Your waistline is a key indicator of your health.

Carrying too much fat around your middle not only makes your, er, tubby, but also increases the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Every extra four inches of waist circumference increases the chances of a man dying of prostate cancer by seven percent.

But how best to shrink your waist? Aside from not eating processed crap and not drinking diet drinks, here’s what the experts advise.

Drink two cups of black coffee daily

In addition to caffeine, coffee contains many bioactive plant components to help with waist-shrinking.

Women who drink two or three cups of coffee a day have less fat around the middle than those who drink less or no coffee.

Men who drink two or three cups a day had almost two percent less abdominal fat than non-coffee drinkers.

Do seven minutes of body-weight exercises daily

Working the largest muscles of your body is effective for overall fat-blasting and will help to shift surplus flab from your waistline.

Body-weight exercises - which use your own weight for resistance - are a great starting point for fat loss. A circuit that includes trunk exercises will help to strengthen your middle for a lean appearance.

A seven-minute body-weight circuit comprising 12 exercises - jumping jacks, wall sits, crunches, step-ups, squats, triceps dips, high-knees running, lunges, push-ups with rotation, side planks, push-ups, and planks - for 30 seconds each, with 10 seconds recovery, will shred inches off your waist.

Cut calories to 800 a day

If you’re above a healthy weight or obese, you can reduce your intake quite drastically in the short term.

Rapid weight loss of just over six pounds in seven to 10 days can be safely achieved if you’re overweight and have no medical issues by reducing your calorie intake to 800 a day.

You’ll typically lose between two to four pounds of weight from reducing glycogen, stored in the liver and muscle with water, and then you’ll begin to lose fat.

Yes, you’ll have a visibly smaller midriff but 800 calories a day isn’t sustainable long term. Aim for a daily intake of 1300-1500 calories for women and 1600-1800 for men to keep weight off.

Eat servings of whole grains daily

Oats, barley, buckwheat, rye, and other whole grains provide fiber that fills you up.

This means you eat fewer calorific and refined foods, thus reducing consumption and waist size.

Fiber in whole grains, including wholegrain breads and cereals, has a satiating effect and reduces post-meal blood sugar spikes, which means you’re less likely to have hunger pangs and reach for unhealthy snacks.

Set a 10-hour eating window

Create an eating window where all your daily calories can be consumed.

Since it usually entails skipping at least one daily meal, the results can be significant.

Breakfast is not an essential meal and a lot of people find they manage to miss it quite easily, which automatically means you should eat less overall.

Stick to a 10-hour eating window and you can lower raised blood pressure and blood sugar, as well as excess body fat around your middle.

Drink alcohol moderately

Alcohol - beer and spirits in particular - contributes significantly to larger waists in men and women.

Heavy drinkers aged fifty-nine and older - that’s people who have three or four drinks four or more times a week - have waistlines that measure up to two inches more than those who drank less.

Alcohol is best avoided if you want to reduce your waistline. It’s easy to rack up calories as alcohol contains seven calories per gram.

A double gin and tonic has 150 calories, roughly the same as six squares of milk chocolate. While a large glass of wine has 160 calories, about the same as six teaspoons of peanut butter.

Walk for 50-70 minutes three times a week

Overweight women who walked for 50-70 minutes three times a week for twelve weeks lost an average of around one inch from their waist circumference.

Walking is the perfect low-impact cardio for fat-blasting and reducing the weight you’re carrying all over, as well as around your middle.

Walking at a moderate pace that is approximately 70 percent of your fastest walking speed - which means you will be breathing hard but can still talk in short sentences - for about an hour two or three times a week should be your goal.

Add some shorter, faster walks or jogs of 20-30 minutes if you can manage it on other days to slim down your midriff.

References

“How to reduce your waist” The Times (2022)

“Adiposity and risk of prostate cancer death: a prospective analysis in UK Biobank and meta-analysis of published studies” BMC Medicine (2022)

“Regular coffee consumption is associated with lower regional adiposity measured by DXA among US women” The Journal of Nutrition (2022)

“Whole and refined grain consumption and longitudinal changes in cardiometabolic risk factors in the Framingham offspring cohort” The Journal of Nutrition (2021)