How To Lose Belly Fat Quickly For Women

So, how to lose belly fat quickly for women? Under-the-skin fat,  a.k.a. subcutaneous fat, is the padding you can pinch. It's found all over your body, especially on your thighs and buttocks, and while it may make bathing suit season a challenge, it's not such a bad companion (at least in moderation). Thigh fat, for example, beyond saddling you with saddlebags, appears to produce substances that help improve the way your body uses blood sugar. Subcutaneous fat also helps give shape to your face and pads your hands and feet. Be thankful: Without it, walking would hurt.

While losing belly fat for women, even the visceral fat that lies deep in your abdominal cavity and surrounds your internal organs has something good going for it: It stores energy, ready to protect you from starvation.

It's when you have too much visceral belly fat that there's trouble. For a start, the fat is an especially active producer of substances — leptin, fatty acids, inflammatory molecules — that appear to interfere with insulin's ability to deliver energy-rich blood sugar to cells, explains Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, M.D., a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic. In response, the pancreas (which produces insulin) goes into overdrive and churns out extra. In time, you have a lot of ineffective insulin — and high amounts of sugar — streaming through your blood, a condition that can lead to diabetes.

Too much belly fat in women that must be lost is also linked to high blood pressure, lower HDL ("good") cholesterol, and elevated triglycerides (one of the dangerous fats in blood). The combination of all these problems (excess abdominal fat and insulin resistance along with abnormal blood pressure and cholesterol/fat levels) is known as metabolic syndrome, a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. "You're a heart attack waiting to happen," says David Katz, M.D., director of the Yale Griffin Prevention Research Center. "You're at risk for stroke, plus you're on the brink of diabetes." The long-running Nurses' Health Study of 44,636 women found that having a waist of 35 inches or more doubles a woman's chances of dying from cardiovascular disease.

Then there's the stress connection. You don't have to be stuck in traffic to suffer a fight-or-flight response. Though the effect may not be quite as strong, big bellies seem to excite the body's sympathetic nervous system in a way that's similar to emotional tension, nudging up stress hormones like Cortisol and adrenaline, says Dr. Lopez-Jimenez.

These are some of the better-known risks, but an overly generous waist has also been linked to cancer, decreased lung function, dementia later in life, and a condition known as fatty liver disease. "Fat accumulation can actually injure the liver in some of the same ways that alcohol does," says Dr. Katz.

And in what might be the final zinger, a 2008 study from the University of Western Ontario suggests that belly fat produces a hormone (neuropeptide Y) that not only creates more fat, but also may make you hungrier…which, of course, can lead to even more belly fat.

It's a depressing list, but not an inevitable one. Indeed, the same strategies that can get you out of your camo outfits — targeting your workouts, tweaking your diet, taking charge of stress — can also help keep you out of the doctor's office. Not a had twofer at all.

If you're chronically pressured, stress hormones stay high, leading to more belly fat storage if you overeat. That's why it's key to address ongoing problems of losing belly fat for women — and to find quick tension busters.

Work on your love life. Women in unhappy marriages are three times more likely to develop metabolic syndrome (and have too much belly fat) than those in satisfying unions. Counseling could offer a happier — and healthier — life.