In my experience with dieting and reading about fitness I’ve heard many many times that the first place you gain fat is the last place you lose it. Is that a myth? It sounds like myth to me. If it’s not a myth then the last place you gain fat is the first place you lose it, right?
In: 185
First thing:
The place where the fat is, is irrelevant for energy consumption. Burning fat actually means breaking down fat molecules into sugars, sending those sugars to the blood, then the muscle in need picks up the sugar from the blood and use it.
So technically you can use fat from your feet as an energy source for your arms. That’s why there’s no such thing as exercising to lose “this fat or that fat”. The body decides which fats to burn and which muscle is working has nothing to do with the choice.
Now, your body tends to “prefer” some locations to store fat, and those tend to grow the fastest as you gain weight (“first place you gain” thing, although your body is probably storing fat everywhere, just a larger and more importantly, more visible, share in those “preferred” places). At the same time, as you lose fat, the reverse happens: you lose fat everywhere, but the preferred places lose proportionally less since they had more to begin with, and the difference is therefore less visible.
Usually when you start to lose weight, one of the most visible places is the face, in part because we pay a lot of attention to it and in part because it stores proportionally little overall and therefore any meaningful loss shows fast. That’s the same logic why the belly tends to be the last to “disappear”.
So yeah, there’s a truth to that saying, but it’s not like any fat respository remains untouched, or that there’s a strong ordering system. It’s just a matter of your body preferring to store in some places over others.
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