Spot Fat Reduction: is it possible?

Losing fat from a specific area like your legs, face, belly, and arms (spot fat reduction) is something everybody wants including me, but is it really possible? I am sorry to be the one telling you that but your body chooses to store and lose fat depending on your genetics.

that’s why when you start a diet, you see some areas get leaner before others. the first thing you start thinking about is to train these lagging areas more so you can focus on losing more fat from them, but is it really an effective method?

A 2013 study

it was done on Seven men and 4 women, they trained with their non-dominant leg without training the other leg for 12 weeks, 3 sessions per week. Each session consisted of 1 set of 960-1,200 repetitions (leg press exercise), at 10-30% 1 repetition maximum.

The results: No significant changes in bone mass, lean mass, fat mass, or fat percentage were observed in both the control (untrained) and trained leg.

A significant decrease in fat mass was observed in the upper extremities and trunk.

The reduction of fat mass in the upper extremities and trunk was significantly greater than the fat mass change observed in the trained leg but not in the control leg.

A 2011 study

it was done on Twenty-four healthy, sedentary participants (14 men and 10 women) who were randomly assigned to 1 of the following 2 groups: the control group or the abdominal exercise group.

The abdominal group performed 7 abdominal exercises, for 2 sets of 10 repetitions, on 5 d·wk (-1) for 6 weeks.

The results: Six weeks of abdominal exercise training alone was not sufficient to reduce abdominal subcutaneous fat and other measures of body composition.

Nevertheless, abdominal exercise training significantly improved muscular endurance to a greater extent than the control group.

After those 2 studies and more done on the same matter with similar results we can now say that spot fat reduction is not possible and there is no specific exercise that can target fat in a specific area.

so, what can you do to lose weight from these lagging areas?

In order to lose fat from these areas, you have to keep dieting until they start losing fat too.

For example, you have been dieting for a month and you lost fat from most of your body parts except your stomach area, don’t quit!!  Keep dieting until you get rid of this last piece of fat.

References

1-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23222084

2-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21804427