Lose that belly fat!

(Shape Magazine) - You exercise, you eat right, but you still have a pooch. Here's the surprising reason why -- and how to fix it.

We crunch. We Ab Blast. We eschew carbs. Heck, we'll even go under the knife to get rid of ab flab.

Unfortunately, recent research shows that you can crunch until you crumble and diet till you're drained of energy, but if your days are full of stress, the perfect six-pack -- or even a flatter midsection -- will continue to elude you.

That's because fat in the abdominal area functions differently than fat elsewhere in the body. It has a greater blood supply as well as more receptors for cortisol, a stress hormone. Cortisol levels rise and fall throughout the day, but when you're under constant stress, the amount of the hormone you produce remains elevated. With high stress and, consequently, high cortisol levels, more fat is deposited in the abdominal area since there are more cortisol receptors there.

But ab flab is not the only price you'll pay for chronic stress (the kind created by a marriage that's unraveling, a job you hate, problems with your health -- rather than, say, tension caused by a traffic snarl). Chronically high cortisol levels also kill neurons in the brain and interfere with feel-good neuro-transmitters -- such as dopamine and serotonin -- which can lead to depression and feeling more stressed.

More stress = more fat

In short, the whole issue of abdominal fat goes far beyond how you look in a bikini: The fat at your waist -- what researchers call central obesity -- is associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and several types of cancer. And while it's true that heredity plays a role in overall body type (that is, whether you are more of an "apple" than a "pear"), says Brenda Davy, Ph.D., R.D., an assistant professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, "genetics accounts for only 25-55 percent of the tendency to develop the most serious diseases associated with abdominal fat -- the remainder is lifestyle."

Ongoing research at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), is showing that it doesn't even matter if a body is otherwise thin; if stress levels are high, ab fat will increase. "People called 'high-stress responders' [those who secrete more cortisol in response to stress than others] have more central fat, regardless of body weight," says Elissa Epel, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the psychiatry department at UCSF and the author of several studies on stress and eating behavior in premenopausal women.

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