After trying out many tricks and hacks to burn stubborn belly fat, you might believe that your body is just not built in such a way for you to have a flat stomach. This is a ludicrous way of thinking. Unfortunately, you’ve come to terms with this. As a Sydney personal trainer, I have some good and bad news to share with you concerning this.

We’ll start off with the bad news so we can get it out of the way. The bad news is that it will take a lot of dedication and effort to achieve a flat stomach. The good news is that having a flat stomach is not as far-fetched as many of you may believe. Anyone can do it. It’s mainly about adhering to key fat-loss principles and figuring out what works best for your body type. It’s now time to take action and rethink your approach! Here are the 10 best tips that will be instrumental for you to keep in mind on your journey to a flat stomach.

Reduce your stress levels: Committing to losing weight is challenging enough as it is. Thinking about it might even be stressful for you. The more stressful you are, the more you’ll want to indulge in food, or even abstain from it completely. Both, rather unhealthy approaches. Usually, overeating occurs when someone tries to cope with stress, in an attempt to make oneself feel better. The increase in appetite and cravings can trigger a hormone production. When the hormone cortisol is secreted in response to a stressor, it would be telling your body to store fat.

Eliminate junk food from your diet: Besides the fact that junk food consists of low nutritional value, it is also high in calories. Most people are unknowingly in the pursuit of “food euphoria” when they crave junk food. Eating such foods acts as a temporary stimulant to the feel-good centres of your brain. This makes you want to eat more, since junk food has a low satiety value. Moreover, because junk food is so dense, it slows down the digestive system and makes your stomach feel extra bloated.

Exercise regularly: Burn calories and boost your metabolism through daily-exercise. Losing weight means burning calories more than you tend to consume. Working out on a consistent basis allows you to shed unwanted and stubborn fat from your body. The more you exert energy and sweat dictates how much calories you will ultimately burn by the end of your workout session.

Do high-intensity training: How frequently your heart rate is beating in the span of a minute determines how intense your training is. If you’re training at 75 to 100 percent of your maximum heart rate, then you’re in the high-intensity zone. Try shooting for high-intensity activities, such as running, cycling, circuit training and wrestling.

CAUTION: This is not for the faint-hearted. Breathing heavily and rapidly will be your new norm.

Stay active: A phenomenal way to losing weight and achieving a flat stomach is by staying active. Not only does this apply to your workout sessions, but to your daily household chores as well. NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) is our calorie expenditure via activities involving movements that are deemed to be NEPA (non-exercise physical activity). Cooking, sweeping, washing the dishes, walking your dog and even fidgeting influence metabolic rate and calorie expenditure.

According to the National Academy of Sports Medicine: “A 145-pound person can expect to burn approximately 102 calories an hour while sitting at work. If that person stood while working, they would burn 174 calories. An extra 72 calories might not seem like a lot, but it can add up to more than 18,000 calories burned per year, leading to an approximate 5-pound weight loss. Without utilizing NEAT, you would have to do 60 30-minute runs at 5 miles per hour to burn the same rate of calories.”

Avoid high-glycaemic index foods: Harvard Medical School’s Healthbeat states: “Glycaemic index (GI) of a food is a measure of how a specific food with carbohydrates causes blood sugar to rise.” High-glycaemic foods raise your average blood glucose levels, place a higher demand for insulin on your body and lead to dramatics dips in blood glucose after the spike. If your diet is leaning towards high-glycaemic index foods, this implies that you’ll most likely be weaker and hungrier.

Get enough sleep: Sleep is by far the most powerful supplement you can have. It is extremely underrated. A jaded brain more often than not takes bad food-decisions. When you’re sleepy, you lose mental clarity to think straight because the activity of your frontal lobe, which is responsible for influencing out decisions, happens not to be functioning optimally. Furthermore, studies have shown that starvation of sleep leads to more late-night munching habits.

Intermittent fasting: This is an eating pattern that cycles between eating and fasting. Some of the many benefits of adopting intermittent fasting into your lifestyle are facilitating fat burning by dropping down the levels of insulin in the body and increasing the levels of human growth hormone. According to a 2014 review of the scientific literature, intermittent fasting can cause weight loss of 3–8% over 3–24 weeks.

Avoid liquid calories: Liquid calories get digested really fast. Anytime you feel hunger means that your stomach is empty and that there is room for more food. Liquid calories are not filling you up for a long time. Research shows that your body doesn’t register liquid sugar in the same way as it does solid sugar. This can cause greater appetite and calorie intake later on.

Eat soluble fiber: Soluble fiber reduces blood cholesterol, permits better absorption of nutrients and stabilizes blood glucose. In addition, soluble fiber also helps lessen visceral fat, since it regulates the speed of digestion by slowing down how fast the stomach releases digested food into the gut.

Conclusion: In a nutshell, exercising alone is in no-way, shape, or form enough for you to achieve a flat stomach. An active lifestyle is required in order to obtain and maintain it. Your diet will be crucial for your success. Make sure you stick to these 10 tips so you avoid going through trial and error and wasting your valuable time.