The myth of the flat belly

I’m six pages deep on Google. I’m trying to remember the last time I’ve ever gone through that many results searching for something, and I can’t.

This time I’ve Googled ‘flat belly’. I’m confronted with page after page of ‘solutions’ to this apparent problem; ranging from flat belly tea, powders and supplements through flat belly exercises; diet plans promising to help me ‘lose belly fat and transform your life with a Perfect Body!’ all the way to surgical options like tummy tucks and liposuction. Along the way, Google helpfully suggests what other people have searched on; ‘How can I get a flat stomach in 7 days?’ and ‘How to be curvy with flat tummy’.

Nowhere in those thousands of websites is the question I’m looking to answer. It’s one I have never in my life, until recently, thought to ask: is a flat belly really something I should be striving for? Is it really the ideal?

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I’ve been pondering this question in light of recent developments in my own body, in which, post-menopause, things have changed. I knew this was likely; it’s clear in all the research I’ve done on this life stage that female bodies change in both shape and composition as we lose oestrogen, and that for the most part this change is inevitable.

And yet, it’s tough to deal with. What was - while never pancake-like - at least consistent, is now more rounded. On top of that my belly seems unpredictable; sometimes uncomfortably distended and other times quite happily accommodated in my clothes, seemingly at random. Whatever the time, my belly is not flat, as the body ideal suggests it should be.

But should it, really?

“The flat stomach thing I think is really dangerous”, says Auckland-based dietitian Nikki Hart. “I think it sets up unrealistic and very bad psychosocial stuff, for young women especially.”

She points to history for some perspective, and she is correct. From the Venus of Willendorf – a fertility icon thought to be 25,000 years old – to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus created in 1484, idealised female bodies have bellies. There are bellies everywhere in the great nudes of the art world; even when women are portrayed with small frames, there’s a pleasing curve to their abdomens. I’ve quickly learned that a bit of art history study can be really good for the body image.

In modern history – from the 16th century, say – the ideal female form has gone through many cycles, and quite some extremes. Clothes tell the story. Elizabethan gowns were stiff and flat from nipple to hip with wide farthingale skirts at the sides. The 1870s gave us bizarre and elaborate bustles extending far over the butt; the 1920s saw the ideal silhouette become devoid of any curve at all. Less than 20 years later, the hourglass figure was back in style. Worth noting: all of these body shapes could only be achieved through the use of restrictive corsetry and/or padding underneath the garments.

Fast forward to my lifetime (I was born in 1970) and corsetry has never been a thing. The only way I’ve ever known to ‘achieve’ the ideal body is through control: exercise, diet and restraint. My whole life, even as curves have come and gone; the flat belly ideal remained. Even when – as per now – the ‘ideal’ seems impossible without surgical intervention. It's very, very unlikely that anyone is going to naturally have a luscious bum and hips, big breasts, a tiny waist and a flat belly. The Kardashian look, in other words.

“The Kardashian body type is idealised precisely because it is so hard to attain”, reckons nutritionist Lyndi Cohen. “Beauty standards will always be centred around what is hard to reach.”

The unattainable is, as with many things, aspirational.

There are lots of logical reasons why real human women are not meant to have flat bellies.

One is simple physiology: we have organs that need somewhere to live; several organs that don’t exist in the more-likely-to-be-flat abdomens of men. Those organs need protection.

“Everyone with organs in their abdomen will have a layer of fat that is useful for protecting us from impact. Your stomach area is not protected by any other bones”, notes Cohen.

Genetic factors – the many variations in body shapes that exist in humans – come into play. People’s torsos, skeletons and bone structures are different, meaning the shape of their bellies is different too. I have, for example, the combo of long legs – mostly femur - and a shorter torso, meaning people meeting me for the first time when I’m seated are sometimes surprised when I stand up and turn out to be taller than they imagined.

People also have variation when it comes to the amount of fat on their bodies. “Women require a higher percentage of body fat in order to be healthy”, Cohen explains. “For our hormones to be regulated; to have enough energy reserves to be fertile. It can depend on where you store fat, but often that fat can be around the belly.”

Normal bodily functions such as female hormonal cycles during menstruation, and perimenopause and menopause can also affect how bellies look, as can age and life stage changes. “This is all incredibly normal”, Cohen stresses.

So, too, is the fluctuation of the belly due to the eating and digestion of food.

“Even in those who have a flat stomach, it's only often flat for a moment in time when they wake up early in the morning”, Cohen notes. In other words – when the stomach is empty of food.

This is something Hart is keen to stress, too. It is normal, she says, for the belly to expand with food and fluid and air.

“Your body is supposed to fart and burp - that's normal. The gastrointestinal tract has air in it.”

So-called ‘solutions’ we may try for belly reduction may do more harm than good. Hart thinks a social-media driven focus on easing so-called ‘bloating’ might be having a detrimental effect.

“I worry that women are using supplements, for example, that are non-prescribed, for weight loss… it's getting to the stage of laxative abuse in some cases because people don't understand that that's actually what's in a lot of these products.”

And while health experts including Hart and Cohen acknowledge that there is some abdominal fat – known as visceral fat, which sits deep inside the abdomen – that’s associated with an increased risk of poor health, it doesn’t mean we should be dieting constantly.

Cohen says: “I'm not endorsing obesity, which is sometimes the pushback I get. I am simply saying that it's not worth sacrificing 95 percent of your life to lose five percent of your weight.”

So what is the answer? How do we develop a better relationship with our bodies and bellies?

Forget about all that stuff that comes up on Google, says Cohen, and concentrate on learning body acceptance.

“Acknowledging the myth of the flat stomach can liberate us and allow us to actually be more consistent with health… It is so much easier to take good care of a body that you like compared to a body that you hate.”

She advocates what she calls ‘exposure therapy’ to normalise bellies of all shapes and sizes.

“It’s an interesting way for us to deal with years and years of body hate. For example: I never felt I had a flat enough stomach to wear a crop top. And then I thought, am I going to spend the rest of my life waiting to have a flat stomach? I'm never going to have a flat stomach. Even at my thinnest weight, my stomach was not flat. And so I put on the crop top and I went and exercised, and the world didn't fall apart. No one commented; no one gawked; there were no repercussions. I just didn't have a flat stomach at the gym. And so by repeatedly doing this, it now feels very comfortable and normal for me. But the first time I did it, it felt incredibly scary and I felt so self-conscious.”

Other things to try: letting your partner touch your stomach, or wearing clothes that show the mound of your belly. “It could be even as simple as buying the right size pants … and discovering how much more comfortable you can feel in your underwear, in your clothes, by doing that. It is this little act of feeling a degree of discomfort and realizing it doesn't mean anything.”

Observing other people’s bodies is also helpful. “Very rarely in the wild will you see a perfectly flat stomach.”

Also worth remembering: bellies can be healthy. Cohen has more words of wisdom here.

“Sometimes that little bit of belly fat can actually be something protective and normal and healthy. If people say to me, ‘I struggle to lose the last five kilograms’, I might say to them: perhaps it's because you're not meant to. It's those last five kilograms that keep your hormones balanced, your mood lifted, your energy stable. It's those last five kilograms that allow you to fall asleep at night without thinking about the reps at the gym or grams of carbohydrates eaten. It's those five kilograms that allow you that freedom to go out and enjoy a meal of pasta with your family and not miss out on the social interactions that are so key to us being human. It's not missing out on memories to achieve something that is pretty unachievable and unattainable for most.”