Best Sumo Wrestler EVER!

Body fat is distributed all over your body but it’s not an even distribution. For example there is a at least a little bit of fat stored in places like your forehead and the back of your hands, but obviously this isn’t a major fat storage site.

For men the main site of fat storage is the gut/belly, and for women it is a mix of hips/thigh/butt and belly.

Each person will have a slightly different specific pattern but the general trend for men and women are more or less the same.

There are different specific locations of the fat.

Visceral fat is the fat that is stored underneath your abs and is all around your organs. This is basically what makes up a ‘gut’. Researchers are finding out that this fat is what contributes to a higher risk of heart disease and diabetes)

Subcutaneous fat is the stuff just under your skin that you can pinch. This fat also accumulates in the belly area for a double whammy on top of visceral fat. Lower body fat is also subcutaneous.

Intra-muscular fat is within the muscles themselves.

We store fat close to the middle of our bodies simply because from an evolutionary and functional perspective it allows us to still move around and use our arms and legs.

Think of it the other way around. If we stored all of our fat in our arms hands feet and legs it would be a functional disaster. We wouldn’t be able to walk or move our arms.

So as people get heavier they start to look like a sphere, with the additional fat all accumulating in the gut and butt area.

The reason it seems to take so long to burn fat from these areas is simply because more fat accumulates in there.

It takes longer to remove enough fat from these areas to see a difference. So when you’re losing weight it shows up in places with minimal fat first, such as your face, hands and arms. This doesn’t mean you’re not also losing fat from your belly or hips/butt, it just means there is more to lose from those spots and it doesn’t show as quickly.

We don’t like to admit it, but many of us have or had enough fat stored in our bellys/hips/butt that a 10-20lbs loss still doesn’t look like much…that just means you have another 20 to go before these area’s really start to look lean.

Every fitness competitor and bodybuilder I’ve known or worked with is always shocked the first time they diet down and realize how much fat they really had to lose.

It’s always more than they think, and they always end up lighter than they guessed they would be by contest time.

John

Do you really think your gut has an attitude?

It’s not uncommon to hear the word ‘stubborn’ used to describe the fat that we store around our midsection (belly). This isn’t meant to be a literal description as I doubt you think the fat is actually being difficult and stuck in its ways and not open to suggestion.

But this term gets used so much that some people may start to believe the fat around your belly is in fact ‘stubborn’ and will not move. This of course is a false assumption.

The fat around your belly or any of your ‘problem areas’ is the same type of fat as the rest of your body, there just happens to be more of it stored around the midsection. This area of fat burns just as readily as every other area however the muscular definition in this area is the last to show through because there is typically more fat stored here.

In other words, as you lose weight your arms will become defined much faster than your midsection (because there is much less fat stored on your arms), this doesn’t mean you’re not losing fat from around your gut, it just means it will take longer to burn through all the fat to see the underlying muscles.

Belly fat isn’t any more stubborn than it is angry or happy, its just fat and you can burn it off if you maintain a caloric deficit for long enough.

John