How do I lose this excess fat around my *? The myth of Spot Reducing

This post is going to answer the question of How do I lose this excess fat. The first things you need to know is you cannot spot reduce. Meaning you can’t just pick a spot that you want to lose weight and target that area, your body does not work like that.

How do I lose this excess fat

In order to lose weight around your waist / legs / ass / etc. you have to reduce your total body fat.

In order to do that, you must change your diet; increase your exercise output or both. Increasing your cardiovascular and/or weight lifting exercise output will help, but weight loss is mainly a dietary and body type thing. You can’t just eat anything you want and then go workout for 2 hours and expect to lose weight; you have to change your diet – there is no way around it. And by diet I don’t mean something you do for a week or 2, but something you change permanently. The reason diets don’t work is because they are temporary; therefore, you get temporary results.

Depending on your body type – this can be quite easy or very hard. Me in particular, my upper body type is an ectomorph – meaning I have a small upper body frame and it’s very hard for me to gain weight on my upper body – and my lower body is mesomorph meaning that I gain muscle mass quite easily.

How do you store fat?

Most men store the majority of their excess fat on their upper body around their waist. Most women store the majority of their excess fat on their lower body around their hips and thighs.

Me as an example.

I outlined in an earlier article what is your body type? There are 3 different kinds of body types: Ectomorph, Mesomorph and Endomorph. For me I have an ectomorph upper body and I “relatively” little body fat on my upper body, I recently tested my body fat hydrostatically, (meaning I was submerged in water 100% and got as much air out of my body as possible by exhaling and farting) I measured at 9.6%. Here are my test results:

Height: 74 in or 188 cm

Residual Volume (L): 2.189

Dry Weight (lb): 178

Wet weight (lb): 8.47

Body Fat:

Body Fat Percentage: 9.6%

Weight of Body Fat (lb): 17.15

Lean Body Mass:

Lean Body Mass Percentage: 90.35%

Weight of Lean Body Mass (lb): 160.85

How do I lose this excess fat

While on a general scale this may seem very low, in actuality for my body type it is not low at all! It’s about medium, for me low would be about 6% and that would require me to lose about 10lbs or so roughly (But notice again if I lose 10 or so lbs, not only will I lose fat, I also will lose muscle mass! Again this is not a one-way street). At that point I would have 8 pack abs and be just ripped. For a 100% pure mesomorph or an athletic body type, you would have 6 pack abs at my current body fat of 9%.

How to lose fat around your *?

As I said above you cannot spot reduce. The reason why you cannot spot reduce is simple, your asking your body to do something it is not capable of. The equivalent question is asking your body to get both skinny in one place and stay fat in another.

If you want to lose fat you have lower your overall body fat percentage. To lower your overall body fat percentage you have to burn more calories than you take in.

For example if you are eating 2500 calories per day and your body requires 1800 calories just to stay alive and keep you healthy. That means you have to burn than 700 excess calories from the food you ate PLUS an additional (ideally 100+) calories to begin to lose the stored fat (energy) you have around your *.

When you first start losing weight your body has a predisposition to lose it in certain spots first because of genetic hardwiring. For men you will lose it everywhere else except your gut first, women will lose it everywhere else except your legs and thighs. This is where men and women store the majority of their fat and it is usually the hardest place to lose it.

To help you get started in fat loss I outlined the CITY Interval Workout in a earlier article. It is what I use to stay in shape and keep the fat monster away.

Thanks for looking at How do I lose this excess fat.