Belly fat! Even the words sound disgusting! Getting six-pack abs is one of the main reasons why people of both sexes go on weight loss diets. The purpose is to look good, fit, and trim during bathing suit season at the beach. Nobody wants belly fat hanging out!

If you want advice about how to lose belly fat, all you have to do is type those words into the search box of your favorite search engine. You’ll get more advice that you can imagine. Most of it isn’t worth the space it takes up in cyberspace, though.

Here’s the thing. You can’t cause fat from a specific part of the body to go first when you are on a weight loss diet. And fat cells NEVER disappear. They can shrink, but they are always there unless you have them surgically removed. Even if you have fat cells surgically removed, your body will be in the process of replacing them before you are out from under the anesthesia.

That sounds pretty grim, but don’t give up. Belly fat can be eliminated. But eliminating belly fat is a two-step process. The first step is to lose weight, and the second step is to build abdominal muscle. Either step alone will not cause you to lose your belly fat. (And don’t believe it when anybody tells you that fat can be converted to muscle — the body doesn’t work like that.) You can lose fat and you can build muscle, but these are two separate processes.

There are two kinds of exercise: cardio exercise and muscle-building exercise. If you want to lose that belly fat, you are going to have to do both. Get on a weight loss diet, and then engage in both aerobic exercise to facilitate fat loss and weightlifting exercises to build muscle.