You’ve see the adverts for those “problem areas”. It seems every other TV ad or Facebook sponsored page is for something to help you target your waist, hips and thighs, but surely such targeted techniques aren’t good for your overall wellbeing. I mean, is such spot reduction even a viable weight loss option?
In the fitness industry, spot reduction is a term used for trimming down specific areas of your body. Unfortunately, unless you go unnatural on that bad boy with a whacking great dose of liposuction, it’s just not possible to lose weight in a specific area. Depending on your hormones, genes, gender, race and age, your body will store fat in certain areas and will only lose fat in a certain sequences. About half of your fat is stored around your organs, while the rest resides between your skin and muscles. However, this latter half of fat isn’t nicely distributed around your body.
Generally speaking, you have a thin layer of fat on your face, hands, neck, calves and forearms, while things get a lot thicker on the layers around the core of your body (just so you know, this includes your upper arms and legs). As you know, your body draws on fat for fuel, and tends to do so evenly from everywhere. However, there is a last one in, last one out system in place which means that fat will usually be lost first from the area of the body where it was last deposited. In women, fat from your our face, neck, wrists, hands and calves will be the first to go, with hip, thigh and upper arm fat bringing up the rear. For the lads, the last place to lose fat is usually around the tummy.
To take care of your wellness and look your best, you need to minimize excess body fat on a general level, and keep those muscles strong and toned. This sounds impossible, but is actually really simple to achieve if you combine a healthy diet with incidental, cardio and resistance exercise. Notice I said simple and not easy; there’s no way to use an effortless product or technique for a few minutes a day and rock up to work next week looking super skinny. However, once you swallow that bitter pill, you can set about actually losing weight.
1. Cardio exercise: This is critical for maximising your fat loss and toning the muscles in your legs, hips and arms. Pick exercises that you like and will do regularly, and make sure you mix it up to keep challenging you body, maximising your total fat burn, and preventing you from getting bored. You should do aerobic exercises that raise your heart rate to around 70 – 80% of your maximum, for at least 20 minutes, three times a week.
2. Strength Training exercise: You need to train with weights if you want to balance your proportions and shape and sculpt your muscles. Aside from helping you to look better, strong and toned muscles help you to burn fat even when you’re not exercising. Try to exercise each muscle group once or twice a week, completing two or three weekly sessions altogether.
3. Incidental exercise: That’s right, doing random stuff in daily life can help you to achieve the body you want, be it walking the dog or doing the washing up. Try to add more opportunities for incidental into your daily routine, like walking to the shops or not sitting down when you’re on the phone.
4. Diet: You don’t need to starve yourself or deny the pleasure of your favourite foods – far from it; a good fat loss diet needs to be one you enjoy and will stick with, or you’ll never lose weight. The Mediterranean diet is a healthy way to lose weight, or else you can simply make sure your fat intake makes up 30% or less of your total calories, your consumption of salt and sugar is an absolute minimum, and you eat plenty of fresh produce.