How to ACTUALLY Lose Belly Fat in 2026 (Using Science)

This is Namesh with the age of 35 had the most belly fat ever in his life. But less than a year later, he now looks like this. His belly fat is now lower than 98% of men.

This is because nobody approaches losing belly fat in three layers with each layer requiring a slightly different strategy, which works for both men and women. But most people are stuck in the outermost layer, layer 1, which is right where Nesh's journey began with a day one body fat of 29. 5%.

Now, one of the cool things about DEXA scans is they don't just give you an overall body fat percentage. They let you split the body into regions. So, you can see your body fat percentage in your arms, your legs, your hips, and even your belly.

Where Nesh clocked in at 34. 4%. Higher than anywhere else on his body.

>> You said that belly fat's like one of the areas where you struggle and you feel like genetically you're kind of like >> cursed. Yeah. >> And the uncomfortable truth is he wasn't wrong.

Almost every single guy I've run through a day one DEXA scan has shown that their belly carries more fat than anywhere else, which can become a serious health risk. As large population studies have shown, every few centimeters you gain around your waist increases your risk of metabolic disease and death, even if your weight stays the same. But to see how consistent this belly pattern is and whether this holds true for women, my team and I analyzed eight years of DEXA scans from nearly 18,000 American men and women.

And what we found actually paints a pretty clear picture of why belly fat seems so hard to get rid of. For men under 25% body fat, their belly fat levels are actually about the same as the rest of their body. But once you go above 25% your belly now becomes the preferred place for fat storage.

And this doesn't just mean belly fat becomes easier to gain. It also means it becomes harder to lose. So we plotted the data to show the rate of fat loss from different body parts as you get leaner with the belly here in red.

Now the flatter the line, the slower the rate of fat loss. So at higher body fat levels, notice how fat quickly drops off from the arms, the legs, and the hips, while fat in the belly remains much higher. But right around 30% body fat, belly fat actually starts to nose dive and the other areas flatline.

And by the time you get to 25%, the belly is no longer fatter than other areas and continues progressing faster afterwards. So it seems like once your body has burned off enough fat from easier to access areas, it'll eventually start pulling more and more from your stomach. Now for women, the picture actually does look quite a bit different.

They tend to store less fat in the belly to begin with and more in their hips, their legs, and their arms. For example, this is my friend Nicole who was starting her fat loss journey at 33%. When I looked at her belly fat though, it was almost identical, 33.

7%. Whereas her legs and hips clocked in much higher. And if the data from our DEXA scans proves reliable, we should see that when Nicole and the mesh see a similar drop in total body fat, Nicole will probably see more of that fat loss coming from her belly compared to the mesh.

At least as they're both working to burn through what I like to think of as the first layer of belly fat. So, this is a soft outer layer of belly fat that prevents you from seeing any ab definition. When men burn through this, you should see some upper abs poking through and usually some shape in the rest of their abs.

Now, for women, the waist tightens up and rolls smooth out, but you're not going to see any clear ab definition yet. And typically, the end of layer 1 gets you at 20% body fat for men and 28% body fat for women. Now, the good news about this layer is it actually requires the least amount of effort to burn off.

For Nomesh, all he needed was four core habits, plus a bonus one to help him push through the biggest challenge this layer posed. First, I set Nomesh up with a workout plan consisting of just three workouts per week, just to make sure any weight he does lose comes directly from fat, and we may even see some muscle gains at the same time. Second, I gave him a few simple diet rules.

At every meal, include a portion of lean protein about the size of your palm. Prepare most of your meals at home where portions and ingredients are easier to control and build each meal around these core foods. With these changes, he shouldn't even need to count calories to start seeing change.

Third, I set him a baseline goal of 8,000 steps per day to bump up his daily calorie burn. And lastly, I got him a scale to track his morning weight with a weight loss goal of just one pound per week. Now, I also set up Nomesh with our Built with Science Plus app to help him track his weight loss, coach him in his workouts every week and just get healthy meal recipes to try out.

Now, even though layer 1 requires the least effort physically, it's actually the hardest mentally. And Desh found this out when he checked back in on day 30. Despite being 7 lb down on the scale, he didn't feel like his belly had changed at all.

He actually texted me afterwards doubting the plan was even working. But if you look closely at his chin, his chest, and his arms, you can clearly see that these areas have leaned down. And when I measured his waist, he was already down 3 cm, which meant he was definitely losing belly fat, just not at the speed he was expecting.

And if you remember from earlier, that's exactly what our DEXA data predicted. In the early stages, fat comes off from the easy areas first, while the belly lags behind. So by day 60, even though he had lost another 3 cm around his waist, visually his belly hadn't progressed as much as his chest and his arms, where he even had some new veins showing.

And then when you compare Nesh's progress to Nicole's, who had lost a similar amount of total body fat, she was down 8 cm around her waist and already had some ab definition starting to poke through. And while we were finally starting to see where Nesh's abs would eventually come through, the abs are relatively small, flat muscles. Compared to your big arm and shoulder muscles, you simply have so much more fat to lose before your abs can start poking through.

Remember, the goal of layer 1 is not to get six-pack abs. And if I wanted to prevent Nash from quitting right before the going gets good, I desperately needed a way for him to see all the progress he was clearly making everywhere else. Which leads me to his bonus habit where I asked Nomesh if he'd be willing to take a progress photo after his morning weighing.

When reviewing these photos, I wanted him to not just hyperfixate on his belly fat, but to be able to see the progress he was making through his chest, his shoulders, and his arms that he was clearly overlooking. And with the ability to look back at his pictures every week, Nash genuinely started to notice the progress he was now making. Plus, now that he was below 25% body fat, progress around his belly finally started to really pick up all the way to day 90, where after losing 12 lbs of fat, layer 1 was successfully burned off, revealing some clear upper ab definition.

Now, although it may not seem like it compared to most of the influencers you see on Instagram, at this point, Nesh is already leaner than about 84% of men. But to push this even further, he's going to have to get through layer two, which for most men gets you to around 15% body fat and 23% for women. But I'd say layer two is where most people give up.

In layer 1, it seems like nothing's changing. Whereas layer 2, fat loss actually slows down or even stops because your body starts to fight back. And the strategies that work for layer 1 no longer do now.

>> So 2 weeks, the weight hasn't changed. Uh the progress photos I'm taking daily, they look identical. And the weird thing is like I'm recording most of the meals and been um pretty consistent I feel.

So yeah, I don't know what's happening. Just got to figure this one out and um see what's going on. >> For starters, depending on how much fat you lost in layer 1, you're going to now be carrying less weight than you did before.

And this is like taking off a 24/7 weighted backpack, which decreases your calorie burn. Plus, your body has now sensed the fat loss and tries to counteract it by conserving your energy. It's subtle at first, but you might sit down more and just walk around less without you even noticing.

Now, when this would happen to me when I was younger, I would try to counter this by ramping up my cardio, adding 20 to 30 minutes of intense running or cycling after each workout. And while it worked, eventually I would just stall again, and then I just didn't have the energy to add anymore. Which is why for Namesh, we simply decided to move his daily steps from 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day.

This works as an insurance policy to help keep his daily calorie burn consistent without spiking his hunger or burning him out. The one exercise I did ask Nomesh to bump up though was a strength training. Most research suggests that just two to three full body workouts a week, around four to six hard sets per muscle, is enough to prevent muscle loss while you're in a deficit.

But I'm curious if by going above this minimum, Nash can actually build muscle even as his fat loss gets more and more intense. So, we took his 3-day workout split and changed it to this 4-day split, focusing more volume on muscles that Nesh had been struggling to grow, like his shoulders and his arms. And we'll be doing a final scan and measurements at the end of his journey to see if he was actually able to put on muscle.

But the extra steps and workout isn't actually going to bump up his daily calorie burn all that much. The more impactful side of the fat loss equation is his calorie intake. Up until this point, he hasn't been tracking calories.

But to get rid of layer 2, it's almost a non-negotiable to make sure he's consistently in a deficit. And to find out how many calories he needs, I entered a mesh's current weight and activity into our Built with Science Plus app, which landed at a daily calorie target between 2100 and 2300 calories per day. Now, if you're not on our app, then you can take your body weight in pounds and multiply it by between 10 to 12.

It's not perfect, but for most people, that's roughly around the calories you want to aim for during this stage. But with his favorite order at Chipotle already coming in at just over 900 calories, I needed to show Namesh a better way to use his calories, which meant setting him up with the 2100 calorie meal plan. >> Okay, don't take this the wrong way, but I got some butter chickens.

>> No offense symbol. That's fine. consisting of apple cinnamon overnight oats for breakfast, butter chicken for lunch, some quick snacks before his workout and a homemade freezable burrito for dinner.

And what I think is the most important part is saving enough room in your diet for one treat at the end of the day to look forward to. For me, my go-to is always a ninja creamy ice cream that I make with our science protein. And for Nomesh, it was a combination of either sugar-free Jell-O, Greek yogurt, caffeine-free Coke Zero, and Smart Sweets.

And if you guys do want Nomesh's full meal plan, I'll give you a PDF of it completely free and I'll put a link in the description box down below. But what's perhaps the trickiest thing about this phase is not everyone's metabolism will respond the same. Researchers in 2019 discovered that most people's metabolisms fall into one of two categories.

The first is what researchers call a spend thrift metabolism. People in this group, when their calories are restricted, their metabolism stays high and they continue dropping weight. However, the second group is what researchers label a thrifting metabolism.

And when this group was placed in the same deficit, their bodies adapted to reduce their calorie burn and slow their weight loss to a crawl. Now, there may be an advantage to having a thrifty metabolism as you typically have an easier time gaining muscle. But when it comes to fat loss, you may have to restrict your calories further or increase your daily activity in order to keep up with individuals in the spend thrift group.

The question we needed to figure out though was which group would Nomesh fall under. If his metabolism was spent thrift, 2100 calories should be enough to keep seeing progress. But if he has a thrifty metabolism, then our app will notice if he's not progressing and likely recommend dropping his calories a little bit more.

Luckily, Nesh's body was clearly responding to his calorie intake as fat loss around his belly was really starting to pick up with visible definition in his upper abs and his obliques finally coming in. Now, for most guys, burning through all of layer 2 will usually take about 10 to 16 weeks, depending on how aggressive you are with your diet. But by this point, you should see a visible four or even six-pack, depending on how your fat is distributed.

Whereas for a woman, your stomach will look visibly tighter. And depending on the lighting, you might even see some definition in the upper abs and down the middle. But even after burning through layer 2, there's usually still some softness left around your abs, especially in the lower belly and around the love handles.

And for those areas, you'll need to burn through the most stubborn third layer of belly fat, where less than 1% of people ever succeed. But while this final layer is the hardest to lose, it's actually when your belly visually progresses the fastest because there's now much less fat covering your abs, even a small loss makes a noticeable difference. So instead of waiting months or several weeks to see changes, now you might see sharper ab definition every few days.

But it comes with a catch that every pound of fat you lose now is going to feel like a battle. Part of the reason for this is not all body fat is created equal. Certain fat on your body is packed with beta receptors, which you can think of like a gas pedal, making it easy for your body to burn for energy.

Most of the fat you burn off up to this point are from those areas. Whereas the stubborn fat left on your body is full of alpha 2 receptors, which instead work like a brake pedal, slowing down fat release. So your body always has some fat reserves to rely on.

And typically the areas that have most of these receptors are going to be your lower abs, love handles, hips, and especially the glutes. It's why shredded glutes in professional bodybuilders is seen as the holy grail of elite conditioning. >> So just struggling to fall asleep today a wee bit.

Um I'm usually pretty good at falling asleep, but uh the hunger is just setting in a bit more than usual. And at this stage, your body ramps up hunger, lowers your energy, and basically does everything it can to prevent more fat loss. So, I had to introduce Nesh to two simple strategies to break through.

The first was his food selection. Name mesh's diet had a ton of wiggle room when he was on layer 1. And when we moved on to layer 2, things had to get a bit tighter.

But for layer three, our margins are thin. We needed every calorie he's eating to go as far as possible to keep him full and energized. That meant no more cream in his morning coffee and fewer nights out for drinks.

We also strategically swapped the rice in his meal plan for yellow potatoes, which in a well-known satiety index study scored as the most filling food you can eat. In fact, I'm currently working on another project where we tested a simple no calorie counting diet mainly based around potatoes. And let's just say the results were pretty mind-blowing.

So, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss that. But no matter what you eat, your body's resistance to fat loss is only going to continue to get stronger the longer your diet lasts and the leaner that you get. And one side effect of this is stress hormones like cortisol start to rise.

This is where many people get blindsided. Higher cortisol levels make your body hold on to more water. So at this stage, you can literally wake up one morning and your belly will look worse than it did the day before, softer and more bloated.

And when you're this lean, even a small amount of water retention around your midsection becomes very noticeable. Now, when this used to happen to me, my first reaction was to assume that my plan just wasn't working and my belly fat was not coming off. So, I panic, adding more cardio to my workouts and dropping my calories even lower.

But this only made things worse, putting more stress in my body and even eventually causing me to lose muscle. But once you understand what's really happening here, rather than trying to fight harder to lose fat, your best move might be to stop fighting at all. Which brings me to our second strategy, diet breaks.

So, as soon as I could tell Nesha's body was starting to hold on to more water and just wasn't responding well to his plan, instead of lowering his food, we increased it roughly 500 calories higher than he was dieting at. And mainly by adding more carbs to his date, rice, bread, and some of his favorite snacks. Usually, you'll want to do this for anywhere between 5 to 14 days, as that's often enough time for cortisol to come down, sleep to improve, and those relentless hunger signals to finally ease off.

But for the mash, 5 days was all it took. And even though he was eating more, his abs actually came back looking sharper. His energy also improved, and he just felt ready to push forward again.

The only question I needed him to answer now was how far he wanted to go. based on where he was currently at. If we wanted to push all the way to 10% body fat, which is where the vast majority of your stubborn fat is actually gone, it would probably take another eight weeks of dieting.

But for some people, chasing that level of leanness is just not always the smartest move. Take my brother-in-law, Dayton. He dropped from 33% body fat down to about 18% in just 5 months.

The leanest he's ever been in his life. And by that point, his body was definitely starting to resist. So, if I had tried to push him to get even leaner in one go, it would have almost guaranteed a crash and uncontrollable weight regain afterwards.

So, instead, we hit pause on his fat loss and shifted to maintaining his new weight, followed by a lean bulk to gain some more muscle. And now that his body has actually settled into his lower level of body fat, he'd be ready to tackle another diet if he wanted to get leaner. But the second reason layer 3 just isn't for everyone is that most guys overestimate how much muscle they have.

and underestimate just how much fat they have to lose. In fact, every person that I've dieted this lean has been surprised by just how low the scale has to go to get there. So, if you don't have much muscle to begin with, you may end up feeling and looking a little bit skinnier than you'd hope for.

Fortunately, it seems like the mesh has been able to build some muscle as he's lost fat. But today is actually the day he's going to get his final DEXA scan, which will tell us how much fat he lost and how deep he made it to losing his third layer of belly fat. But first, I should also mention that from the start of his journey until now, it has taken a mesh 275 days using this exact plan for each layer of belly fat.

Now, I'm sure some of you would be expecting those results in half the time, but for context, Nash also took a fiveweek trip in the middle of his plan where his goal was just to maintain his weight while keeping up with his training. And he also just personally found the slow and steady approach worked best for him. So, while taking almost a full year may sound like a long time, think about how many years it took for you to gain your belly fat in the first place.

And think about what you were doing this same time, but last year. That time is going to pass regardless. So Nash just focused on making small improvements week after week until he was here.

All right, let's see what we got. >> Okay. >> Damn, dude.

Look, >> dude. There's no way. Holy.

Look at this. One, two, three, four, five, six. I feel you got a eight pack coming in, too.

Dude, they're coming slowly, >> dude. And like the size is there. >> Yeah.

>> You know what I mean? Yeah. Give her a little double bicep flex for the camera.

Holy crap, bro. You look amazing, dude. Holy.

Now, Masha's total body fat dropped from 29. 5% on day one all the way down to just 16. 7%.

But when we zoom in on his belly fat, the change was even more dramatic. From 34. 4% down to just 13%.

That's a drop of 20 percentage points. And the best part is he actually gained almost seven pounds of lean mass throughout the entire process with a good chunk of that being actual muscle. >> I'm getting there.

I'm happy, man. >> What do you mean you're getting there? You're there, bro.

Holy crap. >> Cheers, man. I appreciate it.

>> That's incred. Look at this. I'm just going to peel it.

>> If you guys are watching and you want, you know, a pine that takes care of all the guest work for you. I can't physically be there, but it's the next best thing. He can vouch for it.

Um, just head to buildwithcience. com or scan this QR code. You get two weeks free to try out the app.

It's going to take care of all the workouts, all the nutrition for you. It's actually going to purize the plan based on your body just like it did for no mesh. >> Yeah, 100%.

Um, and just to Jeremy's point, I mean, without the app would have been really hard. I was tracking everything every day. Um, the app does the foods, does the weights and everything.

So, just having everything in a one-stop shop, again, not pushing it, but it genuinely helped a lot. So, um, massive guts for the app as well. Yeah.

Well, it it didn't do the the hard work, which is, you know, showing up at the gym and um prepping the meals. That was all you. So, >> yeah.

Without your guidance, it wouldn't have been possible. But yeah, >> man, dude, I'm freaking stoked for you. Holy crap.

>> Thank you so much. >> I wish it wasn't so cold, though.