Can you lose belly fat?

Yes. Belly fat comes off the same way all fat does: you eat less than you burn, for long enough. You can’t choose the spot. Six weeks of ab exercises took no fat off the belly in a trial. But the deep fat around your organs, the kind tied to disease, tends to shrink first.

Why it feels like it never moves

The belly is often the last place you see a change. The fat you can pinch on your stomach shrinks more slowly, as a share, than the fat packed deeper inside around your liver and gut (visceral fat). So the part that matters most for your health can be shrinking while the mirror looks the same.

What to do

• Eat a little less every day, enough to lose about 1 to 2 pounds a week.
• Lift weights two or three days a week, so more of what you lose is fat and not muscle.
• Measure your waist once a month, at the same spot just above your hip bones. A smaller waist is the proof, even when the scale is slow.

Losing fat works like an ATM. You decide how much to take out. The bank decides which bills you get.

The science

In a 2011 trial, 24 adults did seven ab exercises five days a week for six weeks. The fat on their bellies didn’t change. A 2017 review of 89 studies found that when people lose weight, by diet, exercise, drugs or surgery, visceral fat always fell by a bigger share than the fat under the skin. No method in those studies targeted visceral fat on its own. It just tends to go first.

That matters because the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute says a waist over 40 inches for men or 35 inches for women raises the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Check yours with the waist check, and see why one-spot training fails in can you burn fat from one spot.