Losing Weight: Spot Reducing Problem Areas

Losing weight by spot reducing is one of the long enduring myths about weight loss, exercise, and muscle building. Many companies declare their machine or gadget is able to whittle your waist, eliminate your butt, or trim your hips by focusing on that area of your body.

Unfortunately, this is unrealistic. (Sorry) Your body stores fat in a way that is determined by your genetic makeup, not by which areas you work out. When you eat more than you burn in any given period, you will store fat. That fat is typically distributed around the abdomen for men and around the abdomen, hips, and thighs for women; although there are probably as many variations on the distribution of weight as there are people. 

When Losing Weight, You Can't Spot Reduce Specific Areas

If your body tends to store its weight around your thighs, for example, no thigh machine will change that. Losing fat is not like carving wood away from an area to sculpt a statuette; it’s more like spending money in a bank account.

If you’re spending less than you’re taking in, your savings will grow. Good for your finances; bad for your belly. When people learn about this for the first time, they sometimes have an urge to turn away from weight training and focus exclusively on cardio work, figuring that this is the best, or possibly the easiest, way to burn enough calories to spend that storage of fat in their perceived problem area.

There are a few good reasons not to do this. For one, as that fat begins to melt away, if you’ve maintained a good weight training program, you end up uncovered a beautifully toned body bit by bit, rather than a body that just looks like a shrunken version of an un-toned you.

A second, perhaps more compelling reason, is that as you continue developing your muscle tone, you increase the baseline amount of calories you burn every day, even when you’re not working out. The more muscle you have, the more energy you burn.

Weight training also helps develop bone density and decreases your risk of injuring yourself outside the gym during your day-to-day routine. And of course, as you are doing your strength training routine, you are burning calories.

Now, don’t let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction either; don’t abandon your cardio routine. Cardio is important to your overall health as well as to your weight-loss efforts and should be an integral part of your plan.

Just don’t rely on it exclusively once you’ve put the spot reducing myth to rest. So if you want to get rid of your love handles, don’t waste your time looking for the next Love-Handles-B-Gone machine. Focus your attention on total body strength, flexibility, and cardio-vascular fitness, as well as a healthy diet.

This really is the fastest way to getting fit. And, in a way, isn’t this easier? By following one path, all your problem-areas (and your non-problem-areas) are covered and they improve together. If you really did have to carve fat away from each portion of your body, piece by piece, wouldn’t that be a much more daunting task?