How to make your waist slimmer

There's no way to make fat disappear from a single area of your body--you can't do anything that will JUST make your waist (or thighs, or butt) thinner. However, if you regularly participate in aerobic activity, you'll start burning off fat from all over your body, including your waist.

"Aerobic" activity is anything that makes you breathe hard, like jogging, biking, or going on a treadmill. Any amount of aerobic activity is better than nothing, but you'll get the most bang for your buck if you do something aerobic for AT LEAST 20 minutes at a time.

This is because your body doesn't kick into major fat-burning mode until after you've reached your target heart rate and stayed there for twenty minutes (Go here to learn about your target heart rate and calculate what it is: http://www.unmc.edu/Olson/education/thr.htm ). If you're serious about losing fat, you should go to a fitness store and buy a pulse monitor so you can tell when you've reached that target heart rate and keep yourself "in the zone."

Remember, you do your best fat burning after being at that target rate for 20 minutes, so one sixty-minute session is probably going to be more effective than 3 different twenty-minute ones, even though it adds up to an hour either way.

The most important thing, though, is not to push yourself so hard that you give up and stop exercising entirely. In the long run it's far better to ease into it and work your way up to longer and longer sessions than to go too hard and burn yourself out.

It wouldn't hurt to do some ab exercises like stomach crunches as well. Building your stomach muscles won't make you thinner, but you'll be firmer (less jiggle) and once the aerobics kick in, you just might uncover an awesome six-pack underneath the fat.

Good luck!

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Reply From: Girlie - Feb 2nd 2004

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