The Truth About Fat Loss
Fran Kilinski
Experienced Personal Trainer, Published Writer, Runner and Athlete | Founder and Advisor
It’s Easy To Think Ab Exercises Remove Belly Fat,
Leg exercises remove leg fat, and butt exercises remove booty fat. But that’s not how it works, unfortunately.
Today I want to discuss fat loss, and why it’s a more complicated topic than we give it credit for.
There are a multitude of factors that can contribute to the amount of body weight and water you’re retaining (think of that “bloated” feeling in your lower stomach).
Hierarchically, I can confidently say that body composition largely depends on:
Newsletter Summary
There’s No Such Thing As Targeted Fat Loss
Or, at least there isn’t enough science yet to show us there is.
As a fitness professional, I often get requests from clients struggling to shed fat from specific areas of their body.
They are concerned about belly fat, thigh fat, arm fat, and so on, and often ask if some specific exercises or diets can target those areas.
These questions are valid because, in theory, training your biceps will cause your biceps to grow. That’s exercise science 101. However, muscle growth doesn’t always happen at the expense of fat loss.
You can rarely “trade” fat for muscle.
Nonetheless, influencers, gurus, snake-oil salesmen, and saleswomen will attempt to tell you you can.
It's a myth perpetuated by the fitness industry for decades.
Joining the club of unsexy fitness truths is this: There’s no such thing as spot-targeted fat loss.
In other words, training your legs excessively alone won’t reduce cellulite as quickly as it would if you began to make dietary adjustments and increased your step count along with that training.
Usually, the quest for a dramatic change in body structure starts with a dramatic period of weight loss, resulting in a skinny-fat-looking body, followed by a restructuring of the tissue with muscle building.
The scale will go up in this muscle-building period too, which is important to note since weight loss stints condition us to keep wanting the scale to drop.
Why can't we target specific areas for fat loss? Let's break it down.
Our bodies are a complex chain of multiple systems functioning simultaneously.
They are both incredibly intelligent and super simplistic at the same time.
With fat loss, it errs more toward the simplistic.
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When we lose weight, we lose it from all over our bodies, not just one particular area.
Our bodies store fat in adipose tissue, an essential tissue all over our bodies.
Like most of our body’s functions, adipose tissue exists to keep us from dying.
With less adipose tissue, you’d freeze to death faster in the Arctic Tundra because you’d have no protective tissue to keep you warm.
Extreme example? Maybe. But I’m here to get you to understand your body, not create “good things” and “bad things” about it.
Thus, when we increase our energy expenditure (a.k.a calorie burn) through diet and exercise, our bodies start burning fat for energy, and fat comes off from all over our bodies, not just one particular area.
In 2015, a group of researchers took a bunch of women and gave dietary guidance (and the experimental group was also given targeted abdominal exercises) to see if there would be an improvement in stomach fat over 12 weeks.
The good news? Both groups lost weight.
The not-so-good news? There was no significant difference in abdominal definition between the two groups after 12 weeks.
Eating Strategies for Fat Loss
If you're struggling to lose fat in a specific area of your body, please know you're not alone.
It's a common frustration, but the truth is that there's no magic solution or exercise to get you the body part you want.
A lot of it comes down to playing the long game , but there is a sure-fire quicker answer for those who can make significant changes to their diet.
The best approach is to focus on creating a calorie deficit (burning more than you consume) through a combination of nutritional choices and exercise and letting your body do its thing.
My first bit of advice is to take stock of your daily eating habits.
If you aren’t eating the same thing every day, try to first build a consistent diet that is — if not the same — similar every day, so that guesstimating calories becomes easier.
Once you know what’s going in, it becomes much easier to subtract.
In addition to cutting general calories out, the first place many people might look is cutting out carbs.
There are some very rigid approaches to this (like “no-carb”), but I tend to think carbs are essential and, frankly, they’re too delicious to eliminate completely.
However, some carbs can be done without, and it’s worth taking a look at which carbs might be hurting your progress and how you can reduced your intake of them.
Additionally, developing a mindfulness or abstinence practice around pesky cravings and urges for foods that hurt your progress can be equally beneficial for self-restraint and overall calorie reduction.
Below, Ashley Wang does an incredible job of dissecting “urge surfing” in this Instagram post , which is worth a read.
Whether or not you're snacking is going to be a huge catalyst for determining weight loss success.
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