I get a lot of questions asking me about how to lose fat from particular areas of the body.

Some people want to lose belly fat, others want to get rid of their saggy arms or cottage cheese thighs. Some even want to get rid of their double chin.

And that’s only natural because we all have ‘problem areas’ that we’d love to get rid of more than anything else.

My first response when people ask me how to lose fat from a particular body part is:

You can’t spot reduce.

This is a fancy, personal trainer way of saying you can’t isolate your fat loss to just one area. You can’t concentrate all your fat loss into one body area and lose nothing from another. The human body just doesn’t work that way. It’s all one unit, and it gains and loses fat as one unit.

The reason why you have more fat in certain areas than others is because genetically you are programmed to store fat quicker and to a greater degree in some body parts. Two people can have exactly the same body fat percentage yet one will have fat arms and a flat stomach and the other will have a fat stomach and toned arms. It all depends on your genetics.

And what this means is that in order to lose fat from your ‘problem areas’, you have to lose fat from your entire body. You can’t control where your body gains or loses fat quickest. If your body decides that the last place you’ll fat is your arms, you might lose a bunch of fat in other parts of your body before you see a change in your batwings.

So the first thing you need to know if you’re trying to improve your appearance is that you can’t target fat loss to one particular area. Doing arm exercises won’t make you lose fat in your arms if they’re your problem spot. Doing leg exercises won’t help you get leaner thighs if that’s the last place your body wants to get rid of fat.

The only way to tighten up your ‘problem areas’ is to lose fat from everywhere. Read that twice and make sure you understand it, because it’s really important.

Keeping Your Muscle To Lose Fat

However, another important thing you need to know is that you CAN add muscle to just a particular body part. If you work out your arms you are not going to build muscle in your legs, and vice versa. Now, do you remember how a little while back we spoke about how important it was to make sure that you lose fat and not muscle? The only way you can be sure that you are losing fat and not muscle is to ALWAYS focus on using resistance training to add toned, lean muscle to your body. (This doesn’t meant getting huge or packing on tons of mass. It just means adding lean, toned muscle – the kind that all of the world’s top cover models have. The good kind.)

Scientific studies have shown that people who work out with resistance training maintain lean muscle, even if they are eating very few calories and are losing lots of weight. Simply put, if you are working out with weights (or doing equivalent bodyweight exercises) your body has to keep stores of muscle and get rid of its fat stores instead. This even works in pretty extreme situations, like fasting. In fact, fitness experts like Brad Pilon have conducted research that shows that even if you’re fasting for 24 hours, as long as you do resistance exercise you will maintain your muscle mass and not lose it, despite not taking in any calories at all!

So it’s VERY important that you do resistance exercises for your entire body to keep that lean muscle and make sure you lose fat instead. This is EXTRA important in your problem areas, since your body loves storing fat there and will do whatever it can to keep that fat and avoid getting rid of it. So you can bet that if there’s muscle to use as energy instead, your body is going to choose to burn that instead of fat in those body parts. Therefore, we want to make sure that your body has no choice but to save the muscle and burn the fat instead by doing some extra resistance training in those areas.

Doing Extra Ab Exercises

So for example, if your body stores a lot of fat around your belly, feel free to add in some extra ab work. I’d encourage it. Just don’t make the mistake of doing tons and tons of ab exercises, while neglecting the rest of your body and following poor nutrition habits, thinking that all that ab work is going to get you a six pack. Because it won’t. You have to get rid of fat from your entire body first, and there’s no way around that. All that extra ab work you’re putting in just ensures that when your body fat does get low enough that it needs to look to that abdominal area for energy, it won’t be able to choose to burn muscle instead of fat. It’ll have no choice but to eat up that ugly belly fat, leaving only a toned, lean, flat stomach behind.

Summing It All Up

So, to sum it up, the answer to getting rid of problem areas is pretty simple:

• You need to lose fat from your entire body since you can’t target fat loss to one area
• You want to make sure that you’re doing resistance exercise during this process to make sure that your body is burning fat, not muscle
• As you lose fat from everywhere else, your problem area will eventually follow and start losing fat too
• Put in a little extra work on your problem areas to ensure that your body burns fat and not muscle in those spots
• The end result: An entire body that’s lean, toned and devoid of fat

Easy! Well, ok, making it happen isn’t actually THAT easy, but the idea behind it is.

Eat and train the right way to lose fat and you’ll not only get rid of your ‘problem areas’ but you’ll also end up toning and leaning out your ENTIRE BODY in the process. Pretty sweet deal.

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