Best exercises to reduce belly fat

I wonder if part of the confusion is to do with the fact that exercise can change your body shape and its appearance. In terms of the belly area, my experience is a little on the extreme end, as I am a very small woman who was pregnant with a very big baby immediately after two surgeries on my belly area which stretched the scars before they could heal which is much worse than normal stretch marks. I also experienced diastasis recti (muscle separation) during pregnancy and 8 years on have protruding muscle on the lower right side. And I gave birth by c-section, which means I have an over-hang over the scar.

At a healthy weight with a body fat level on the low side for a woman, my belly area is a lumpy bumpy mess. Yes it looks worse if I'm overweight, so diet is important but the effects of diet are actually somewhat limited compared to exercise when it comes to the aesthetic of my belly area. With a strong well built core, only achievable through exercise, my belly area looks completely different. Strong core muscles pull the whole area up, the overhang over the section scar disappears, the protrusion becomes almost unnoticeable. When my abdominal muscles grow and become visible, they fill in my wrinkly scars in a way that stretches out the skin and makes it smooth again. When my pectorals, shoulder and back muscles are stronger and more easily flexible, my posture is better and my remaining loose skin is lifted. It sounds a bit weird but the bigger my chest muscles and less slouched my shoulders and back, the less visible the scarring on my belly button is.

The fact is that the kind of damage I have on my belly area will never be completely gone. I still wrinkle around the belly button area when I bend over or even slouch forward. I still have loose skin on my lower belly that will hang down in little upside-down triangles if I'm doing push-ups or a plank type pose. But even at that, core strengthening exercises have utterly transformed how my belly area looks in a way that diet alone never could have.

So it comes down to what you actually want/need to achieve. For many men in particular the belly area is the first place your body will store excess fat and the last place you will lose it. You can look like you are generally a healthy weight in the rest of your body but if you are carrying weight on your belly area, you mainly need to get rid of it with diet. For women, we tend to carry excess weight in three ways depending on our body shape, evenly all over for natural hourglass figures, hips and thighs for pear-shapes and on the tummy area for apples. We also tend to have weaker core areas, maybe due to a mix of biology and socialisation. So an awful lot of women, especially those in the first two categories, even without the kind of belly area damage that I have, will find that exercise will flatten/pull up a rounded lower belly.