Is It Possible to Spot Reduce Stomach Fat?

If you were to watch fitness infomercials for too long you would be convinced that you could spot reduce fat from your stomach or others areas where you would like to get rid of it. How many times have you seen the latest “ab wonder” touted on television and seeing the promoters of the product show you an individual who lost inches off their waist from doing some weird mutation of a sit up.

I hate to burst your bubble, but if you do buy into that stuff then I have some swamp land that I would like to sell you. You cannot spot reduce and only burn the fat from your stomach or your butt or any other body part.

If you have a particular area that you would like to eliminate fat from then the only way to do so is to lose it everywhere else at the same time.

We have a pull that we put up for our kids each year. (I can't wait till I don't have to do so anymore.) So this means that each fall I drain the pool and take it down. Now when I go to drain the pool I can't dictate that I want to drain the northeast section of the pool first. When I pull the plug the level of the pool goes down evenly. Just as I can't spot remove water from my pool, you cannot spot reduce fat from your body.

In fact, it has been my experience that the stomach fat is the last to come off. In the investing world (where I work), there is a term that refers to which position is considered closed for tax purposes. The term is LIFO. It stands for Last In First Out. What it means is that the last position that you purchased it the first position that is closed out when you begin to sell. So in other words the first position in is the last position out. This is stomach fat in a nutshell. It is the first fat that you gain and the last fat that you lose (at least for many guys, for women it is probably the hips).

Now the good news is that if you are losing fat and your haven't seen it coming off of your stomach yet then all is well. You will probably remove it from everywhere else first. Don't lose heart and result to stupid tactics by buying diet pills or by starving yourself to death or by (and forgive me for saying this) running endless miles on a treadmill or by doing ridiculous exercises on a Bosu ball.

Stay the course. Eat sensibly. Build muscle through weight training. Raise your metabolism through weight training. Supplement with some multivitamins and fish oil and you are good to go.

Don't buy into the hype of the hyped products on TV that promise you the world.