The #1 Secret To Getting Rid Of Belly Fat Forever

When it comes to ab fat, it’s your DNA that you need to deal with. Here’s how to outsmart the most stubborn flab of all.

- Lesley Rotchford

If you’re like many fit women, you’ve worked your butt off (or some other fill-inthe-blank trouble spots), but your belly fat seems to stick around no matter how well you eat or how hard you sweat. It’s incredibly frustrating. So what’s the deal? Genetics is a big factor: Studies of twins and families show that the amount of ab fat each person carries is inherited – roughly 30 to 70 per cent of the total variation in waist size from person to person is attributable to genetics – and that appleshaped physiques are more likely to be passed down than other body types. “You can inherit abdominal-fat-risk gene variations from your mother or father, or from both,” says epidemiology professor Lu Qi, director of the Tulane University Obesity Research Center. Inheriting these genes from one parent elevates your odds of living with belly bulge. But if you get socked with a lot of genes from both sides, you may be at an even greater risk for belly pudge that won’t easily budge.

More than a couple of genes affect abdominal fat. There are 49 to be exact, according to a recent study in the journal Nature. Nineteen of these have a stronger effect on women, which suggests that genes may be influenced by hormones, says Kari North, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina’s Carolina Center for Genome Studies.

One major player in the belly-fat game is cortisol, which you most likely know as the hormone triggered by stress.

“Chronic exposure to cortisol can result in a complete shift in body shape, [from hourglass or similar to] a round middle and thin arms and legs, even if you’re not genetically predisposed to that physique,” says Shawn Talbott, author of The Cortisol Connection.