Is Spot Reduction Possible with Diet?

Many people want to lose fat from a specific part of their body. For example, you might wish you carried a fewer kilos in your midsection, thighs or forearms. Efforts to eliminate fat from a single area are called “spot reduction.” Nowadays, the internet is exploding with trends such as “Detox drink to lose belly fat” which claims to target on reducing fat from a certain area of the body without any exercise.

To understand if spot reduction works, let’s first understand how our body burns fat. A fat cell’s main function is to store energy. Genetics is an important determinant for where fat is stored, men tend to carry more fat in the midsection, and women tend to have more around thighs and hips. Apart from genes, the major contributors to fat storage are a sedentary lifestyle and a high calorie diet. The body will expand the number of fat cells and the size of fat cells to accommodate excess energy from high-calorie foods. It will even start depositing fat cells on our muscles, liver and other organs to create space to store all this extra energy from calorie-rich diets especially when combined with a low activity lifestyle.

When a person begins and maintains a new exercise regimen and limits calories by going on a certain type of diet, the body does two things to “burn fat.” First, it uses the already present fat cells to fuel the body. Second, it stops fat deposition due to reduced calorie content. As a result, the body readjusts by decreasing the number and size of fat cells, which subsequently improves baseline metabolism and decreases inflammation. If we maintain this situation over time, the body reabsorbs the extra empty fat cells and discards them as waste, leaving us leaner and healthier.

Therefore, going on a diet (consuming fewer calories) primarily focuses on burning the total fat in the body and does not target a single area.
Many studies have also been held to find out if spot reduction really works with specific body part targeting exercises and it was found out that people who were trying to reduce belly fat by performing some special type of abs exercises which targeted the stomach area for six weeks have seen no change in their body. Therefore, be it diet or exercise, just focusing on losing fat at a certain area is merely a myth and not supported by actual scientific findings.

Over to you

Spot reduction from diet is just a myth, there’s no magic food or a type of diet that burns fat from a specific body part. There are some treatments such as liposuction which do claim to help in spot reductions, however, due to lack of evidence there side effects still need to be studied. If you want to lose fat from one area, you’ll have to lose fat overall. That means developing a healthier lifestyle with routine exercise (preferably three or four times a week) and consuming a well-balanced diet with lots of seasonal vegetables, fruits, whole grains and limited processed products are the only sustainable approach.