I will teach you about where you lose fat first when you're cutting and also where you lose it last, and if this is interesting to you, it's probably because there's a part of your body you want to change fast or an area of your body you want to strip fat from.
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If you look online for information on how to lose belly fat, hip fat, thigh fat, or butt fat, you're likely to find a lot of nonsense; you're likely to find a lot of advice to tone up specific areas of the body by doing very specific exercises, eating very specific foods, or taking very specific supplements, and unfortunately,
That's not how it works. I'm sorry to share the bad news if I am the first person to tell you this, but fat loss is a pretty simple process, as you'll learn about in this podcast, but it's not perfectly predictable. If you know how to eat and you know how to exercise properly, if you know how to use food and exercise to drive fat loss, you will lose fat consistently each and every day.
You'll lose a little bit of fat, and over time it will add up to a lot of fat if it needs to or if you want it to. That said, there aren't clearly defined stages of fat loss that allow you to forecast exactly where you're going to lose the fat from, and especially if you're just starting out, there's also no way to significantly influence where you lose fat from at least in the beginning.
of a cut If you're already lean and want to get even leaner, you can target quote-unquote stubborn fat to some extent by doing fasted exercise and supplementing with yohimbine, and if you're going to supplement with him bean, you might as well throw in some caffeine, and if you're going to do that, you might as well consider some synephrine or ephedrine, but that's not the topic of this podcast.
Particular Head over to legionathletic.com and search for fasted cardio, and you'll find an article as well as a podcast that I recorded on fasted training specifically, in which I talk about why people who are lean and wanting to get really lean should consider including fasted cardio and a couple of supplements in their regimen. They don't have to, of course, but it does
Speed up the process. Now, in this podcast, I'm going to focus more on the early stages of a cut when you can do fasted training and take the supplements that I mentioned, but they won't have the same noticeable effects as when you're lean and want to get really lean in the beginning. You shouldn't be thinking about how do I get rid of just belly fat because it won't work.
Like that or just hip fat, thigh fat, or butt fat, no amount of crunches will get rid of the belly fat, and no amount of hip thrusts will get rid of the butt fat; instead, focus on maintaining your calorie deficit, eating enough protein, and getting your strength training and resistance training workouts in so you can build or preserve muscle.
allowing your body to simply whittle away at its fat stores that said, there are some general patterns to fat loss that you should be aware of because they can give you an indication of how and when you're going to lose fat as you cut, and that can be useful because then you know what to expect and you know when you start your cut that although you really want to see your abs,
Or if you really want to get rid of the hip, thigh, or buttock fat, you are probably going to have to lose fat in other areas of your body first, and that is totally normal. I've heard from many people over the years who were concerned that they were only losing fat in their arms, their chest, their shoulders, their back, or their legs, and not in the areas that they really wanted to lose fat in.
And they thought something was wrong. Well, as you will learn in this podcast, nothing was wrong; that is just part of the process. Also, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best-selling weightlifting books for men and women in the world.
Leaner, stronger, and the leading flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef, have now sold well over 1 million copies and helped thousands of people build their best body ever, and you can find them on all major online retailers like audible, amazon, itunes, kobo, and google play, as well as in select Barnes & Noble stores.
Also mention that you can get any of the audio books 100 percent free when you sign up for an audible account, and this is a great way to make those pockets of downtime like commuting, meal prepping, and cleaning more interesting, entertaining, and productive. So if you want to take audible up on this offer, or if you want to get one of my audio books for free, just go to www.buyaudio.com.
Legion is buy legion.com audible and sign up for your account, so please consider picking up one of my books if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, and if you want to learn time-proven and evidence-based strategies for losing fat, building muscle, and getting healthy, strategies that work for anyone and everyone regardless of age or circumstances.
Best-selling books For men, bigger, leaner, and strongerthinner, leaner, stronger for women, and the shredded chef for my favourite fitness friendly recipes, okay, so let's start high level here. Most women and men lose fat first and quickly when they start cutting in their upper body: the arms, shoulders, and back.
Women that tend to get defined first, or at least those are the areas where people notice muscle definition first, for example, when they first start cutting, they often notice that their shoulders start to get more defined and that they start to see some vascularity in their forearms and sometimes in their upper arms as well depending on the person.
How much muscle they have, at least when they're in the gym, maybe not all the time, but once they get a pump and start working out, they'll usually start seeing some veins, and on their back, they'll start seeing the shoulder blades and the muscles that run vertically along either side of the spine, and depending on how much fat a woman has to lose, they may be able to see all the edges of their shoulder blades and the muscles that run vertically along either side of the spine
Maybe you'll see a valley of muscles directly above, and they may be able to see a little bit of a, quote-unquote Men have a similar structure in the lower back; most guys don't store much fat in their arms and shoulders, so as their body gets leaner, the small amounts of fat that come from their arms and shoulders make a difference.
pretty big visual difference, whereas the small amounts of fat that they lose in their abdominal region are not noticeable usually until you get deeper into a cut. You have to get pretty lean to really start seeing a big difference with your abs, for example, and by then you've probably already seen major changes in your arms and your shoulders.
Similarly to womenAs guys get leaner, they see more definition and vascularity in their arms, and if they have a fair amount of muscle, they start seeing a clear separation between their upper arms and their shoulders, and they start seeing separation between the different deltoid muscles in their shoulders, and then as they get even leaner, they start seeing more separations.
Between the biceps and triceps, like women, most guys also notice that when they first start cutting, their back gets significantly leaner and looks significantly leaner, whereas their belly doesn't seem to change at all. Now belly fat is where most men and women differ; women tend to struggle a lot less with it.
more belly fat than menWomen tend to shrink their waist faster than men, and men tend to lose fat in their upper legs, their thighs, and their hamstrings in their hip region faster than women, which is kind of funny because most men most want to get rid of belly fat, and most women most want to get rid of hip and thigh fat. Maybe there's a lesson in there about always wanting what we can't have.
But, in any case, many guys, especially those who are lean and then start lean bulking, or who simply start eating too much, will notice that they gain a disproportionate amount of fat in their abdominal region; their belly right, their abs start to disappear, and their obliques start to sag.
start to just look bigger and rounder, and even their lower back starts to accumulate fat, and many women notice that they seem to gain fat first in their hips, thighs, and buttocks before they start gaining fat elsewhere, and these people are not hallucinating; they are not delusional; there is a physiological explanation for what's going on here for why this is.
This fat appears to come and go very quickly, and I'll get to that in a moment, but to summarise what I've covered so far, most women will see their upper body, including their abdominal region, get lean before they see their lower body get lean before they lose hip fat, thigh fat, and butt fat, and most men will see their lower body get lean before they lose hip fat, thigh fat, and butt fat.
Notice that when they first begin cutting, their upper body begins to get lean excluding their abdominal region, so the belly fat does not appear to be phased at all in the beginning, and they will also notice that their lower body, specifically their upper legs, quads, and hamstrings, begin to get leaner right away, and as they continue to cut, their lower body will also begin to get leaner.
People lose a fair amount of fat from those areas, so as long as they keep going, they will start seeing real progress in the belly fat for the guys or in the hip, thigh, or buttock fat for the gals. Now, why is that? Why don't men see fast results with belly fat like they do with pec, shoulder, or back fat, and why don't women see immediate progress in their hips and thighs?
Butts like they do in their arms and their stomachs? Well, it has to do with a term that I used earlier, which sounds very scientific but is legitimate actually, and that is "stuck" fat, meaning that there are certain fat stores in the body that are just very resistant to being mobilized, meaning "used up."
They're very resistant to releasing the fatty acids that they're storing, which then are burned for energy or can be burned for energy, and the physiology is fairly complex, but I'm going to break it down and just make it simple. So to mobilise body fat to access the fatty acids in body fat, your body produces chemicals known as catecholamines, and these little guys travel through your blood.
The problem is that fat cells have two types of receptors for these chemicals, these catecholamines; they have alpha receptors and beta receptors, and alpha receptors are found in the brain while beta receptors are found in the liver.
Keep things simple. Beta receptors speed up fat mobilization, so when catecholamines attach to a beta receptor, that's good if you are trying to lose fat, whereas alpha receptors hinder fat mobilization, so if catecholamines attach to an alpha receptor on a fat cell, not much happens. Now, research shows that fat stores
There are not equal amounts of alpha receptors and beta receptors throughout the body. Of course, we're talking about fat cells that make up fat stores, but you can have a couple of pounds of fat in an area of the body that is very rich in alpha receptors and then have fat stores in other areas of the body.Let's just say a pound of fat or two pounds of fat are distributed.
Throughout a different area of the body that is very rich in beta receptors, what do you think happens to those regions when you start cutting? How do they respond to your calorie restriction? you guessed it, you guessed it.The region with the fat that is very rich in alpha receptors doesn't change much at all.
Whereas the region with a lot of fat and a lot of beta receptors is very receptive to the catecholamines and starts to get leaner right away, the fat cells start to shrink right away. So getting specific and bringing this back to where people tend to lose fat or lose weight first, what's happening is that in most people, the fat that covers most of their upper body is very receptive to the catecholamines and starts to get leaner right away.
Body fat, excluding the belly for men but including the arms, shoulders, and back, usually has a lot of beta receptors and is very easy to mobilize, whereas fat covering their abs has a lot of alpha receptors and is harder to mobilize, and stubborn fat, again with a lot of alpha receptors, is more difficult to mobilise in women.
Fat on other areas of their body tends to have a lot of beta receptors and to be very receptive to calorie restriction, whereas fat on their hips, thighs, and buttocks tends to have a lot of beta receptors and to be very receptive to calorie restriction. Of course, you can lose that belly fat if you're a guy, and you can lose that hip, thigh, or buttock fat if you're a woman
Stay patient, stick to it, and trust the process, and things really start to take shape; they really start to come together toward the end of a cut, so if you're a guy, once you get under 15 percent body fat, every percent that you go down from there in an absolute sense, not a relative one, so if you go from 15 to 14 percent body fat, that's a big deal.
14 to 13; 13 to 12; and so on, every one percent drop usually means a pretty noticeable change in your belly fat levels; you'll also notice your upper body continuing to get leaner, but you really start to notice your abs coming out once you get beneath 15%, and if you're a woman, once you get beneath 25%, and every one percent drop usually means a pretty noticeable change in your belly fat levels.
Percentage from 25 down to, let's say, 20 really starts to make a noticeable difference in your lower body. If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best-selling weightlifting books for men and women in the world.
In addition to The Shredded Chef, the leading flexible dieting cookbook, one other factor I want to mention here that relates to this stubborn fat phenomenon is blood flow. You may have noticed that fat in areas like your butt, hips, or thighs if you're a woman, or your stomach, low back, or even your butt actually inhibits blood flow.
For some men, you'll notice that these areas are slightly colder to the touch than other areas, and that's simply because there is less blood flowing through those areas, and less blood flow means fewer catecholamines that can reach those stubborn fat cells, which of course means even slower fat loss, so we really have a double whammy of fat loss hindrance here.
Reduced blood flow means that only a small number of these chemicals, these catecholamines, can make it to your fat cells, and then we have a lot of these alpha receptors that prevent a lot of the catecholamines that can make it from causing the fat cells to release their fatty acids. Now, some people say that the amount of fat that you have to lose when you start cutting
has a big influence on where you lose that fat from, and that's not exactly true if you're very overweight. If you're over 25 percent body fat if you're a guy or 30 if you're a woman, you are going to have a lot more body fat stored around your organs in your abdomen, such as your liver and your intestines. This is known as visceral fat. You're going to have a lot more.
Visceral fat than someone who is leaner, and this visceral fat accumulation, by the way, is one of the reasons why being overweight can be so bad for your health. Research shows that the more visceral fat we have, the higher our risk of various diseases and disorders, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, insulin resistance, and dyslipidemia. fortunately though
Visceral fat is easy to lose, you just have to maintain a calorie deficit, and for most people, it's actually the first to go when you first start losing weight, so if you have a lot of weight to lose, keep that in mind. If you see your weight going down over the first month or so but you're not really seeing any changes in the mirror at all, you may be losing a fair amount of visceral fat, and that's good.
is usually the first to go, and once you've lost enough visceral fat, once your body has decided that's enough, it will begin attacking the subcutaneous fat, the fat beneath your skin, more aggressively. As for sex, we've already discussed the regional differences in fat loss, but it's also worth noting that women tend to lose more subcutaneous fat than men.
shows that men tend to lose fat slightly quicker than women in general, so just know that if you're a woman and you have heard how quickly some guy has been able to lose fat, you may not be able to lose it as quickly. Men also tend to maintain muscle more easily than women, even when women are doing it right when they lift.
are using a moderate, not a reckless, calorie deficit, something around 20, and eating plenty of protein and working out hard in the gym, and that doesn't mean if you're a woman that you have to lose muscle or that you're going to lose a significant amount of muscle, but if you're lean and want to get really lean, or if you're not lean but end up cutting,
When you get very lean and you notice that you have lost a fair amount of strength on your big lifts, that means that you may have lost muscle. Just know that that is fairly normal in women who are trying to get beneath 20 percent body fat, for example, and also know that it doesn't really matter because
The muscle loss will be minimal, and once you return to maintenance calories, you don't even have to go back to like lean gaining, but once you stop cutting and are solidly in a maintenance phase, you'll quickly gain back whatever muscle you may have lost while in a deficit.
Genetics is debated, and genetics do play a role in how quickly you can lose or gain weight in different parts of your body, but this is not as important as many people believe. For example, while some people will say that their body is just programmed to store everything they eat in their thighs or belly or whatever, we know that genetics can only determine how quickly you can lose or gain weight in different parts of your body.
The only way to make any part of the body fatter regardless of genetics or anything else is with a consistent calorie surplus. There must be a surplus of energy that the body can then use to turn into additional body fat if there is no energy surplus or calorie surplus. It can't just conjure up these chemicals it needs from nothing.
That said, genetics can definitely influence how your body stores fat when you are consistently eating more calories than you burn, and it can also influence how fat looks on your body, so some people have a noticeably fatter face when they are younger.
start gaining weight even when the rest of their body doesn't change very much or have a fatter face even when the rest of their body is lean. I'm one of those people. For example, I've always had big fat cheeks, and if you were to try to guess my body fat level based on just seeing my face, you're probably going to be off by at least 10%.
Three, four, even five percent, so I could be eight percent body fat, and if you looked at my face, you'd think I'm 11; 12; or 13 percent body fat, which is still pretty lean and very athletic, my face looks like I'm at the end of a dirty bowl, and just to give you an idea of how different this can be in other people, my brother-in-law preferentially stores fat in his upper body in his pecs and his back.
shoulders as well as his backIt is, in fact, [__].Basically, for the first couple of months of a lean bulk, he just starts to look huge with more or less the same six-pack that he started with, and then even when he pushes his body fat levels fairly high, even when he leans bulks for an extended period of time and gets up to 15 percent body fat, he just starts to look huge with more or less the same six-pack that he started with.
16-17 percent body fatHe still has some ab definition; he has abs that most guys would have to be around 12 or 13 percent to have, so anyway, I've shared with you how most people's bodies respond to fat gain and fat loss, but there are outliers; there are exceptions to the rules, of course, and in some cases the outliers have an advantage.
like my brother-in-law, and in other cases they don't. For example, there are plenty of guys out there who tend to store fat more like women; they tend to carry a lot of fat in their hips, thighs, and buttocks; they tend to have a pear-shaped body; and when they're cutting, they tend to see a lot faster results in their upper body, including their stomach region, than their lower body, but to say it one way,
More often than not, the good news is that you just have to keep going, that you just have to get your body fat level low enough if you're a guy, something around 10% is what most guys are going for; that's the look most guys want, and if you're a woman, something around 20% is probably what you want; that's where you look athletic, toned, but still feminine, you don't look jacked, and to get down to that, you have to be consistent
Those body fat levels, you just have to keep at it and keep maintaining that calorie deficit. You have to be perfect, of course, but just get it mostly right most of the time and do your workouts and train your muscles so you can gain muscle or at least maintain the muscle you have so when you do end up getting to your target body fat percentage, you haven't lost a bunch of muscle.
Ignore anyone who claims that you can do special exercises, follow a special diet, or eat special foods to help you lose the fat covering your stomach, hips, thighs, or any other part of your body faster; unfortunately, the only strategy I know of that has good scientific evidence is what I mentioned earlier.
If you're going to use yohimbine, you might as well add caffeine, and you don't have to do that, but there is good research and a lot of anecdotal evidence at this point that it can be especially helpful when you are lean and want to get really lean, so if you are a guy approaching 10% body fat and now you want to lose quite a bit of that,
Stubborn fat You're going to have a lot of stubborn fat left at that point, and the female equivalent of that would be something around 22 percent body fat, and you may find that if you add in the fasted training, which could be cardio and weight lifting both, plus the yohimbine and then the caffeine, you are going to see that stubborn fat shrink faster. Again, if you want to learn more, click here.
More information can be found at legionathletics.com by searching for fasted cardio. Okay, that's it for this episode; I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful, and if you did and don't mind doing me a favor, please leave a quick review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to me from, in whatever app you're listening to me in.
In because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility, which thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and happier as well. Of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, simply subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out.
If you missed anything new, or if you didn't like something about the show, please send me an email at Mike MuscleforLife.com. Just go to muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how I can do this better. I read everything myself, and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, even if it is criticism. I'm open to it, and of course, you can email me.
