SELF HEALTH + HEALING

If you're looking to get rock-hard abs, remember that proper dietary choices is your first step, but from there a comprehensive fitness program and targeted ab exercises will help you achieve your goal.

If you're looking to shrink and tone your belly, there's a better way to do it than trying to do crunches. In fact, research has indicated that doing abdominal exercisesalone -- even when performed five days a week for six weeks -- has no effect at all on subcutaneous fat stores and abdominal circumference.

In an op-ed piece for Forbes Magazine, Jennifer Cohen suggests using strategies that burn up cortisol instead. Cortisol is a hormone in your body that depletes lean muscle and holds onto fat in the abdominal region.

A quick internet search will yield countless claims of ways to remove the unwanted fat from around your mid-section. From over-hyped diet pills promising to reduce levels of cortisol to cutting-edge workouts. The truth is that there is no scientifically proven diet pill or exercise that will specifically target your stomachs fat vs the fat providing a nice bone blanket for other parts of your body.

All that being said, you can get rid of that belly fat- to better understand how, let's talk about fat, in the medical world known as adipose tissue, the different types, and methods for losing some of it.

By now, you probably know that upping the ante on your core workouts won't unveil the six-pack abs of your dreams. It's simply impossible to reduce body fat in a specific area, no matter how much you curse that little something extra around your middle.

However, that doesn't mean that strength training doesn't have a benefit for that belly. In a new study, Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers found that men who completed 20 minutes of weight training a day saw a smaller increase in belly fat than men who spent the same amount of time sweating it out in a cardio workout.