Why Is It So Hard to Lose Belly Fat?

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If you’ve looked at the abdominal fat surrounding your waist and wondered if it would be possible to get rid of it, you’re definitely not alone.

Is there something about abdominal fat that makes it harder to get rid of?

In determining the best ways you might be able to lose abdominal fat, it may be a good idea to have at least a rudimentary understanding of how our body handles our fat stores.

So in Part 1, let’s talk about the ways our body uses, stores, and distributes fat.

How you body metabolizes fat

Fat breakdown and usage

Fat breakdown, also known as lipolysis, is the breakdown of fat into fuel for our body to use.

It requires multiple steps to prepare and use the fat as energy. These steps involve removing the fat from our fat stores, shuttling it via the bloodstream all over the body to needed locations, and transforming the fat so it can be received by muscles as energy.

Muscles don’t just pull the fat energy from surrounding fat tissue, merely because it’s closeby. Doing so would actually be very inefficient.

This is because important muscles that are not immediately near any large fat stores like your heart or diaphragm, would potentially receive less energy than less important muscles that are near larger fat stores like your arms and legs.

I mean It’s not good if your arms and legs feel weak, but it’s fatal if your heart or breathing stops working.

So, fat breakdown is highly generalized, meaning the body will use fat from all our fat stores, since this helps ensure all the muscles in the body can quickly receive this energy.

There isn’t really any natural way to decide where your body will burn fat from.

Fat formation and storage

We gain fat by two major means, either by getting it directly from our diet, or by generating it ourselves.

When we get it from our diet, the body takes the fats that we eat, then breaks down those fats into more basic building blocks, before reassembling them into a type of fat that can be transported easily.

This type of fat is called a triglyceride. These triglycerides are then shipped all over the body for storage, or use, as needed.

When we generate new fat, it’s called lipogenesis.

Our body is able to easily produce fat from almost all the food we eat, like from carbohydrates.

It’s particularly efficient at producing fat from the ethanol we consume from alcohol, like wine, beer, or other liquor. This is because the biochemical pathway for the body to convert ethanol to fat is one of the shortest and most simple for the body to carry out.

In comparison, the body is much less efficient at producing fat from the protein we eat, since the conversion pathway from protein to fat is long, complex, and inefficient.

Unlike the breakdown of fat which is highly generalized however, the body may preferentially choose to store fat in certain areas over others. We’re very familiar with these areas.

For example, we tend to have much more fat around the arms, rather than around our hands. And we’re more likely to store fat around our abdomen, than our face.

It’s just how our bodies genetically store fat, and while our hormones play a big role, there isn’t too much we can do to naturally control it.

Why is it so hard to lose belly fat?

Because our body preferentially chooses certain areas like our belly to store fat, but doesn’t choose specific areas to burn fat, the end result is an uneven distribution of fat.

For example, When we put on fat weight, we’ll notice the biggest increases around the areas of our abdomen, or in women, also the buttock and thighs.

As we gain even more fat, we’ll start to also notice small increases in our arms, face and neck.

When we finally do lose the fat weight, reductions are noticed everywhere at once. So our abdomen, buttocks, thighs, and also our arms, face, and neck are reduced.

Because the fat stores in our arms, face, and neck are much smaller, their reduction is noticed first.

Meanwhile, there are also significant reductions around our abdomen, but because there is so much more fat on our abdomen to begin with, and our body is not just targeting our abdominal fat to burn, some fat remains there, and is still noticeable, even after losing a significant amount of weight.

For the body to burn only abdominal fat, it would require the rest of the body to have almost no other fat sources, which is not really possible as the body would still have small fat stores all over the body it could still use.

At that point, the only natural way to completely lose your belly fat would be to continue to lose weight and burn fat until nearly all your fat stores have been depleted. Which is possible, but very difficult to do in practice.

Learn more about

• What To Eat To Lose Belly Fat – Protein and Fat
• Foods To Avoid To Lose Belly Fat
• Best exercises to lose belly fat

See also

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  Low FODMAP Diet: an overview
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  How To Eat Mindfully
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  Anti-inflammatory diet: an overview
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