The #1 Reason You're Not Losing Belly Fat

“I can’t seem to lose this belly,” my friend Bill told me over Mexican food the other night. “I’m running 15 miles a week, I’m cutting calories everywhere I can, and nothing. The only thing I’m not giving up is my margaritas!” Then he scooped a bit of salt off the rim before throwing back a splash of his drink.
“The margaritas might be the problem,” I told him. “Not because of the calories. Because of the salt.”
In fact, a new study has linked obesity and sodium intake so closely that cutting down on salt might be the absolute best way to shed belly fat, fast. For every extra gram of salt you eat in a day--that’s a mere ⅕ of a teaspoon, or about what you’ll find in one of those tiny salt packets from the soup shop--your risk of obesity climbs by 25 percent, according to a study at Queen Mary University in London. Researchers speculate that sodium alters our metabolism, changing the way in which we absorb fat.
And that’s really bad news. From our packaged snacks to the food we order in restaurants, the modern American diet is saltier than Amy Schumer’s pillow talk. American men eat 4,243 mg of sodium a day, about double what experts recommend, while women average about 3,000 mg daily. And most of the salt we eat comes not from our own salt shaker, but from restaurants and packaged foods. The best way to seize control: Cook more at home, which will automatically cut your salt intake in half. That’s a lot of weight loss, just for eating a lot of delicious food. 

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