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
It’s not a myth. Most people start gaining fat around their bellybutton. And then when lose it it’s the last place to go.
Some people may be different and start gaining in their hips or whatever. It’s genetic. But the same logic applies.
Technically speaking, we both build and burn visceral fat- fat around our internal organs- first. But visceral fat isn’t very visible, so we tend not to notice it as much as fat just under the skin.
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.
Say your partner brought home a few cool peices of art, you put them up in the best looking place right? Then they bring home more art and more and more, until eventually the place is covered with art. Then their hoard phase ends so you start by taking out the art that’s cluttering the place, then the ones that don’t really fit in on the wall, and before long you are left with art only in the spaces that look good, which happen to be the ones you started with.
You have a garage with tools to fix certain things on your car, you buy more and more. Eventually you have tools for cars you don’t own that may only be used once in a lifetime, and realize that a lot of them are useless to you so you start giving away the stuff you do not use and keeping important stuff.
Your body uses fat to protect the most important organs and then is forced to deal with “clutter” when you start losing weight the least important fat goes first
Well if your body is storing fat somewhere, and goes ‘oops getting a bit full here guess we should put it somewhere else’, it can then go ‘oh no we need some more energy, let’s get rid of the bits in the overflow first’.
It’s more nuanced and complicated than that, but it’s fairly eli5
One thing people don’t often think about when discussing this topic is how muscle gain/loss plays a factor in how you look when your weight changes.
A lot of people say that it’s a myth that you can “target” a certain part of your body to eliminate fat. That is technically true – however, if you’re concentrating on exercising a certain area of your body then you’ll gain muscle in that area which may make that area look more toned. This might create the impression you’ve been able to target that area for fat loss. If your goal is to exercise to improve your appearance, then you may not care about this distinction.
I have lost 50 or 60 pounds in the past several years, but that was primarily through cardio and calorie cutting and very little upper body work. So my legs look great and toned, but my upper body just kind of looks like a deflated version of how I used to look. So I’m stuck being skinny-fat unless I ever care enough to work on strengthening my upper body.
it is true, you gain and lose fat pretty symmetrically, it would be kinda weird if you gain fat on your stomach first and then on your arms/legs and when losing fat you suddenly lose all your stomach fat but no the fat on arms/legs. Generally if you lose/gain weight multiple times in your life you’ll most likely gain it in the same parts each time because it’s mostly genetics. There are some factors tho that could change this, for example if your hormone levels change (because of puberty, pregnancy, medication, sickness,…) your body might slightly change where it stores fat first
Similar to a “stack” in computer science. This data structure follows LIFO; last in first out
This is true, adipose (fat) tissue works on the FILO (FIRST IN, LAST OUT) Principle. Think about it like grocery shelf stocking.
A decently run store will have the first things that come in come out first, because it is best that the product gets sold before it spoils. The body however, does opposite.
Let’s say for the sake of the example a human has 0% body fat. (Theoretically essential fat is between 2-8% for men and women respectively). As soon as body fat starts to accumulate, depending on where the individual reserves it first, it will continue to accumulate throughout the body in a wrapping pattern where it will obviously wrap around the body thicker (belly/hips typically ) and thin out more on other areas (ankles/fingers typically). Like a paper towel roll except with a belly, hips etc.
When the wrapping comes off, the last of the wrapping begins to unfurl first, until we are back down to the fat we have to carry around before we basically starve to death.
To take this further, this is why if an individual is already lower body fat, 5-10%, that single sheet of paper around the roll wraps around the roll maybe three times before the next sheet starts to apply. With a full roll of paper, one sheet may only cover 1/3 of the entire roll, instead of wrapping around it 3 times like when it was a much smaller roll.
Hope this helps
You body wants to put excess fat in specific places. Under the skin for women, especially on the chest and butt. Under muscle and around organs for men, especially the abdomen. When those get filled up, it starts putting it wherever it can. So you mostly have to get rid of enough everywhere else before you can start losing it where you want. And you can never target fat loss with exercises, only tone and grow the muscle you have there
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