When you gain weight, the places that get affected first and foremost are your stomach, buttocks and thighs. Of all of them the hardest to lose is your belly fat. The main objective of this article is to reveal best little-known secrets but quick ways that you can use right now to lose weight and develop abs of steel.

Most fitness experts will tell you that when you start losing weight by exercising, the initial drop in weight is water loss. What they won't tell you is how important water is in facilitating rapid weight loss. Water is not only a cleansing agent, but it also aids in your metabolism. Drinking water throughout the day is very important and developing a habit of drinking about 6 to 10 glasses of water a day will go along way to ensuring general well-being and weight loss. It is critically important that you sip some water every now and then during exercises in order to prevent dehydration. It is also important not to confuse water with fluids. The latter contains calories and would add to your total caloric intake for the day, a fact that must be recognized in your meal consumption relative to your ability to lose belly fat and general weight-loss endeavor.

After the initial weight loss, most people do not experience any further weight reduction and some people even tend to gain some of the weight back. This adds to frustration and a temptation to resort to unhealthy practices like starving yourself. More of that later. More often than not, the culprit here is sodium (salt). Salt loves water and too much salt will make your body retain water, which would make it difficult for you to lose weight. Although salt is an essential element for your body to function properly, it is important to limit its intake and therefore to avoid processed and packaged foods that tend to have very high concentrations of sodium. Too much salt could also lead to hypertension - high blood pressure. And we all know that hyperstension is a silent killer!

As mentioned earlier, this brings us to the issue of food. Starvation will not make you lose weight the proper way. Infact, it wil
l just make you unhealthy, sick, weak and ugly. You must eat in order to lose weight. You must eat often in order to constantly engage your cells in metabolic activity. You must eat the proper foods that will trigger cellular action metabolism leading to rapid weight loss. You must consume healthy portions of fiber-rich foods like fruits, vegetables and nuts. It is important to eat proteins like poultry and fish and also eat some fat (butter) and oils like olive oil, while avoiding sugar, cakes, cookies and soda. For rapid weight loss, limit yourself to a total of about 1100 calories a day.

Exercising the right way will make you lose weight and develop rapid abs of steel. You must engage in exercises that target the right muscles. To make your weight loss endeavor more pleasant and enjoyable, you need a combination of walking, dancing, trotting, sports, ab crunches and weight-lifting. Rapid weight loss is based on a simple mathematical formula: burn more calories than you consume. There are good techniques to doing ab crunches that should not make your lower back hurt. When done correctly in combination with lifting weights, a 20- minute ab crunch work-out should tone your stomach muscles within a very short period of time.

You don't need any expensive gym equipment to flatten your abs. Training your stomach muscles can be done most effectively with an exercise ball. The core body muscles that most exercise ball routines target are the abdominal and back muscles. One of the principal benefits of exercising with an exercise ball is that the body responds to the instability of the ball to remain balanced, thus engaging more muscles.

Over a short period of time, the muscles become stronger in order to keep balance. The core muscles that an exercise the ball targets are:

Transversus abdominis: these are your deep abdominal muscles
Tultifidus: these are your back muscles that support your lumbar spine
Quadratus lumborum: these are the muscles of your lower back that maintain spinal and pelvic balance.

Originally used by physical therapists to treat patients with injuries and balancing problems, the exercise ball has now been incorporated into many training regimens and can be found in many fitness centers.