“Skinny Fat” Explained (& How To Fix It)

“Skinny fat” is a term you may have seen floating around social media. It describes people who have a low body weight but a high body fat percentage, often resulting in flabby appearance despite being within a weight range considered healthy. Many try dieting and exercising, only to find that neither work.

This video explains what’s going wrong, and how to fix it:

Diet & exercise won’t work if it’s not right

This problem occurs because common weight-loss approaches, such as restrictive dieting and excessive cardio, fail to improve body composition:

• Restrictive dieting reduces both fat and lean mass, keeping the body fat percentage unchanged
• Cardio burns some calories but the underlying metabolic issue hasn’t meaningfully changed, so any loss will be temporary (and most of any immediate loss will be water weight, anyway)

The key to overcoming skinny fat is resistance training. Lifting weights or doing bodyweight exercises helps build muscle, which not only lowers body fat percentage (by simple mathematics; add more muscle and the percentages of other things must go down even if the total amount is the same) and improves overall definition, which is something most people consider nice. However, the real value here is that it actually addresses the underlying metabolic issue—because muscle costs calories to maintain, one’s basal metabolic rate will now be faster, even when you’re sleeping.

This then becomes… Not quite a self-sustaining system, because you do have to still eat well and continue to do resistance training, but your body will be doing most of the work for you, and you’ll find it’s a lot easier to maintain a healthy body composition than to get one in the first place, for exactly the metabolic reason we described.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It ← this is a different, but adjacent issue (and very important for avoiding metabolic disease risks)

Take care!