a day. Fine if you like eating that way. It does not raise metabolism, and grazing makes it harder to notice hunger at all.
- Laughing. We genuinely had this in the previous version of this article. It burns roughly the calories in a single grape.
If You Change One Thing
Put a real starch at lunch.
Most people who are struggling in the evening are running on four to six hundred calories before dinner against a need two or three times higher. The evening is a bill arriving, and it is issued at midday.
Venny is a medical doctor and a dietitian; Andy is a psychologist. This is general information rather than medical advice. If you take medication for blood pressure or blood sugar, changes of this kind can move those numbers quickly enough to need your doses reviewed, so your doctor should be involved before you start rather than afterwards.
And, always, seek health consciously.
Hello.
I just clicked twice on your 21 day weight loss challenge but the link was broken. Is it no longer available/on offer now?
Thank you for letting us know, Adele – that offer isn’t currently running, which is why the link is broken. I’ll get it removed from the post so it doesn’t send people to a dead page.