How to Get Rid of Belly Fat in a Week

Belly fat reduction does not need to be a long drawn out process, but if you want to know how to get rid of belly fat in a week, then you better be ready to endure a bit of discomfort.  Assuming your physique is in a place where you don’t have a lot of belly fat to lose, a week may be sufficient to trim down and get ripped quickly, but you’ll need to make significant short term lifestyle and diet changes for it to happen.  However, if you have more than 8 to 10 lbs of belly fat you may need to take more time.  That is not to say that you can’t lose that kind of weight in one week, but it will be unsustainable and you’ll gain it back just as fast.

I’d normally encourage a client working toward sustainable weight loss to include 3 days of resistance training in order to build and maintain lean muscle mass, which is key in maintaining a high metabolism.  But with only a week to get rid of belly fat one should forego this training and instead focus on high intensity interval training.  Diet and intense cardio should be the focal point of a fast fat loss program, and I’ll discuss what each aspect entails below.

How to Get Rid of Belly Fat in a Week with Intense Interval Training

The focus of your training should be on high intensity fat burning workouts.  These should not be long sessions.  They should however be frequent and very tough.  For most people, 15 to 25 minutes is more than enough time per session.  This should be performed at least once a day, every day of the week.  In order to obtain the best results, don’t do the same workout two times in a row.  Use a variety of interval training methods like kickboxing, a treadmill or elliptical routine, or rowing.  For those new to interval training I provide more details on program construction in How to Get Rid of Belly Fat with Interval Training.

How to Get Rid of Belly Fat in a Week by Altering Your Diet

Now we all know that the backbone of weight loss is calorie reduction.  You need to eat less to lose weight.  By consuming fewer calories each day than your body requires you’re bound to make up the difference with stored belly fat.  Conveniently, very few of us eat well.  We eat a lot of the kinds of foods that keep weight on, and not a lot of low glycemic complex carbohydrates and lean proteins that maintain muscle and encourage fat loss.  So for 90% of the people out there, making a few simple dietary changes is enough to allow you to get rid of excess belly fat in just a week.  These changes are:

  • Replace simple sugars with complex carbohydrates.  This means that you don’t eat ‘white’ carbs like sugar, bread, pasta, rice, etc.  Instead eat whole grains and vegetables.
  • Eat breakfast everyday.  Make sure your breakfast contains complex carbohydrates and protein.  A breakfast of oatmeal and a couple eggs is perfect, but perhaps not so tasty.
  • Eat every few hours, but just enough to stave off hunger.  If you are not hungry, eat anyway, your body needs the energy, but keep it small and balanced.
  • Eat no carbohydrates other than salad or a small bowl of steamed vegetables for dinner, along with either fish or chicken.
  • Reduce fat consumption, oil use, and calorie containing drinks like alcohol, coke, or juice. 
  • Drink a lot of water.

For those desperately wanting to know how to get rid of belly fat in a week, follow these rules to a T, and you’ll hit your target.  Train hard, eat right, and be smart about it.