Spot Reduction
You can burn fat from specific zip codes on your body by exercising the muscles directly beneath the area you want to tighten.
Want to lose your belly fat? Do crunches. Want to lose your bat wings? Do triceps extensions. Want to get rid of your sausage fingers? Become a typist…
or so the story goes.
Unfortunately, if using a muscle melted the fat sitting on top of it like butter on a Williams-Sonoma griddle, then fat people wouldn’t have fat faces.
Where do you think your chewing muscles are?
There’s only one scientifically proven way to spot reduce body fat.
And no, it is not “be disciplined” or “drink more celery juice while crying into your Peloton.”
It’s dangerous.
But it works.
Takes a little grit.
(And bloodshed.)
Because you have to use a knife.
Since you, a person with nerve endings and also a sense of self-preservation, are not going to go full Freddy Krueger on your own midsection with a steak knife from the Bed Bath & Beyond that’s now just a Beyond, here’s the actual deal: To lose fat from specific areas of your body, you have to create an energy deficit and cross your fingers like you’re 11 years old hoping Raquel Brown notices you at the school dance.
Your body, that smug little overlord, decides on its own which fat it finds least essential to your survival and torches THAT first — completely unbothered by your opinions on the matter. Could be the fat in your neck. Could be the fat between your toes (you have that, don’t lie). Could be the weird little upholstered situation between your eyebrows that nobody’s ever mentioned to you out of kindness.
No way to know.
No way to nudge.
Like trying to pour out a crumb stuck in a cup of water. You tip the cup, hoping the water-logged carbohydrate flops out first. But it never does. It sinks to the bottom of the cup because it’s obeying the laws of physics, not your fickle feelings.
The physics of fat loss bends the knee to survival, not six-pack abs.
And for whatever caveman-era, sleeping-in-a-cave, outrunning-a-saber-tooth-tiger reason your body has cooked up, it will almost always save the fat tucked in the lower belly and love handles for the bitter, bitter end. You may not be thrilled that your stomach currently resembles a rack of hot dogs rotisserie-ing at a 7-Eleven every time you sit down, but your body? Your body thinks that’s adorable. Your body thinks that’s insurance.
So if you’re shrinking everywhere except the one place you’ve been begging the universe for since the Obama administration, there’s only one move left: keep going. Eventually your body will get around to your trouble zones. Unless, of course, you tried the knife thing, in which case, well. We did warn you, and also, please call someone.