In this blog, I’m going to talk about how to shrink your stomach—ways to help you get that flat and lean midsection.
If you want to know how to shrink your stomach safely and effectively, you’ll be happy to find that there’s actually a plethora of ways to do it.
Here are just some of the most proven ones to get you started.
How to Shrink Your Stomach: 15 Ways That Work!
1. Diet
Perhaps the most critical way to impact your body weight, and the way your stomach looks, is through your diet.
In fact, there are many ways to adjust your diet to promote abdominal fat loss and prevent putting it back on.
Start by counting your calories. One pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories. If you can figure out how many calories you burn each day, then you can figure out exactly how many calories you need to eat to replace those calories for energy purposes.
Eat only that amount and no more, and you can avoid tacking on those extra pounds.
Other ways to shrink your stomach with diet include:
- Increase your natural fiber intake, such as vegetables, and in particular soluble fibers like avocados, blackberries, and legumes.
- Eat more protein including lean animal proteins and plant-based proteins (adding a protein supplement will help, too).
- Eat healthy fats such as fatty fish and avoid unhealthy ones such as processed foods with hydrogenated oils.
- Consume more whole grains and less refined grains
- Avoid refined sugars or excess sugar intake of any type.
- Be conscious of any food sensitivities or allergies you may have.
- Replace butter and olive oil with coconut oil.
2. Water, Yay! Alcohol, Nay!
When it comes to beverages, the best thing you can drink to lose weight around your belly is water. The worst thing you can drink if you are trying to shrink your stomach is alcohol.
Drinking water in particular right before you eat a meal can help you lose weight around your belly by encouraging you to eat less. By having water already in your belly before you start to eat, you will feel fuller faster.
In one study of obese adults over a three-month period, those who drank two cups of water a half-hour prior to each meal lost nine pounds, while those who were only told to imagine themselves already satiated prior to commencing eating lost only six pounds.
3. Exercise
Getting a minimum of 1/2 hour of moderate exercise a minimum of five days each week can go a long way toward helping you to lose that excess belly fat and keep it off. It doesn’t need to be any particular type of exercise either.
Walking, for example, is a perfectly sufficient form of exercise for this purpose. Just be sure you walk briskly enough to increase your rate of breathing and your heart rate and to work up a sweat (no shortcuts, and no texting while walking).
Increase the intensity of the exercise and you can increase the duration or frequency if you desire.
For example, by jogging or running instead of merely walking, you may only need to do it for 20 minutes a day, four days per week. Alternatively, instead of increasing your pace, such as by jogging or running, you can increase the intensity, such as by walking uphill or increasing the incline on your treadmill.
In a study reported by The Journal of Exercise Nutrition & Biochemistry, obese women who walked for 50-70 minutes a day, three days a week for 12 weeks lost a significant portion of their abdominal fat compared with sedentary women.
4. Strength Training: Ab Exercises
For maximum results, include some strength training in your exercise regimen to shrink your stomach as well. Strength training, such as sit-ups and bench presses, help the body to replace the fat burned through cardiovascular exercise with muscle.
Below are some abdominal exercises that really work to strengthen and define the muscles in your midsection. These are key exercises to help a person get a flatter stomach.
Cat and Cow Pose
This traditional yoga pose is performed on all fours. As you inhale, tilt your head up and lift your tailbone, arching your spine. As you exhale, lower your head toward the floor, drop your tailbone, and round your spine. Repeat the movements up to 10 times.
Plank
Get into a push-up position, resting on your forearms and keeping them perpendicular to your body. Make sure you form a straight line from your shoulders to your ankles. Hold this position for up to 30 seconds. Over time, you will strengthen your abs and want to go past 30 seconds. This is a great way to flatten your midsection and shrink your stomach.
Bridge
Lying on your back, bend your knees with your feet flat on the ground. Lift your hips toward the ceiling, then release and lower your hips almost all the way back to the floor before repeating the action for another rep. Repeat up to 10 times.
Weighted Walks
Grab a dumbbell or other lightweight in each hand. Hold your arms down straight at your sides, standing tall and keeping your chin parallel to the floor and your shoulders down and back. Maintaining this posture, take 10 paces forward, then turn and take 10 paces to return to where you began. Repeat as desired. You’ll be amazed at how much you can feel this in your stomach area.
“Zip Up” Your Stomach
Instead of sucking in your stomach in a futile attempt to engage your core, zip it up instead. I know, sounds crazy right?
Zipping up your core is a matter of controlled breathing.
First, breathe into the back and sides of your ribs as you inhale. Then, as you exhale, imagine drawing up the four points of your diamond-like pelvic floor through your spine and torso from bottom to top. It’s as though your pelvic floor were the slider of a zipper, and your spine and torso were the zipper’s teeth.
Zipping up your core helps to activate more core muscles while improving your breathing and posture. This, in turn, can help alleviate stubborn exercise-related neck and lower back pain. It can also help to shrink your stomach and make it firmer and flatter.
Belly Button Pull
A similar technique to zipping up your core via your pelvic floor involves focusing on your belly button for the visualization instead.
For this version of the technique, you lie on the floor and imagine pulling your belly button up your spine toward your ribs, moving across gravity rather than against it, and then bearing down a bit while envisioning your belly button dropping down to the floor. This produces a slight contracting or tightening of the abdomen while keeping the ribs expanded. Also, it works great.
Bear Down
A different way to engage your core and help flatten your stomach is to bear down on your abdomen and diaphragm as though you’re bracing for a punch. Just remember not to hold your breath.
Giving a short, guttural grunt can help propel your core into this position. Repeat this over and over until you can feel the muscles engage and disengage even without these exaggerative movements.
Use Your Hands
With your hands placed over each side of your belly, try to push them away with just your core muscles. The reference points of your hands and their pressure against your core muscles help you to more efficiently and accurately activate them.
5. Sleep
Getting the right amount of sleep is integral to maintaining your weight. In fact, sleeping too much and too little are both potential causes of unwanted weight gain.
According to one study, those who slept for six or seven hours per night over a period of five years accumulated less abdominal fat than their counterparts who slept only five or fewer hours or eight or more hours each night.
In another study, people who slept 5 1/2 or fewer hours each night ate 385 calories more on average the following day than people who slept for seven to 12 hours. What’s more, those people who slept 5 1/2 or fewer hours showed a preference for fatty foods and empty calories.
In a very basic and practical sense as well, getting less sleep gives you more waking hours to exert energy, be hungry and eat more.
6. Stress Management
When you experience stress, your body releases a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol also releases in response to low blood sugar levels. As such, when your body releases cortisol from stress, it reacts the same as if that cortisol had been released due to low blood glucose levels: it triggers hunger and increases the amount of food you eat that it stores as fat rather than converts to energy or excretes as waste.
Because of this, you may experience hunger despite your body actually being satiated already, or what’s commonly called “stress eating.” Moreover, this hunger could likely be for unhealthy foods that provide immediate comfort rather than nourishment and sustenance.
Ways to reduce and avoid stress and anxiety include taking conscious, deep breaths, exercising, meditating, and going for walks in nature. Different people also have other ways they commonly deal with stress, such as reading a book, cooking, or spending time with family and friends. You may also find stress-relieving benefits by talking about your stress with a professional like a counselor or therapist.
7. Epsom-salt Baths
Epsom salt has the benefit of being able to extract excess water from your body. Adding two cups of Epsom salt to a warm bath is one way how to shrink your stomach rapidly. Be sure to only perform this ritual once per week, at most, in order to prevent dehydration.
8. Healthy Bacteria
Studies have found that overweight people tend to have more unhealthy bacteria in their stomachs than people who aren’t overweight, as well as more unhealthy bacteria in their stomachs than healthy bacteria.
This unhealthy bacteria, in turn, promotes increased fat storage and, thereby, weight gain.
Eating more foods containing healthy bacteria can address this imbalance and, in turn, prevent the belly from continuing to increase its fat stores. Gut health can play a major part in having a flat stomach.
Types of foods high in healthy bacteria, or “probiotic-rich” foods, include:
- Bone broth
- Greek yogurt
- Kombucha
- Kefir
- Pickles
- Miso
- Cottage cheese
- Kimchi
- Green olives
- Tempeh
- Sauerkraut
- Other fermented foods
9. BPA-free Plastics
Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical used in making many plastics, including water bottles. BPA concentrations have been linked in at least one study to larger waist sizes and increased chances of obesity. Therefore, avoid drinking out of plastic bottles or cups containing BPAs. Instead, carry around your own BPA-free water bottle with you wherever you go, and (barring glasses and ceramic mugs, of course) drink only out of that.
10. Sun Exposure
According to a study reported in Scientific Reports, getting direct exposure to sunlight between 8:00 am and noon can help reduce your chances of gaining weight independently of your age, diet or exercise level.
Researchers suggest this may be the result of morning sunlight synchronizing the body’s metabolism and thereby subverting the influence of genes that promote fat retention.
So basically, getting sun can literally shrink your stomach. Who would have thought?
11. Do a Colon Cleanse Supplement
I’ve mentioned this one in other blogs about making your stomach flatter. And, sometimes when I mention colon cleanses to people, they look at me like I’m crazy. And, well, I am.
However, if you do a colon cleanse supplement for a few weeks, and if you have an experience anything like mine, you will notice that you lose some serious stuff.
Yeah, I know, it sounds really gross. And, doggonit, it is. But, it will make you feel so much better to drop some of that excess weight you’ve been carrying around with you in your gut. In other words, you’ll feel better if you make yourself poop.
Note, always check with your doctor before taking a colon cleanse supplement. This is especially important if you are currently on any medications or have any medical conditions.
12. Practice Good Posture
Practice keeping good posture. This will help you strengthen your core, and having a strong core can make your midsection tight, firm, and well, more attractive.
13. Cough or Laugh
If you’re just trying to feel what it’s like when your core is engaged, to feel what muscles are involved in expanding and contracting in this action, try coughing or laughing on purpose. Both of these actions naturally engage the core.
Pay specific note to how your core feels immediately before actually emitting a cough or laugh. This is the moment when your core is most engaged.
14. Stop Drinking Soft Drinks
Soda pop, pop, cola—whatever you call it, drinking it will make your belly bloat. So, maybe switch to water with a little Mio. It’s much better for you and tastes great.
15. Be Consistent
Finally, as many professionals and fitness gurus will tell you, be consistent in your efforts to shape your midsection and shrink your stomach.
Create your plan, work your plan, and be consistent with your plan. When you get right down to it, you might as well not even have a plan if you aren’t going to be consistent.
This means the moments of “oh it is just this one time” and other similar instances have got to go. Every single little break you take in your diet, workout routine, and night out on the town adds up. It sets you back and keeps you from reaching your goals.
Yes, people do need a break from diets, people need to splurge. But weekly splurges are counterproductive and only work against all of your hard work.
Recap
In order to shrink your stomach—to get a flatter stomach, there are several things you can do.
You’ll want to consider changing up your diet, limiting alcohol, and drinking more water.
Also, as we all know, exercise can play a huge role in getting a flatter stomach and building a nice lean core.
Additionally, managing stress levels efficiently, Epsom salt baths, eating foods with healthy bacteria, avoiding BPAs, and getting more sun may all impact stomach size.