Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Can You Spot Reduce Belly Fat (and Other Stubborn Areas) After All? | Ep 332

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Can You Spot Reduce Belly Fat (and Other Stubborn Areas) After All? | Ep 332 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: You've been told for years that spot reduction is impossible.
• 0:04
  Philip Pape: You can't do crunches to lose belly fat, tricep exercises to lose arm fat or squats to lose thigh fat period.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: But what if there's actually a way to spot reduce, just not how most people think?
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: Today we're examining what's really happening when people finally lose stubborn fat after years of struggle, why the traditional approach fails and the three factors that actually create the results people want from spot reduction.
• 0:29
  Philip Pape: The answer isn't in targeting those areas directly.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: So what is the answer?
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: Tune in to find out.
• 0:46
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 0:52
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're tackling one of the most persistent questions, or myths, in the fitness world, and that is can you actually target stubborn fat areas?
• 1:06
  Philip Pape: Now, the short answer is no, at least not how most people think Traditional spot reduction, where you work one area and the fat just melts off.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: The long answer, though, reveals a different approach that does deliver the results people want from spot reduction, but without the frustration that most people experience.
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: And before we get into this, this episode is actually based on two different listener questions that I've smushed together into one topic and if you want to send your question in and get it featured on the podcast whether it's training, nutrition, mindset, building your physique, any of it just go to witsandweightscom slash question and you'll get a personal response by me by email and potentially get it featured on the show and a shout out if you'd like.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: And again, that's witsandweightscom slash question.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: So that's what we're doing today.
• 1:54
  Philip Pape: We're going to share two listener questions.
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: They're almost stories about these listeners that capture what most people experience with stubborn body fat, and you might definitely relate to this.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: The first one is a 58 year old guy from the Philippines, uh, who wrote, quote I've been training for a little over six months now and I've achieved both my target weight and target muscle to fat ratio.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: I've even developed visible muscles on my upper abs.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: My problem is that my lower abs still protrude with a healthy dose of belly fat.
• 2:23
  Philip Pape: I can't seem to get rid of it.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: And then he continued.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: He said I don't want to lose more weight as I'm happy where I am, so I'm hesitant to go on extended calorie deficits.
• 2:31
  Philip Pape: I'm also concerned that I may lose muscle if I go on extended calorie deficits To try to lose the belly fat.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: I started to do targeted exercises leg lifts, sit-ups, side pulls, russian twists to try to focus on losing the belly fat, with no visible progress.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: And I picked out this one in particular because here's a person who has done a lot of the right things.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: He's achieved the weight he wanted and the muscle mass and body comp, except he has a stubborn area of belly fat, and men and women relate to this in different ways, but definitely starts to occur more and more as we get older.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: So if this sounds familiar, I think that's because it captures what most of us experience.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: The other listener and I'm going to address both all of this together in one topic.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: The other listener is Aubrey, who is 41, and she wrote me on Instagram.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: She said, quote I would love to hear your take on trouble areas leaning out more with each cut phase.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: I think it has to do with continued leanness from adding muscle and maintenance through the year and then just having less fat overall, and then when I go to cut, it impacts my trouble areas.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: It takes time, so I don't think people understand that things can keep improving and body shape can change for the better as years pass on.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: And then she added, quote I am in a cut now and I'm seeing muscle definition in my butt that I know I've never had before.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: It's like my body said okay, she's mastered the leanness up top, let's start hacking away the lower.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: Finally, now, these are two completely different experiences, different stories, but they all link together in a very amazing way that we're going to address today and kind of look at what the key is to all of this.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: And you want to listen to the whole episode because we're going to take you through the story of what the research says, what's actually going on, what approach most people take and why it doesn't work, and then the actual way to do it.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: So you're going to want to listen all the way through if you want to understand the full context and what to do for your own situation.
• 4:14
  Philip Pape: So let's address the elephant in the room, and that is that there is recent research suggesting some limited spot reduction might be possible.
• 4:23
  Philip Pape: Ooh, shocker.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: You didn't know.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: I'd say that, did you.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: There was a study in 2023, I think it was actually reviewed in the May 2020, may or March, I forget which one 2024 issue of Body by Science by Bill Campbell that I had the pleasure of contributing to as an expert contributor and it talked about ab training, but I want to talk about the study itself.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: The study found that combining ab exercises with cardio led to slightly more trunk fat loss over 10 weeks, and it's a very tiny bit, but it's interesting Now why this misses.
• 4:57
  Philip Pape: The point is that even if you can achieve some small amount of localized fat loss, it's just not enough to solve the real problem people have with those stubborn areas, and that's why our first listener question he was doing everything and still, even after targeting those areas, it didn't seem to work.
• 5:16
  Philip Pape: And the real issue is not that you need to target them directly.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: The issue is most people are missing the requirements for accessing stubborn fat stores in the first place.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: What do I mean?
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: All right, let's get a little sciencey here, because here's what's happening when you have stubborn fat.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: Okay and I'm just using that word a little bit loosely, but we all know what it means it's the areas of fat that seem to be the last to come off, or maybe they don't even seem to be able to come off.
• 5:43
  Philip Pape: They're just like if we lost all the fat in our body, somehow the stubborn fat's still going to be there.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: Well, what it is is they have more what's called alpha-2 adrenergic receptors that inhibit fat breakdown, and they have poor blood flow.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: This is very reminiscent of visceral fat around our organs, for example, and this makes them resistant to fat loss, even in a calorie deficit.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: All right, there's a big caveat on that, because we're gonna talk about ultimately what it takes.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: A calorie deficit is gonna be part of the solution, potentially, but they are more resistant during a calorie deficit.
• 6:17
  Philip Pape: So for men, it's typically the lower abs and the love handles I feel like.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: For me it's my butt, so that's just me.
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: For women, it's my butt, so that's just me.
• 6:31
  Philip Pape: For women, it's often the hips, the thighs, the lower body.
• 6:32
  Philip Pape: But and this is the big but pun intended fat loss is still primarily systemic.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: It's system-wide.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: Your body mobilizes fat from throughout your body, based on your overall energy balance, your hormones, your muscle mass and your genetics.
• 6:47
  Philip Pape: And the reason people get obsessed with spot reduction is they're looking for a shortcut around the fundamental requirements of fat loss.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: They want to keep their current body composition and just target the problem area.
• 6:59
  Philip Pape: And I'm not calling you out to our 58-year-old caller.
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: He didn't want me to use his name, so all cool.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: I'm not trying to call you out as if you're not-old caller.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: He didn't want me to use his name, so all cool.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: I'm not trying to call you out as if you're not trying to do the right thing.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: But it may require more fat loss than you believe and that's one of the issues.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: What have I told you if there actually is a way to spot reduce?
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: But it requires a different approach that works with your physiology and it takes time.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: It's not just a one-and-done thing.
• 7:22
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about.
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: Let's talk about the different approaches.
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: All right, our 50 year old, 58 year old guy from the Philippines is experiencing exactly what happens when you try to spot reduce without addressing the underlying issues.
• 7:35
  Philip Pape: He's addressed a lot of them, so congrats, kudos to him.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: For sure, he is a far ahead of where most people are right now.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: So congrats on that big win to be celebrated.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: He's achieved his target weight is muscle to fat ratio, but he called in, or he wrote in with lower belly fat that he's frustrated with.
• 7:52
  Philip Pape: He doesn't want to lose more weight and he's trying to target the fat, but the problem is he may not have enough muscle mass in his core to reveal the definition, even at his current body fat level.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: That's one thing, because if you don't train your abs properly and that's a key word, properly, we'll get to that.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: They won't be developed enough to show, even when you're lean right.
• 8:13
  Philip Pape: And that's independent of genetic differences, because we all have different.
• 8:17
  Philip Pape: Not everybody has a six-pack under there, some have, you know, eight packs, four packs, different kind of shapes.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: So that's the first thing.
• 8:23
  Philip Pape: He may not have enough muscle mass.
• 8:25
  Philip Pape: Some people think you do.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: You said you're at your ideal muscle-to-fat ratio, but usually it's a lifelong process and you want to keep adding muscle.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: Second, his overall body fat might still be too high, and that's probably actually where I'd go first in his case, potentially, knowing that he has trained for a while If you're brand new, I would definitely lean more toward the muscle side of the equation.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: But his body fat might be too high for lower ab definition, even if his total muscle to fat ratio looks good from his perspective.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: Lower abs, the lower section of the abs, are typically the last place that men lose fat and you usually have to get down to something like 10% to 12% body fat or lower to see them clearly.
• 9:03
  Philip Pape: So again, not wanting to lose weight piece of it comes into here with his fears because then we have to understand okay, well, how do we get to that level of leanness if it's not strictly through losing more weight or fat?
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: The third thing here is he's afraid of losing muscle in a deficit, but I think this fear could be preventing him from doing what might be necessary.
• 9:22
  Philip Pape: So if the reason you and I say you, because I wish I could use your name but if the reason he doesn't want to lose more weight is because he thinks he'll lose muscle, well that's an easy problem, right.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: A strategic cut with the proper training to hold on to muscle, with enough protein, that's an easy problem.
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: We do it all the time.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: That's the very definition of a fat loss phase, when done properly, is you're going to lose very little to no muscle.
• 9:45
  Philip Pape: So if that's the only thing holding you back, then that's great, because you're gonna be good if you're training, eating protein, doing all the right things, right.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: And so I think overall, this actually represents maybe the most common mistake people make is trying to solve a body composition problem without changing body composition.
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: And again, I know he's saying he wants to improve body composition but without losing weight.
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: And you can do that.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: You can do that by building more muscle and then losing fat.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: That's what I alluded to already.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: But the targeted exercises that he's doing, um, yeah, they might build some muscle, done properly, but they're not going to spot reduce the fat.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: And I did allude to training abs, and of course you want to do that, but it's not going to be the only thing you know.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: Plus, you have to be progressively overloading and actually building that muscle, which we have to confirm that you're doing.
• 10:31
  Philip Pape: So that's that's the big uh takeaway in terms of why things don't work.
• 10:37
  Philip Pape: It's if your your body fat's not low enough, you haven't had enough muscle or you're afraid to lose weight to reveal the muscle because of other reasons, like in this case, um, losing muscle in a deficit, uh, but that's, and that's that's the one.
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: That's one listener.
• 10:50
  Philip Pape: Now let's look at Aubrey, our other listener, who wrote in because she's discovered a, the real way to spot, reduce, so.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: So in her case she's not asked, calling in at a frustration.
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: She actually wants to share the fact that this can work and I think that's that's awesome.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: Um, and she's done it by improving body composition systemically over time.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: That's how you actually get the results people want, but it's through a different mechanism.
• 11:11
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about the um.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: I'll say three factors for doing this, because this is really the.
• 11:17
  Philip Pape: The money here is what do you do?
• 11:19
  Philip Pape: So the first factor is you have to have a foundation.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: I've said before and I stole this from someone years ago you can't sculpt a pebble, but you can sculpt a boulder, and you need to become that boulder first that you can then sculpt down.
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: Aubrey mentioned adding muscle and maintenance through the year.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: She said that in her quote in her message to me adding muscle in maintenance through the year and I think this is crucial because you can't reveal what isn't there.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: If you want to find abs, you have to build abs.
• 11:48
  Philip Pape: If you want a shapely lower body, you have to build those muscles.
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: There's nothing to show otherwise, right.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: And this means training your target areas like any other muscle group, with progressive overload, sufficient volume and consistency.
• 12:01
  Philip Pape: And, yes, you're going to hit your abs, like, let's say, abs.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: Specifically, you're going to hit your abs with big compound lifts.
• 12:07
  Philip Pape: But then you also want to have some special ab work in there once or twice a week, like, like they say, 10 to 20 hard sets per week per major muscle group, using exercises that allow you to add weight or reps over time, like a a loaded ab crunch, for example, or if you did hanging leg raises, it's increasing your reps.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: But here's the key you have to do this during periods where you're eating enough to support muscle growth.
• 12:29
  Philip Pape: You cannot build muscle in an aggressive deficit or even a moderate deficit.
• 12:33
  Philip Pape: Unless you're totally new to this, you're not going to build much muscle, and the amount of muscle we want to get this lean shredded look that I think you guys are going for when we talk about spot reduction does take at least one or two cycles of truly building muscle.
• 12:45
  Philip Pape: And Aubrey mentioned, you know, doing it at maintenance, like being in maintenance throughout most of the year.
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: That's a great strategy If you're willing to actually gain weight and go into a surplus.
• 12:54
  Philip Pape: That could be even more optimal short term, especially if you're on the younger end of the training spectrum younger as in, newer to training, not young in age.
• 13:03
  Philip Pape: End of the training spectrum.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: Younger as in, newer to training, not young in age.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: So that's the first foundation is building the foundation becoming the big granite of muscle that you can sculpt down rather than being a skinny pebble that has nowhere to go?
• 13:18
  Philip Pape: Factor two is then strategic fat loss phases, not crash dieting, not cutting super aggressively.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: Again, going back to Aubrey, she talks about each cut phase impacting her trouble areas more each time she does it and I've seen that myself.
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: I've seen that with clients, and that is you have to actually lose enough fat to reach those stubborn areas and the first time you do a fat loss phase you just may not have enough muscle and then you may not get lean enough.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: But first time you do a fat loss phase you just may not have enough muscle and then you may not get lean enough.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: But each time you add muscle it's easier to get lean in terms of you don't necessarily have to cut down to as low of a body weight to get lean.
• 13:53
  Philip Pape: So more muscle, cut fat, more muscle, cut fat.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: That's why we like bulking and cutting generally as an optimal way to do this.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: Again, for most men, lower abs they're not going to show until you're around 10 to 12% body fat.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: I don't like living at that percentage.
• 14:06
  Philip Pape: I usually get down around 14% when I'm pretty lean, like for the summer, and I have a little bit of, not a little bit.
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: My abs are showing but they're not like super cut because I don't want to, I don't want to diet down to 10 to 12%.
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: Generally.
• 14:19
  Philip Pape: Some clients I have love living around you know 8% body fat as men, or and to the point where some of them are even afraid to gain weight, and that's a separate issue.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: For women, lower body definition is going to require getting quite lean.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: I'm just sorry to say it, to tell you the truth, but it's usually somewhere around 16 to 20% body fat, or potentially lower for women.
• 14:39
  Philip Pape: And again, percentage body fat doesn't directly correlate to scale weight.
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: It correlates to how much muscle and fat you have.
• 14:47
  Philip Pape: So of course, if you have more muscle, you can be at the same percent body fat at a higher scale weight.
• 14:54
  Philip Pape: And that's what Aubrey, and that's what we're trying to get at here.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: It's easier, each cut phase, each bulk, each cut to get there, and that means accepting that you might need to lose more total weight than you initially wanted the first time and maybe less the next time and the time after that, not because the scale number matters, because that's what it takes to access those fat stores.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: Listen, your body's going to run out of places to get fat and then it's eventually going to go to that trouble area and it may just require getting a lot more lean than you've ever been.
• 15:21
  Philip Pape: It may also let's be honest about it require getting more lean than you want to be, or that is super sustainable for you, and part of that is genetics.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: It's just genetics, but that's okay.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: Anybody can do it.
• 15:33
  Philip Pape: However, so it's a very strategic thing and to me, fat loss needs to be done intelligently, moderately and keeping the protein high, continuing to strength train, planning in diet breaks or refeeds all of the things we talk about a lot on this show and recently have covered in other episodes, like the three plus three model of optimal fat loss.
• 15:52
  Philip Pape: You can go find that one.
• 15:53
  Philip Pape: I did an episode quite a while ago called your very first cut, which you can search in the feed.
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: So that's.
• 15:59
  Philip Pape: The second factor is doing strategic fat loss, knowing that in between you're going to be building muscle and kind of going back and forth.
• 16:06
  Philip Pape: And then the final factor here maybe this is the biggest one for all of you is time and patience, and I know you're rolling your eyes like oh, here he goes again, but you know how much of this is just psychology.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: 90% of it is psychology.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: Now, aubrey's been at this for four and a half years.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: Okay, I've been at this for four or five years four or five years myself and I have a long way to go to where I could really be at the place where I feel like super lean and it's easier and I can carry a lot more body weight.
• 16:33
  Philip Pape: But if I drew a graph for you up and down with body fat, with weight, with all the things you would see it trending toward being leaner at a higher body weight and therefore being easier to see my abs or get the fat off my butt or whatever.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean that I always live that way.
• 16:49
  Philip Pape: I live many times with more weight on my body because I love to lift and make progress and feel great as well.
• 16:54
  Philip Pape: Aubrey said quote things can keep improving and body shape can change for the better as years pass on, and that is what most people miss.
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: Real physique transformation happens through multiple cycles of building muscle and losing fat over years, not weeks or months.
• 17:10
  Philip Pape: I'm sorry.
• 17:11
  Philip Pape: I know you want the quick fix.
• 17:12
  Philip Pape: I know you think I've got to lose the weight.
• 17:13
  Philip Pape: It's not about that.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: It's about building muscle and losing fat.
• 17:17
  Philip Pape: You have to be training that is a non-negotiable and then each time you go through one of these cycles, you build muscle for, in my opinion, six to 12 months and then you cut for maybe eight to 16 weeks right, that's two to four months.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: And then you maintain for a period.
• 17:32
  Philip Pape: That's improving your body composition at a fundamental level and being able to see more of your definition the more you do it.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: So the muscle you build.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: How many times do we have to talk on the show about the benefits?
• 17:43
  Philip Pape: But it does, it's everything.
• 17:45
  Philip Pape: It raises your metabolism, it improves your insulin sensitivity, it changes how your body partitions nutrients right, and that's what muscle gets you.
• 17:52
  Philip Pape: Fat loss phases will get easier and more effective because you have more of this metabolically active, what we call expensive muscle tissue.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: Right, and you notice.
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: I didn't even get to things like specific exercises, because at the end of the day, if you simply do basic strength training with progressive overload, you get stronger, you build muscle generally systemically over your body and then you use nutrition to cut fat, you probably can get to the leanness you want doing that alone.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: Some of you, because of genetics or because of a look you're going for, will definitely want to specialize and train certain muscle groups more.
• 18:29
  Philip Pape: You just will.
• 18:30
  Philip Pape: There are phenomena that occur with the body and how it stretches skin, how it stretches the layer of fat on top of those stubborn areas that we're not even getting into here because it's in the weeds, it's in the noise, it's very individual and genetically specific, no-transcript.
• 18:55
  Philip Pape: The one little trick with some of these areas like the abs is, for some people, they do need to have loaded ab work, whether that's hanging, leg raises, reverse crunches, ab wheel rollouts, what's the other thing?
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: You know, loaded ab crunches, like there are plenty of ways to load your abs and make sure to focus on the area that you care most about developing, but all you're doing is you're potentially increasing the muscle mass a little bit, a little bit, like we're doing is you're potentially increasing the muscle mass a little bit, a little bit, like we're talking.
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: You know, millimeters or centimeters, like it depends on which one we're talking about where the real game changer is going to be how lean you get.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: That's just it, I'm sorry to say, but if you have overall more muscle mass, you could be overall more lean at a higher body weight, and that's what makes it really cool over time.
• 19:37
  Philip Pape: So I think what people really want from spot reduction is to see definition and shape in specific areas, and the secret?
• 19:43
  Philip Pape: The secret is that you can achieve this, but not by targeting those areas directly.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: So when you build muscles systematically, when you lose fat strategically over time sometimes years, I'm sorry to say it, it just is going to take time you create what looks and feels like spot reduction.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: Your trouble areas will eventually lean out, not because you targeted them, but because you've built the foundation that allows your body to access those fat stores effectively.
• 20:09
  Philip Pape: Because your body is a system, it is integrated.
• 20:13
  Philip Pape: When you build muscle, you're not just building that specific muscle, you're improving the entire metabolic profile of your body.
• 20:19
  Philip Pape: When you lose fat, you're not just losing fat from one area.
• 20:21
  Philip Pape: You can't even control that.
• 20:23
  Philip Pape: You're changing your hormonal environment, your insulin sensitivity, your body's entire energy management system.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: And that's why Aubrey, for example, can see changes in her fourth year.
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: She couldn't see in her first year.
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: She hasn't just lost fat, she's systemically upgraded her whole body's operating system, for lack of a better phrase.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: Every training session, every meal, every recovery period is programming your body for that long-term lifestyle, as whatever phrase works for you athlete, lifter, healthy, person and when you understand this, then you're going to stop looking for the quick fix, the shortcut, which isn't going to work anyway.
• 20:57
  Philip Pape: It's just not going to work, and then you can start building that foundation and that's the lasting change you're going for.
• 21:02
  Philip Pape: It's going to take time and the irony is, when you stop trying to spot reduce and you start focusing on body composition, your trouble areas are going to start responding, not because you're targeting them, but because you've created the conditions to access those fat stores and that's really all it is.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: So can you spot reduce belly fat?
• 21:19
  Philip Pape: No, not in the traditional sense of targeting directly, but you can absolutely achieve the results you want from spot reduction through building muscle and losing fat over time.
• 21:27
  Philip Pape: For our 58-year-old guy from the Philippines, this might mean accepting he needs to either build more muscle or yes, lose more fat, or do both in strategic cycles.
• 21:38
  Philip Pape: For Aubrey, she's discovered the real secret here patience and consistency over the years, not quick fixes over weeks.
• 21:45
  Philip Pape: Your stubborn fat areas are not stubborn because you need better exercises okay, it's not that.
• 21:52
  Philip Pape: They're stubborn because you have to give yourself the time and patience to build muscle and lose fat.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: Many people haven't even taken time to build muscle and if you're one of those, listening everything else I talk in this episode, almost doesn't matter until you do that, all right.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: If you have any questions about building muscle, losing fat, applying any of these strategies we talked about, or you have follow-up questions about specifics, submit them at witsandweightscom slash question.
• 22:16
  Philip Pape: You'll get a personal response from me and we'll potentially feature it on the show, if it makes sense.
• 22:22
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember your best physique is not ever built using shortcuts.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: It is engineered through patience, consistency and an understanding that real transformation takes time.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.