Bye-Bye Belly! How to Get Rid of Lower Belly Fat Fast.

Give It a Whirl in just 1 month, you can get rid of your lower belly fat and — bonus! — boost your health.

When 45,000 women were asked in a survey which body part they'd most like to change, 40 percent chose their stomachs. Abs outscored hips and thighs (24 percent), breasts (16 percent), and bottoms (7 percent). It's not hard to understand why: There's nothing like a couple of tummy rolls to make you feel, well, belly fat — especially as they tend to thicken and pooch out more as you age.

But before you resign yourself to a wardrobe of camouflage for life, consider this: With the right losing fat diet, some simple moves, and lifestyle changes, you really can deflate those rolls. And it could be easier than you think to get rid of belly fat fast, especially if your waistline has just begun to spread. Fat follows a last-on, first-off policy. "When you drop pounds, your body will first shrink the fat cells it put on most recently," says Brian McFarlin, Ph.D., assistant professor of exercise physiology and nutrition at the University of Houston.

Getting rid of lower belly fat will help your health, too. While we carry fat every-where on our bodies — it swaddles our thighs, swings from our arms, marbles our midsections, even cradles our lungs and cushions our eyeballs — it's not all the same. And when it comes to our health, where we pack on the pounds might be more important than how much we lug around.

Those double scoops of ice cream and other indulgences might be behind your extra weight. But where it settles has to do with other factors-gender, for one. Women tend to put on weight in their buttocks and thighs (becoming "pears"), where it's ready to supply the extra energy demands of pregnancy and breastfeeding. Men, on the other hand, tend to pad their fat bellies ("apples").

These patterns are also affected by age. After menopause, hormones change the way calories are stored, with more fat settling in women's middles. (The same thing happens to men, though less dramatically.) Hormone therapy might seem to be an obvious answer to this "menopot" — and a study of Japanese women found that it did help for apple-shaped women — but doctors generally don't recommend hormone therapy for this purpose since it poses an increased risk of breast cancer, blood clots, and other ills.

You can blame your shape on your mom and dad, too. Researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center and Harvard Medical School recently discovered 12 genes that help determine where you tend to store your excess fat. But genetics isn't destiny: In one of the most encouraging studies on losing belly fat fast and weight loss in recent years, research on identical twins in Finland showed that a healthy lifestyle without lower belly fat, including lots of physical activity, can not only keep weight down, but also actually change how genes in fat cells behave. Exercise on getting rid of fat may help the genes flip on so they'll assist in converting food to energy.