Your waistline is a key indicator of your health. Carrying too much fat around your middle not only makes your jeans hard to do up but also may increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. And now researchers from Oxford University have found that for every extra 10cm of waist circumference the chances of a man dying of prostate cancer rises by 7 per cent, according to a report in the journal BMC Medicine. But how best to shrink your waist? Here’s what the experts advise.
This professional provides 10 simple tips to shrink your waist, read below:
Do seven minutes of body-weight exercises every day
“Working the largest muscles of your body is effective for overall fat-blasting and will help to shift surplus flab from your waistline,” says Dalton Wong, the director of Twenty Two Training.
“Body-weight exercises – which use your own weight for resistance – such as squats and lunges are a great starting point for fat loss. A circuit that includes trunk exercises will help to strengthen your middle for a lean appearance.”
Researchers reporting in The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness found that a seven-minute body-weight circuit comprising 12 exercises – jumping jacks, a wall sit, crunches, step-ups, squats, triceps dips, high-knees running, lunges, push-ups with rotation, side planks, push-ups and planks – for 30 seconds each, with 10 seconds’ recovery, helped 29 normal-weight adults to shrink their waists after two weeks. After six weeks their waists decreased in size by an average of 4cm.
Keep to a 10-hour eating window
Unsurprisingly, the key to weight loss from your waistline is to eat less. One of the most straightforward ways to do this is to create an eating window inside which all your daily calories should be consumed. Since it usually entails skipping at least one daily meal, the results can be significant.
“Breakfast is not an essential meal and a lot of people find they manage to miss it quite easily, which automatically means you should eat less overall,” says Roy Taylor, professor of medicine and metabolism at Newcastle University.
One study of people with metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms including raised blood pressure and blood sugar, as well as excess body fat around the middle, showed they lost up to 6.72cm from their waistlines after 12 weeks of sticking to a 10-hour eating window.
Drink two cups of black coffee a day
Skip the coconut latte or oat-milk flat white and drink your coffee black. In addition to caffeine, coffee contains many bioactive plant components, some of which may be helpful with waist-shrinking, according to Lee Smith, professor of public health at Anglia Ruskin University.
He showed that women who drink two or three cups of coffee a day have less fat around the middle than those who drink less or no coffee. His study in the Journal of Nutrition also showed that 20 to 44-year-old men who drink two or three cups a day had almost 2 per cent less abdominal fat than non-coffee drinkers.
Eat three servings of wholegrains daily
Oats, barley, buckwheat, rye, and other wholegrains provide fibre that fills you up so that you eat fewer calorific and refined foods, making them useful for reducing waist size. Last year a team of nutrition scientists at Tufts University in Massachusetts showed that middle-aged adults who ate at least three servings of wholegrains daily had smaller waist sizes. “Fibre in wholegrains, including wholegrain breads and cereals, has a satiating effect and a beneficial effect on post-meal blood sugar spikes, which means you are less likely to have hunger pangs and snack unhealthily,” Ian Marber, the nutrition therapist, says.
Give up diet drinks to shrink your waist
Reaching for a diet drink might seem a better option for your waistline, but it’s not necessarily true. Numerous studies have shown that artificial sweeteners in the drinks signal receptors in the brain to prepare the body for a calorie intake. Since these diet drinks contain almost no calories, you are then likely to seek sugar elsewhere, resulting in weight gain around the middle. Researchers reporting in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that older people who consumed diet drinks every day gained 8cm around their waist over nine years, compared with a 2cm gain among those who never drank them.
Walk for 50-70 minutes a day three times a week
Overweight women who walked for 50-70 minutes three times a week for 12 weeks lost an average of about 3cm from their waist circumference, significantly more than a control group who did no walking, a study published in the Journal of Exercise and Nutrition Biochemistry showed.
“Walking is the perfect cardio base for fat-blasting and reducing weight you are carrying all over, as well as around your middle,” Wong says. “Walking at a moderate pace that is approximately 70 per cent of your fastest walking speed – which means you will be breathing hard but can still talk in short sentences – for about an hour two or three times a week should be your goal. Add some shorter, faster walks or jogs of 20-30 minutes if you can manage it on other days.”
Cut calories to 800 a day
Professor Taylor says that rapid weight loss of just over 3kg in seven to 10 days can be safely achieved by people who are overweight and have no medical issues by reducing calorie intake to 800 per day.
“If you are above a healthy weight or obese, you can afford to reduce your intake quite drastically in the short term,” he says. “When you do this, you will typically lose about 1-2kg of weight from reducing glycogen, stored in the liver and muscle with water, and then you will begin to lose fat.”
This will result in a visibly smaller midriff but is not sustainable long term, and Taylor suggests a daily intake of 1300-1500 calories for women and 1600-1800 for men to keep weight off.
Be a moderate drinker
Studies have shown that alcohol, beer, and spirits in particular, contributes significantly to larger waists in men and women. Heavy drinkers aged 59 and older – defined as people who have three or four drinks four or more times a week – were found to have waistlines that measure up to 3.8cm more than those who didn’t exceed guidelines of 14 units a week or less in a 2020 study by University College London researchers.
Marber says that alcohol is best avoided if you want to reduce your waistline. “It’s so easy to rack up calories as alcohol contains seven calories per gram and the stronger the drink the more calories it contains,” he says. “A double G&T has 149 calories, roughly the same as six squares of milk chocolate, while a large glass of wine has 160 calories, about the same as six teaspoons of peanut butter.”
Take your grandma’s advice and try a waist-training belt
No gadget is a substitute for exercise and a healthy diet, but some might provide what scientists refer to as “marginal gains”. Electrical Muscle Stimulation devices have been around for decades – your mother (or grandmother) may have used an ab belt or something similar in the 1980s – and work by using electrical impulses to replicate natural muscle contractions around the midriff.
Improvements in technology mean EMS devices have been shown to help strengthen muscles and, in a study in the Journal of Physical Therapy Science, even to reduce tummy fat. Researchers asked a group of young overweight women to wear EMS electrodes on their stomachs for 30 minutes at a time, three times a week for six weeks. Without changing their usual diet and exercise plan, their waist circumference, subcutaneous fat mass (fat under the skin) and total body fat percentage were all significantly reduced by the end of the trial. “The use of the high-frequency current therapy may be beneficial for reducing the levels of abdominal obesity in young women,” the Korean researchers wrote.
Don’t overdo the waist exercises
Side planks, weighted side bends and planks with rotation are all great for working the oblique muscles at the sides of your waist. But Wong says that if your only aim is the appearance of a cinched waist, overdoing them can have the opposite effect.
“Your priority should be to lose fat around the middle with aerobic exercise and circuits, and if you haven’t done this you should be careful about overdoing oblique strengthening routines,” he says. “Strong obliques are important for functional movement, but with strength work they grow and can make the waistline appear a bit thicker.”
