You see all sorts of ads for regimens to burn fat in the belly, or burn fat in the thighs, etc.
But I was under the impression that fat is only burned when calories expended exceed calories taken in - and that any time you succeed in achieving such a deficit, you are burning fat cells equally throughout the body - so that, say, your fat thighs and fat belly are both being diminished at the same rate. You can’t say “I want fat gone here, but retained there.”
Or do fat cells have more staying/sticking power in certain body regions than elsewhere?
I think it’s even worse than this. There does appear to be a sequence, so some areas (such as the belly for many men) are the last to go. That said, I saw an ad at the dermatologist office recently that showed a fat burning process that appeared to target some areas.
Years ago I read a body-building book by Schwarzenegger. He talked about “spot reduction,” which is what the OP is referring to, the idea being that aggressively exercising one muscle or area of your body would selectively reduce fat in that area. He acknowledged that doctors and fitness experts he talked to said this was not physiologically possible, but went on to say that working out in this way was enough like spot reduction that it was a useful tool for body builders, i.e. that building muscle in an area could increase local definition even if it wasn’t actually reducing the fat content in that area.
I’m no Schwarzenegger, but I have found that when my fat level is relatively low, even though I still have a bit of a belly, if I clench my abs tight enough, I can still barely get a six-pack effect visible through the fat. Obviously, the effect would be more significant, if I had even less fat, and more-developed muscles.
This isn’t quite right. If you get to a point in exercise where your muscular glycogen stores are depleted your metabolism will switch from glycogen conversion (glycogenolysis) to fatty acid oxidation (ketosis). This is without regard to caloric intake and outtake, though obviously if you are intaking more carbohydrates than you are capable of converting and storing as glycogen your body will convert these into adipose tissue (the subcutaneous and visceral fat stores that we think of as “body fat”), such that any fats that are consumed in exercise are quickly replaced.
There are not special exercises that will burn fat in a certain locations but fat doesn’t get consumed evenly everywhere. Where and how the body collects fat stores are determined by genetical predisposition for a particular body morphology and epigenetic factors which can change with age and nutrition. There is some evidence that you may be able to change this a bit through changes in diet but the claims that there is some special food that will “burn away abdominal fat” is not true.
The “calories in/calories out” mentality is vastly oversimplified nutritional science since your body does not consume calories (a theoretical measurement of energy as measured in a bomb calorimeter) but nutrients which the body processes in different ways. You could eat thousands of calories of lean protein, for instance, and never gain a pound of adipose tissue (although you’ll probably suffer toxicity from such an extreme diet) but eating a bunch of “low fat” starch-enriched may cause you to accumulate body fat even if you are below your nominal calorie requirements if you aren’t using it in normal movement.
If you want to “burn fat” and more importantly keep it from returning, you need to regulate your diet such that you have the correct nutrient balance of proteins, fats , and carbohydrates consistent with your activity level, engage in sufficient energetic activity to consume glycogen and move into ketosis, and perform strength-building exercises (bodyweight or moderate weight training with sandbags or kettlebells is fine; you don’t have to do Olympic barbell training) to raise your basal metabolic rate and maintain capacity to engage in energetic activity. Of these activities, diet is key; with poor diet it is nearly impossible to reduce fat particularly past a certain age, and exercise is important but not sufficient in and of itself.
If you reduce fat, the place it’s reduced is decided by your body, not by you. Some people lose fat first/last in different places, but there is no way to target a specific area lose fat just there.
All that said, given that the body does seem to preferentially add and remove fat in various places, and given that those places vary from person to person, it’s not out of the question that there might be some way of manipulating those body processes to produce different results. Maybe there’s some hormone or something that favors belly fat, and you could change a person’s fat distribution by changing the levels of that hormone.
Arnold Schwartzenegger is a very clever guy, and I wonder if maybe he didn’t have a bit of a hidden agenda here in that he figured if a person was working really hard on one part of their body, that meant they were working hard. If it motivates you to burn fat, well, you’re gonna burn fat. You’ll burn it from everywhere, but you’ll certainly get more our o that spot than if you’d worked less. Psychologically it might make you feel better about it too. “Yeah… yeah, it’s working! Look at that!”
Working out one spot will change that part of your body much like flexing your bicep does. When you flex your bicep, the shape of the muscle can be seen much more than when the muscle is relaxed. Working out specific muscles can make them firmer even when you are not working out. This has the effect of giving a slight flex to the muscle at all times, which makes that part of the body look fitter. But this is contingent on the layer of fat being thin enough so that the shape of the muscle can be seen. If the layer is thick, then even the flexed muscle may not really be visible.
Working out at high exertion levels does change how fat is distributed, but that’s over your whole body. A very fit but overweight athlete (like a sumo wrestler), will have almost all their fat on the outside layer of their body much like a fat suit. If the outer fat was removed, they would have a lean, fit, muscular body. But a sedentary person also has fat distributed throughout their muscles and around their inner organs. Even if you removed the outer layer of fat, there would still be significant fat deposits within their body. The fat around the organs of an overweight, sedentary person is one of the major causes of health risks from being overweight. An overweight athlete doesn’t have as many fat deposits there, so they have fewer health risks even if they had the same amount of fat as the sedentary person.
That’s not a fat burning process. It’s cryogenic inducement of cell death. It’s similar to liposuction, which has already been mentioned as a way that changes fat distribution on the body, but instead of removing the cells through the skin, you kill them and let the body deal with the carnage through the regular cleanup processes.