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So, I know crunches/sit ups won't help me lose belly fat. I've known that I can't target places to lose fat from my body for a long time, but I've been doing some research lately and I'm curious about a few things.

I used to do sit ups almost every day for a few months in high school. I liked doing them, and I found that in conjunction with some dancing my fitness had improved over the time period. I'm now 19 and I've started doing them again lately.

In the past year and a half I've slowly lost about 13-14 kilos. I've been doing different kinds of exercise and healthy eating over that period and my stomach has definitely gone down in size. It's still big, jiggly and fatty so I decided that with my normal rigorous walking four times a week I'd start doing some crunches and see if it made a difference. It's only been two weeks but I feel a lot better. I don't think I've lost weight or anything, but I think it's helped to de-bloat my stomach. Is that possible? It's gone down by about half an inch already. My stomach does feel a lot tighter and nicer as well.

I'm not going to JUST do crunches. I focus mostly on walking (I have to walk a lot to get to my classes from the station which is a few kilometres away) and jogging whenever I can, but will the crunches help at all with these exercises to help smooth out my stomach a bit? In high school people used to say that if someone with a fat stomach did crunches the muscle would form underneath the fat and only push out the fat even more. I don't know if this is true, but obviously I don't want to make myself look worse when I'm trying to look better.

May be stupid questions, but thanks for the advice and opinions anyway!

I think it may depend if you are male or female? For women it is extremely difficult to put on muscle, and basically impossible to do so while you are in a calorie deficit (i.e. losing weight). So if you're female then don't worry about stomach muscle pushing the fat out! If you're a guy it is easier to pack on muscle but still I don't think this push out your stomach fat in a noticeable way.

The main thing is to lose the fat which, as you say, you can't spot reduce anyway. Stomach bloat is affected by a bunch of other stuff like water retention and how many carbs you are eating, so perhaps you have changed your diet as well, maybe you're not eating as much bread/pasta? Stomach fat is also affected by hormones, mainly cortisol - but this is more the tendency of fat to be stored on your stomach, so probably not a visible change in 2 weeks.

I reckon you should keep going with your crunches, because when you get rid of that last layer of fat you will have some killer abs to show off :)

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