Maintaining a trim midsection might extend your life in addition to improving your appearance. Heart disease, diabetes, and possibly cancer are all associated with larger waistlines. Additionally, losing weight, especially belly fat, enhances blood vessel performance and sleep efficiency. In the middle of a field, a middle-aged man is enjoying a slice of watermelon. When dieting, it is impossible to target belly fat directly. In addition to helping you lose the harmful layer of visceral fat, which is a form of fat in your abdominal cavity that you can’t see but that raises health risks, decreasing weight overall will also help you trim your waistline. When Johns Hopkins researchers compared the effects of losing weight through a low-carbohydrate diet versus a low-fat diet for six months while each contained the same amount of calories, those on a low-carb diet lost an average of 10 pounds more than those on a low-fat diet (28.9 pounds versus 18.7 pounds). According to Stewart, the low-carb diet also had the added bonus of producing better-quality weight loss. Lean tissue or muscle is frequently lost along with excess fat during weight loss, which is undesirable. In addition to the weight lost from fat on both diets, there were also 2 to 3 pounds of lean body mass lost, meaning that the percentage of fat loss was substantially higher.
