One of the many advantages of liposuction is that you can pick the area from which you can get rid of the fat. Do you have lots of fat in your abdomen? Liposuction can deal with that easily enough. Are your thighs too large for your taste? With liposuction, you can end up with thighs that don’t touch one another.
However, some people say that with the right exercises, you can actually burn off the fat with the right type of exercises. This is called spot reduction. But does this really work?
Spot Reduction and Targeted Toning
It’s true that you can exercise to build up your muscles. In fact, you can focus on specific muscles for your workouts. One day you can focus on your arm muscles, the next day on your chest, abs and back, and then you can concentrate on your legs after that.
This really works, since you can go with specific exercises to build up particular muscles. You can do chin-ups or lift dumbbells, for example, in order to build up your arm muscles. Sit-ups can help with your abs. For the legs, recommended exercises include plank leg lifts and squats.
These exercises cause microtears in the particular muscles. The body then rebuilds the muscles, using the protein in your diet. When you do enough of these exercises and you have plenty of proteins in your system, then you end up with bigger muscles. Consequently, you get stronger and you look better as well.
Some people might think that these exercises can also help to burn off the fat in these areas, and that these exercises can therefore work for spot reduction. That’s certainly helpful if it works, since the bigger muscles are more noticeable when there’s less fat in the area. Having too much fat also doesn’t look attractive, at least by modern standards.
However, fat burning doesn’t quite work that way.
How Fat Burning Works
As any doctor or weight loss expert can tell you, fat burning is a different process. It starts with how fat deposits form in the first place. Your body takes in calories through your diet, while your body burns off calories through various activities. You’re burning off fat even when you’re at rest.
Fat deposits form when you consume more calories than you use up. The body reserves those excess calories as fat deposits. This serves an evolutionary purpose: you have fat deposits you can use for times when food is scarce.
Therefore, to lose weight you have to use up more calories than you consume. That’s why you diet and limit your calorie intake, so you don’t have as many calories to deal with.
And that’s why you need to exercise more regularly. You can work out, and your strenuous activities lead your body to burn off more calories. High intensity workouts can burn off a lot of calories, and can even boost your metabolism so you’re burning off more calories even when you’re not active.
When you have a calorie deficit, your body compensates by burning off the fat to get the calories it needs for your various activities. That’s how you lose weight and end up with a slimmer body.
However, the scientific evidence tells us that you can’t quite target where your body will get the fat deposits for burning off. It’s random, and determined mostly by genetics.
The Scientific Evidence
It’s true that there are some studies that indicate that fat loss may be higher in the areas closer to the muscles you’re focusing on with your exercises. But these studies are few and far between.
The overwhelming evidence points to a different conclusion: that the fat loss is generalized over the whole body, and not just limited to the specific areas you’re targeting.
What that means is that even if you’re doing lots of squats to build up your leg muscles, it doesn’t mean that the fat in your thighs will also disappear as you exercise. If you have a calorie deficit working, then your body is just as likely to burn off the fat in some other area of the body, such as around your waist.
Conclusion
It is true that you can always improve the general appearance of a particular body area through targeted toning of the muscles there. Find one area where you wish to have bigger muscles, and you can always Google for the right exercises to do.
But you can’t really choose where your body will take the fat for burning off. Some people just burn off the fat from their abdomens first. This can be a problem, when you want to get rid of fat around the face or neck and it just won’t come off.
For that, you have liposuction and dermal filler alternatives!