What You Should Know if You’re Trying to Target Fat Loss

After I lost a few pounds recently, my sister looked at a picture of me and gasped. “Look at your feet!” she exclaimed. “They are so tiny!”

While I appreciated her enthusiasm for my weight loss, I have to be honest: Losing weight in my feet wasn’t exactly my goal. And my experience is not an isolated one — many people who are on a weight loss journey have experienced the frustration of seeing overall weight reduction, but no major changes in the areas they hoped for. 

“Everybody’s different,” says Mir B. Ali, MD, bariatric surgeon and medical director of MemorialCare Surgical Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, California. Dr. Ali notes that because physiology varies between individuals, even when two people lose the same amount of weight, it won’t show up on their bodies in the same way. 

“Some people will notice it after a few pounds — in their face or other areas of their body,” Ali says. “For other people, it takes more weight loss for them to see a difference. There’s no way to predict where you’ll lose weight and how noticeable it will be.”

So what can you expect when you lose weight? Here’s a breakdown of what weight loss actually looks like in your body.

How Weight Loss Begins

First, it helps to understand the physical process of weight loss. Ali says that, in general, our bodies lose weight when our caloric intake is lower than our caloric expenditure. When calories are lower than what the body expends, the body first turns to the immediate stores of energy, glycogen (glucose). Since there’s only about a 24-hour stash of glycogen in the body, he adds, burning through that storage typically doesn’t affect someone’s weight. 

Once the glycogen reserve has been burned up, however, the body turns to using fat for energy. This can continue as long as you eat enough calories to maintain the basic functions of the body. “There’s a tendency to burn up fat stores before you lose muscle,” says Ali. “There are situations where you can lose muscle, but in general, the body burns fat before it starts muscle wasting.”

The one exception to that, adds Ali, is if you aren’t eating enough calories to fuel your basic bodily functions. If you’re undereating, your body can go into starvation mode and actively work to hang on to fat storage. That’s why ensuring you are eating enough calories is important, especially when trying to lose weight. To understand your ideal caloric intake, visit the Lose It! app.

Where Do We Lose Weight First?

The quick answer: It depends. Yet one study published in February 2013 in the European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine found that in adults categorized with overweight and obese BMIs, the women tended to lose weight in their legs first, while the men initially lost weight in their torso.

Another thing to consider is that the body has two types of fat: visceral and subcutaneous. While subcutaneous fat lies just beneath the skin’s surface, visceral fat is “deep” fat that surrounds organs. Rekha Kumar, MD, a practicing endocrinologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, says it is common for visceral fat to be lost first because it’s the “most excessive pocket of fat.” However, she adds that things like genetics will affect just how much visceral versus subcutaneous fat is lost. 

Ali stresses that even biological sex generalities can be highly individualized, and how and what type of fat is lost will depend on the person. For instance, things like sleep quality, stress levels, hormonal disorders, and menopause all impact weight loss.

Aging in general can also impact weight loss, says Ali, because metabolism and muscle mass both slow down. There are also certain endocrine conditions, like Cushing’s syndrome, that can force the body to deposit fat in certain areas, but those kinds of conditions are relatively rare, Ali notes. 

Can We Determine the Order of Fat Loss?

If you hope to lose weight in a certain area of your body first, such as your stomach or arms, we have bad news: Spot reduction is a weight loss myth. There’s no proven way to target fat loss in the body.

That’s because everyone stores fat differently and loses it differently, says Ali. All you can do is reduce your overall fat stores. Your body will ultimately decide where to take that fat from and in what order. 

“You can build muscle by targeting muscle groups, but the body will burn off weight where it wants to burn it off,” says Ali. “Any kind of exercise is helpful, but the majority of weight loss is going to be diet.” 

How to Lose Weight Faster in All Areas of the Body

Speaking of diet, Ali says paying attention to the food you eat is the number one way to achieve weight loss. He recommends a diet of reduced sugars and carbohydrates to all of his patients because it encourages the body to turn to more fat-burning on a biological level.

The reason for that, says Ali, is twofold. First, lowering the amount of sugar and carbohydrates in the body reduces the glycogen stores, which forces the body to turn to fat-burning more readily. Second, sugars and carbs stimulate insulin secretion. More insulin secretion tells your body to store fat and not burn it so much. So, reducing sugar and carbohydrate levels can stimulate the body to burn fat and avoid storing it.

After these dietary adjustments, the second strategy Ali recommends is building more muscle mass. “Muscle requires more energy,” says Ali. “So if you have more muscle mass, your basal metabolic rate, or the amount of calories you're burning just being still, is higher.”

Lastly, Ali suggests using non-scale measures to track your own weight loss journey and progress — for instance, things like inches lost, how your clothes fit, or how you feel. 

Dr. Kumar also encourages anyone who has lost weight — even if it’s not where they wanted it to be — to realize that even a seemingly small amount of weight reduction when medically indicated will have important health benefits. 

“When someone loses 5 percent of their body weight, we start to see health benefits if they were experiencing medical complications because of their excess weight,” she says. “The 5 percent weight loss mark is where we see improvements in blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol.”

Editorial Sources and Fact-Checking

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• El-Zayat SR, Sibaii H, El-Shamy KA. Physiological Process of Fat Loss. Bulletin of the National Research Centre. December 30, 2019.
• Fothergill E, Guo J, Howard L, et al. Persistent Metabolic Adaptation 6 Years After The Biggest Loser Competition. Obesity (Silver Spring). August 2016.
• Mittal B., Subcutaneous Adipose Tissue & Visceral Adipose Tissue. Indian Journal of Medical Research. May 2019. 
• National Institutes of Health. Biological Factors and Weight Loss Methods. February 27, 2018.
• Jensen J, Rustad PI, Kolnes AJ, et al. The Role of Skeletal Muscle Glycogen Breakdown for Regulation of Insulin Sensitivity by Exercise. Frontiers in Physiology. December 2011. 
• Ludwig DS, Ebbeling CB. The Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity: Beyond ‘Calories In, Calories Out.’ JAMA Internal Medicine. August 1, 2018.
• McPherron AC, Guo T, Bond ND, et al. Increasing Muscle Mass to Improve Metabolism. Adipocyte. April 1, 2013. 
• Ryan DH, Yockey SR. Weight Loss and Improvement in Comorbidity: Differences at 5%, 10%, 15%, and Over. Current Obesity Reports. June 2017.