You work out zealously and eat healthy meals -- at least most of the time -- and the pounds are starting to drop off. You're looking and feeling more toned, too, just as you'd hoped.

But with all this effort, shouldn't you lose fat? Shouldn't the flab be dissolving faster? If you're of a certain age, you know the flab we're talking about.

If you're a woman, you may still have the dreaded muffin top, that slab of fat that spills stubbornly over the top of your best jeans, spoiling the look. Or if you're a man in that same bracket, you may have the unsightly pot belly that adds years to your otherwise youthful physique.

Shouldn't fat burning be faster? Not to mention easier?

WebMD consulted an exercise physiologist and an exercise physiologist/registered dietitian to find out how best to burn fat -- once and for all!

Here are their five best fat-burning strategies:


1. How to Burn Fat: Get Realistic

Get real tip No. 1: "You can't spot reduce," says Darlene Sedlock, PhD, an associate professor of kinesiology at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind. "Nobody wants to hear that."

Translation: If you're hankering to get rid of the jeans spillover or the pot belly, you need to burn fat from head to toe. "Anything to reduce your overall body fat will help," she says.

Get real tip No. 2: You need to give it some time. "There's no easy fix to the flab," Sedlock says. "Over time, some of the flab will disappear," if you're diligent about the eating and exercise plans. Give it several months, she suggests. Your weight might not change, but you will notice a difference in the way your clothes fit, she says.

Get real tip No. 3: This is perhaps the cruelest. You probably can't expect to be as flab-free as when you were 20. "Skin loses elasticity as you age," Sedlock says. The sagging of the skin adds to the unsightly appearance of flab, she says.

Other factors also make flab a challenge, says Jim White, an exercise physiologist and registered dietitian in Virginia Beach, Va. who is a national spokesman for the American Dietetic Association. "As we age, muscle mass declines, and metabolism slows, so we are definitely fighting an uphill battle."

So is some flab inevitable with age? "It seems to happen, but if you make a concentrated effort to avoid it, you can," Sedlock says. Too late if you're reading this article, of course, but preventing flab is a lot easier than banishing it, she says.

Even so, it's possible to reduce your fat and flab, White and Sedlock say. Besides being realistic, here are their best tips.


2. Fat-burning Workout: Pump Up the Cardio

A good overall cardiovascular conditioning exercise program is crucial to burn fat, say Sedlock and White. "Walking is excellent," White says, but most people have to pump it up a bit from their routine pace, especially if they've been exercising for a while and the flab isn't budging.

"Increase the days," White suggests. "If you work out two days, go to three. Or if you're jogging for half an hour, increase it to 45 minutes or an hour."

Interval training -- that is, alternating bursts of intense activity with bursts of lighter activity -- is a good way to burn more fat, White says. "Walk for five minutes, then jog for five," he says, then repeat. That strategy will burn overall more calories and more fat. If you are already jogging, jog then sprint to mix it up, he says.

Increasing intensity for a short period within your regular workout will burn more total calories and therefore more fat, Sedlock says.


3. Fat-burning Workout: Pump Iron or Do Other Strength Training

If you're trying to banish flab, weight training three times a week for a half hour each session -- if you're a beginner -- is ideal, White says. Once your flab is under control, two weight training sessions a week usually will help you maintain tone, he says.

"Work the full body," he says, rather than focus only on, say, triceps work for flabby upper arms. A full workout works all the major muscle groups, not just the flabby ones.

If you're a beginner to weights or other kinds of strength training, such as resistance bands, get some expert instruction first by hiring a personal trainer for a session or two, experts suggest.

You can incorporate the full-body weight training exercises that focus on your flabby areas, of course, White says. "For the muffin top, focus on the [abdominal] oblique muscles by doing bicycle kicks," he says, "or do oblique twists with the cable [weight] machine."

A simpler at-home exercise to burn fat, White says, is: Get a broom, hold it straight up over your head, then lean to the right and the left. You should feel the effort in your so-called love handles.

For flabby upper arms, you can do dumbbell kickbacks with hand weights. (With upper arm parallel to the floor and bent at the elbow, lean over a weight bench or other low bench with your other arm supporting your body. Extend the lower arm holding the weight until it is straight. Repeat and switch the weight to the other hand.)

To maximize the fat burning during weight training, women should aim for 12 to 15 repetitions per exercise, White says, and focus on a higher number of reps rather than constantly boosting the weight. Men should aim for eight to 12 reps and increase the weight periodically.
4. Fat-Burning Workout: Crunch Your Flab

Although a lot of people think a thousand sit-ups or crunches a day will get rid of the flab, that's not entirely true, Sedlock says. "Sit-ups aren't going to get rid of your abdominal fat, per se," she says. "Sit-ups strengthen the abdominal musculature." So that means with enough sit-ups your tummy should have a better appearance, she says.

"If part of the muffin top is due to those muscles not being exercised for a long time, toning up those muscles may help," she adds.

Pot bellies can be toned up with crunches and reverse crunches (lie flat and raise your hips and legs to work the lower abdominals).
5. How to Lose Fat: Overhaul Your Diet

Every other week, it seems, there's some new "fat-burning" food or supplement. On the list: chili peppers, low-fat dairy, and numerous dietary supplements.

There's some truth to the fat-burning food claims. "Some studies show certain foods can speed metabolism," White says.

For instance, capsinoids -- compounds derived from chili peppers -- increased fat burning slightly, and more so in subjects who had a body mass index (BMI) over 25, the beginning of overweight, according to Japanese researchers who published the study in Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Biochemistry.

Researchers have debated the role of dairy foods in weight management. Diets with at least three daily servings of [low-fat] dairy products speed weight loss and body fat loss in obese people compared to a diet with little dairy, according to Michael Zemel, PhD, of the University of Tennessee, who has published his results of the value of dairy in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition and other journals.

But White says don't rely on the so-called fat-busting foods to banish flab while you eat whatever you want the rest of the day. Instead, White suggests, incorporate the fat-burning foods into a sound diet.

What's sound and flab-unfriendly? Whole grains, lean protein, plenty of fruits and vegetables, and eight glasses of water daily, White says.

Small frequent meals also help you lose weight, White says, although not all experts agree that many mini-meals are better than three square meals.

"I have a client who came in eating one [huge] meal a day, and he weighed 300 pounds," White says. He put the man on five small, healthy meals a day. He lost weight, White says, and was amazed. Eating often also helps keep your energy levels up, White says.

Strap on the pedometer: Walking 10,000 steps daily helps greatly with weight loss, according to a new study. That's about five miles -- but over a day's time, it's possible, experts say.

Regular exercise has long been known to burn calories. Studies have shown that people who exercise regularly have less body fat, especially in the belly. Fat in the belly is linked to heart disease risk.

But the question has been: Exactly how much walking works?

This is the first study to specifically look at that figure, writes lead researcher Dixie L. Thompson, PhD, with the Center for Physical Activity and Health at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Her study appears in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

"Pedometers have become increasingly popular devices for public use," writes Thompson. "These devices are relatively inexpensive, are unobtrusive, and provide immediate feedback to the wearer." They also provide a relatively accurate report of overall calorie burn.

Among women over age 40, walking has been known to make a difference, reports Thompson. She set out to give midlife women a "walking formula" for weight loss.
Getting the Figure

In her study, 80 women -- average age 50 years old -- wore a pedometer every day for seven days. But before they started, researchers measured their height, weight, body mass index (BMI, a measure of body fat), as well as waist and hips (to determine belly fat).

Women wore their pedometers on their waistband. Every evening, they noted the number of steps they walked that day. Every morning, they reset the pedometers. They did nothing different, in terms of exercise -- just followed their typical work and leisure routines.

At the end of seven days, it was obvious: Women who walked more had less body fat, lower body mass index (BMI), and a lower waist/hip circumference, writes Thompson.

BMI, waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio are measures of obesity. A BMI of more than 25 is considered overweight, and more than 30 is obese. In men, having a waist more than 40 inches or waist-to-hip ratio more than 0.95 increases the risk of health problems. In women, it's 35 inches and 0.80.

The average sedentary person walks 2,000-3,000 steps per day.

In this study, women walking:

Less than 6,000 steps had a BMI of 29, 44% body fat, a 37-inch waist, 42-inch hips, and a 0.87 waist-to-hip ratio.

6,000 to 10,000 steps had a BMI of 26, 35% body fat, a 32-inch waist, 40-inch hips, and a 0.80 waist-to-hip ratio.

10,000 steps or more had a BMI of 23, 26% body fat, a 29-inch waist, 39-inch hips, and a 0.75 waist-to-hip ratio.

"Those who walked less had more total fat, and more centrally located fat," Thompson writes. The health implications (heart disease and type 2 diabetes) caused by this excess fat make her study important, she adds.

And walking has become increasingly popular among women between 45 and 54 years old. "Clearly, walking is an important means for American adults, and particularly women in their middle and older years."

Walking can have the added benefit of lowering blood pressure and blood sugar, she writes.

Her study does not show whether walking has similar effects for men -- or for women in other age or ethnic groups, since all were white women between 45 and 60 years old, she says. However, women in her study had diverse body compositions.

A few ideas to help you get walking:

Get a dog (so you'll have a good excuse to walk).

Use the stairs instead of the elevator.

Park farther from the mall or the office.

Take walking breaks during the work day.

After work, take a fast walk around your neighborhood, to get extra steps.

Get that step bench out of the closet and step-walk to your favorite TV show.

Soon enough, you'll be on top of that weight loss problem.

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Don't dump dairy delights when dieting. That's the word from researchers who found that adding yogurt to a low-calorie diet helped people lose belly fat.

University of Tennessee scientist Michael Zemel, PhD, put 34 obese people on a low-calorie diet. Sixteen of them got pills with 400 to 500 mg of calcium per day. The other 18 people ate a higher calcium diet -- enough yogurt to give them 1,100 mg of calcium per day.

After 12 weeks, everybody lost a lot of fat. The comparison group had six pounds less fat, and the yogurt group lost about 10 pounds of fat. But those who ate Yoplait Light yogurt in the General Mills-sponsored study looked different from those who didn't. The yogurt eaters' waists shrank by more than an inch and a half. The comparison subjects lost about a quarter of an inch from their waist size.

Body scans showed why. Sixty percent of the yogurt eaters' weight loss was belly fat, while only 26% of the comparison group's loss was belly fat.

"Not only did yogurt help the study participants lose more weight -- the average weight loss was 13 pounds -- they were about twice as effective at maintaining lean muscle mass," Zemel says in a news release. "This is a critical issue when dieting. You want to lose fat, not muscle. Muscle helps burn calories, but it is often compromised during weight loss."

Zemel's earlier research shows that calcium -- especially dairy calcium -- slows down the body's fat-making process. He says that dieters should eat three servings of fat-free or low fat dairy products every day.

"The moral of the calcium story is to not dump dairy when you're dieting," Zemel says. "Not only is it critical to keep your calcium levels high so you won't lose bone density, it will also help you maintain your muscle mass and increase you fat loss."

It's unclear if the source of calcium affects fat loss -- whether it makes a difference if the calcium comes from the diet (dairy products) or from calcium supplement pills.

Zemel presented the study findings at this week's Experimental Biology 2003 meeting in San Diego, Calif.

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Slipping back into Breath of the Wild is typically a painless process; spirited moments are never far away, and tranquil scenery makes the time between finding treasure and hard-fought battles consistently captivating. With so many things vying for your attention, it's fair to say that the game doesn't need to be expanded. But as the Master Trials DLC showed us earlier this year, there are still pieces of this lost chapter in Hyrule's history to uncover.

For the game's final act, The Champions' Ballad, Link's ancient allies (Revali, Daruk, Mipha, and Urbosa) get their chance to retake the spotlight. The result is less impactful to the overall story that we're already familiar with, but the accompanying quests and new gear do a lot of heavy lifting, delivering over a dozen new stages to test your problem-solving skills in ever more interesting ways. They alone make a return trip to Hyrule worth getting excited about.

A big part of this new journey involves walking in the champions' footsteps, re-enacting feats they performed prior to the fall of Hyrule, to unlock long-forgotten memories--but you must first prove yourself worthy of the opportunity. Upon returning to the Resurrection Chamber, the cave where Link awoke from his 100-year slumber, you're given a weapon known as the One-Hit Obliterator. As the name implies, this short-range weapon allows you to kill an enemy in a single blow; but with your health consequently whittled down to a quarter heart, you're also more vulnerable than ever.

Similar to how you may have felt when tackling Eventide Island or the Trials of the Sword, the threat of an easy death when wielding the Obliterator is stressful, and it takes time to acclimate to being such a fragile warrior. You may have shrugged off an occasional bee sting before, but it's little incidents like these that teach you to think twice about every move during this phase of The Champions' Ballad. Sadly, it's a great setup that ends too soon. After clearing out four small enemy camps and the shrines that emerge from their defeat, the weapon returns to the resurrection chamber having "fulfilled its duty." Even after completing everything the DLC has to offer, the weapon remains unusable, which feels like a missed opportunity.

With this stage of the new journey complete, you're sent to the four corners of Hyrule on a glorified scavenger hunt. The accordion-playing Kass regales you with songs that hint at your objectives without completely spelling out the steps involved. Adding to the mystery are the visual hints that reference a specific part of Hyrule, but these pictures are limited, forcing you to pore over the map in search of your destinations.

In a very pleasing way, the goals set for you take great advantage of Breath of the Wild's numerous mechanics. You will take on a snowboarding challenge that tasks you to pass through rings in a limited amount of time, hunt Hyrule's elusive dragons, and re-engage the banana-loving Yiga clan, among other missions that test the breadth of your capabilities. And for each task you complete, a new shrine surfaces from underground.

The Champions' shrines force you to engage in mindfulness and critical thought. They typically involve a lot of moving pieces, veering away from combat in favor of puzzle-solving. So far removed from a life of shrine-hunting in the main game, returning to these creatively built challenges takes you back to a time when Breath of the Wild was this new and mysterious thing, an experience filled with surprises.

Upon completing the three shrines in a given set, you're able to tap into the memories of the relevant champion. You don't get the opportunity to directly control Hyrule's famous defenders, but as Link, you re-enact their battles against Ganon's four blights--the same four bosses you fight at the end of each of the game's Divine Beast dungeons. The difference this time around is that you are limited to a small selection of gear based on what each champion would have carried into battle. Oddly, you retain access to the powers bestowed to you by the champions' spirits in the past, which give you incredible advantages and somewhat negate what would otherwise be difficult battles. You can always turn off these powers if you choose, but given the context of exploring someone else's memories, it would have made more sense had they been disabled by default.

Your immediate reward for beating each blight is the ability to recharge Champion abilities in less time, and new cutscenes for each champion; each one shows a recollection of when they were recruited to join Zelda's anti-Ganon squad 100 years in the past. These vignettes are more playful than serious, which is a little disappointing considering the gravity of the calamity they're up against.

Thankfully, there's a bigger and better reward waiting for you once you've resolved every champion's quests: a new Divine Beast dungeon, complete with a totally surprising boss fight. In a similar fashion to other Divine Beasts, the final station requires you to manipulate the entire structure, rotating major components this way and that, as you work to resolve the four puzzles locking away the final area. It's another reminder of how clever, if non-traditional, Breath of the Wild's dungeons are. While shrines ask you to solve puzzles comprised of compact devices and easily conceivable constraints, the scope of the final Divine Beast (like the ones before it) is delightfully difficult to wrap your head around both for how big it is and how intricate its solutions are.

The parting gift for your efforts is one of the unlikeliest additions to The Legend of Zelda: an ancient motorcycle. Loosely modeled to resemble a unicorn, Link's new bike fits thematically if not logically into Breath of the Wild's mythical tapestry. On one hand, having a bike at the ready overshadows your stable of horses. On the other, tearing through Hyrule on a motorcycle is as ridiculously playful as it sounds. It even makes for a fun snowboard replacement on snowy hills, which helps escalate the sense of speed as you rocket down mountains and look for ramps to catch a bit of air. The only real disappointment: you can't summon the motorcycle in the desert nor travel there if you're already on the go. Attempt the latter, and an invisible wall prevents you from proceeding, exactly the same as if you tried to enter on horseback.

Who knows if Nintendo will continue to surprise us with fanciful new additions to Breath of the Wild down the road, but considering that The Champions' Ballad is likely the final world on this chapter in The Legend of Zelda, it's a bittersweet goodbye. There are so many wonderful quests and beautiful, tiny moments that make revisiting Hyrule's past feel like reliving your own memories, when Breath of the Wild was truly new and surprising. Nintendo certainly could have extended some of the aspects within The Champions' Ballad, such as giving you access to the Obliterator at anytime, and letting you ride your new motorcycle over sandy dunes, but these are minor blemishes on an otherwise great trip down memory lane.

The first people to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi are taking to Twitter to deliver their verdicts on the on the forthcoming film. Full reviews won't be up for a few more days, but critics fresh out of the cinemas are offering their two cents, and we've gathered them up for you.

So far it seems The Last Jedi is faring well with critics. In a series of tweets, EW's Anthony Breznican said The Last Jedi "may be the first Star Wars movie that's not just about growing up, but also about growing old."

Luke was right: "This is not going to go the way you think." #TheLastJedi will shatter you - and then make you whole again. pic.twitter.com/PJyYpH5loP
— Anthony Breznican (@Breznican) December 10, 2017

IGN's Joshua Yehl was equally as enthused about The Last Jedi.

I am STUNNED by #StarWars #TheLastJedi. I gasped, I laughed, I screamed, I cried and I had the time of my life. Rian Johnson pulled it off, making what might be the best Star Wars movie ever. pic.twitter.com/0VE5M90dsH
— Joshua Yehl (@JoshuaYehl) December 10, 2017

Terri Schwartz, meanwhile, praised the performances of The Last Jedi's cast.

Not only are Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill at their very best as Leia and Luke in this movie, but Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver blow Rey and Kylo Ren out of the park. I didn’t expect where those characters went and it’s my favorite part of the movie. #TheLastJedi
— Terri Schwartz (@Terri_Schwartz) December 10, 2017

Comicbook.com's James Viscardi went as far as saying The last Jedi is a new benchmark for the series.

No hyperbole - #TheLastJedi is the best #starwars movie. @rianjohnson and co nailed it
— James Viscardi (@JimViscardi) December 10, 2017

From what we can gather, The Last Jedi may live up to expectations. GameSpot's Star Wars: The Last Jedi review will go up soon, and we'll have plenty of video coverage on the site too. If you need more Star Wars right now, be sure to check out the latest international trailer and you can also see how Leia became a general from A New Hope to The Last Jedi.

Looking further ahead for the blockbuster film franchise, JJ Abrams--who was hired to helm the ninth film in the Star Wars saga after director Colin Trevorrow left the project--said he wants Episode IX to "take [viewers] places that they haven't gone [before]."

Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits theaters on December 17. Its sequel, Star Wars: Episode IX, releases on December 20, 2019. Between those two movies, Solo--the Han Solo standalone film--will debut on May 25, 2018.