Can We Do Fat Redistribution?

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The famous answer: no

The truthful answer: yes, and we are doing it all the time whether we want to or not, so we might as well know what things affect our fat distribution in various body parts.

There’s a kernel of truth in the “no”, though, and where that comes from is that we cannot exclusively put fat on in a certain area only, and nor can we do “spot reduction”, i.e., intentionally lose fat from only one place.

How, then, do we do fat redistribution?

Your body is a living organism, not a statue

It’s easy to think “I’ve been carrying this fat in this place for 20 years”, but during that time the fat has been replaced several times and moved often; in fact, the cells containing the fat have even been replaced. Because: fat can seem like a substance that’s alien to your body because it doesn’t respond like muscles, isn’t controllable like muscles, doesn’t have the same sensibility as muscles, etc. But, every bit of fat stored in your body is stored inside a fat cell; it’s not one big unit of fat; it’s lots of tiny ones.

In reality, any given bit of fat on your body has probably been there for 18–24 months at most:

Fat turnover in obese slower than average

…and there are assorted factors that can modify the rate at which our body deals with fat storage:

Human white adipose tissue: A highly dynamic metabolic organ

So, how do I get rid of this tummy?

There are plenty of stories of people who try to lose weight from one part of their body, and lose it from somewhere else instead. Say, a person wants to lose weight from her hips, and with careful diet and exercise, she loses weight—by dropping a couple of bra cup sizes while keeping the hips.

So, we must figure out: why is fat stored in certain places? And the main driving factors are:

  • hormones
  • metabolic health
  • stress

Hormones affect fat distribution insofar as estrogen and progesterone will favor the hips, thighs, butt, breasts, and testosterone will favor a more central (but still subcutaneous, not visceral) distribution. Additionally, estrogen and progesterone will favor a higher body fat percentage, while testosterone will favor a lower one.

This is particularly relevant later in life, when suddenly the hormone(s) you’ve been relying on to keep your shape, are now declining, meaning your shape does too. This goes for everyone regardless of sex.

See:

Metabolic health affects fat distribution insofar as poor metabolic health will result in more fat being stored in the viscera, rather than in the usual subcutaneous places. This is a serious health risk.

See: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It

Stress affects fat distribution insofar as chronically elevated cortisol levels see more fat sent to the stomach, face, and neck. This fat redistribution isn’t dangerous itself, but it can be indicative of the chronic stress, which does pose more of a general threat to health.

See: Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)

What this means in practical terms

Assuming that you would like the fat distribution that says “this is a healthy woman” or “this is a healthy man”, respectively, then you might want to:

  • Check your sex hormone levels and get them adjusted if appropriate
  • Improve your overall metabolic health—without necessarily trying to lose weight, just, take care of your blood sugars for example, and they will take care of you in terms of fat storage.
  • Manage your stress (which includes any stress you are experiencing about your body not being how you’d like it to be).

If you are doing these things, and you don’t have any major untreated medical abnormalities that affect these things, then your fat will go to the places generally considered healthiest.

Can we speed it up?

Yes, we can! Firstly, we can speed up our overall metabolism:

Let’s Burn! Metabolic Tweaks And Hacks

Secondly, we can encourage our body to “move” fat by intentionally “yo-yoing”, something usually considered bad in dieting when people just want to lose weight and instead are going up and down, but: if you lose weight healthily, it comes off everywhere evenly, and if you gain weight healthily, it goes mostly to the places where it should be.

So, a sequence of lose-gain-lose-gain might look like “lose a bit from everywhere, put it back in the good place, lose a bit more from everywhere, put it back in the good place”, etc.

So, you might want to gently cycle these a few months apart, for example:

How To Lose Fat (Healthily!) | How To Gain Fat (Healthily!)

You can also cheat a little, if it suits your purpose! By this we mean: if you’d like a little extra where you already have a little fat, then you can put muscle on underneath it, it will pad it up, and (because of the layer of actual fat on top) nobody will know the difference unless you flex it with their hand on it.

Let’s put it this way: people doing squats for a bubble-butt aren’t doing it to put on fat; they’re putting muscle on under the fat they have.

So, check out: How To Gain Muscle (Healthily!)

And finally, for all your body-sculpting needs, we present these excellent books:

Women’s Strength Training Anatomy Workouts – by Frédéric Delavier

Strength Training Anatomy (For Men) – by Frédéric Delavier

Enjoy!

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  • Mouthwatering Protein Falafel

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Baking falafel, rather than frying it, has a strength and a weakness. The strength: it is less effort and you can do more at once. The weakness: it can easily get dry. This recipe calls for baking them in a way that won’t get dry, and the secret is one of its protein ingredients: peas! Add to this the spices and a tahini sauce, and you’ve a mouthwatering feast that’s full of protein, fiber, polyphenols, and even healthy fats.

    You will need

    • 1 cup peas, cooked
    • 1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed (keep the chickpea water—also called aquafaba—aside, as we’ll be using some of it later)
    • ½ small red onion, chopped
    • 1 handful fresh mint, chopped
    • 1 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
    • ½ bulb garlic, crushed
    • 1 tbsp lemon juice
    • 1 tbsp chickpea flour (also called gram flour, besan flour, or garbanzo bean flour) plus more for dusting
    • 2 tsp red chili flakes (adjust per heat preferences)
    • 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
    • 1 tsp ground turmeric
    • ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
    • Extra virgin olive oil

    For the tahini sauce:

    • 2 tbsp tahini
    • 2 tbsp lemon juice
    • ¼ bulb garlic, crushed
    • 5 tbsp aquafaba (if for some reason you don’t have it, such as for example you substituted 1 cup chickpeas that you cooked yourself, substitute with water here)

    To serve:

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Preheat the oven to 350℉ / 180℃.

    2) Blend the peas and chickpeas in a food processor for a few seconds. You want a coarse mixture, not a paste.

    3) Add the rest of the main section ingredients except the olive oil, and blend again for a few more seconds. It should still have a chunky texture, or else you will have made hummus. If you accidentally make hummus, set your hummus aside and start again on the falafels.

    4) Shape the mixture into balls; if it lacks structural integrity, fold in a little more chickpea flour until the balls stay in shape. Either way, once you have done that, dust the balls in chickpea flour.

    5) Brush the balls in a little olive oil, as you put them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Bake for 15–18 minutes until golden, turning partway through.

    6) While you are waiting, making the tahini sauce by combining the tahini sauce ingredients in a high-speed blender and processing on high until smooth. If you do not have a small enough blender (a bullet-style blender should work for this), then do it manually, which means you’ll have to crush the garlic all the way into a smooth paste, such as with a pestle and mortar, or alternatively, use ready-made garlic paste—and then simply whisk the ingredients together until smooth.

    7) Serve the falafels warm or cold, on flatbreads with leafy salad and the tahini sauce.

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

    Share This Post

  • How Your Exercise Today Gives A Brain Boost Tomorrow

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Regular 10almonds readers may remember we not long back wrote about a study that showed how daily activity levels, in aggregate, make a difference to brain health over the course of 1–2 weeks (in fact, it was a 9-day study):

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    Today, we’re going to talk about a new (published today, at time of writing) study that shows the associations between daily exercise levels (amongst other things) and how well people performed in cognitive tests the next day.

    By this we mean: they recorded exercise vs sedentary behavior vs sleep on a daily basis (using wearable tech to track it), and tested them daily with cognitive tests, and looked at how the previous day’s activities (or lack thereof) impacted the next day’s test results.

    Notably, the sample was of older adults (aged 50–83). The sample size wasn’t huge but was statistically significant (n=76) and the researchers are of course calling for more studies to be done with more people.

    What they found

    To put their findings into few words:

    • Consistent light exercise boosts general cognitive performance not just for hours (which was already known) but through the next day.
    • More moderate or vigorous activity than usual in particular led to better working memory and episodic memory the next day.
    • More sleep (especially slow-wave deep sleep) improved episodic memory and psychomotor speed.
    • Sedentary behavior was associated with poorer working memory.

    Let’s define some terms:

    • general cognitive performance = average of scores across the different tests
    • working memory = very short term memory, such as remembering what you came into this room for, or (as an example of a test format) being able to take down a multi-digit number in one go without it being broken down (and then, testing with longer lengths of number until failure)
    • episodic memory = memory of events in a narrative context, where and when they happened, etc
    • psychomotor speed = the speed of connection between perception and reaction in quick-response tests

    These are, of course, all useful things to have, which means the general advice here is to:

    • move more, generally
    • exercise more, specifically
    • sit less, whenever reasonably possible
    • sleep well

    You can read the study itself here:

    Associations of accelerometer-measured physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep with next-day cognitive performance in older adults: a micro-longitudinal study

    Want to know the best kind of exercise for brain health?

    Check out our article about neuroscientist Dr. Suzuki, and what she has to say about it:

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    Enjoy!

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  • How We Age: The Science of Longevity – by Dr. Coleen Murphy

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    The author is not a glossy “name brand” and has nothing to sell (besides her book). This shows, because it’s clearly not a book that was rushed out as a marketing ploy. Indeed, she begins with the words:

    ❝This book took me several years to write and is largely based on information I gathered while teaching my class, “Molecular Mechanisms of Longevity: The Genetics, Genomics, and Cell Biology of Aging,” at Princeton University.❞

    ~ Dr. Coleen Murphy

    Thus, as you may imagine, it’s a thorough book, thoughtful, with conscientious attention to detail. As a reader, you are essentially getting the knowledge of a Princeton genomics class.

    She covers what’s going on in our genes, in our cells, and in our bodies, when we age; why some animals don’t, and what things affect that. She talks biomarkers of aging and the industry gold standard “Health-Related Quality of Life” metrics. We learn about insulin signalling and FOXO targets; the role of caloric restriction or intermittent fasting, topics such as molecular homeostasis in the regulation of longevity (hello senolytics and chaperone-mediated autophagy), the microbiome and epigenetics, as well as mitochondrial management, cell replacement (including induced pluripotent stem cells), and even DNA repair. And yes, a lot about cognitive aging and how to slow it too.

    The style is academic and/but perfectly readable; she explains everything as we go. We’ll note, though, that it’s not dry academic—her personality comes through throughout, in a good way that makes it a pleasant read as well as an informative one.

    Bottom line: if you’d like a much deeper understanding of the mechanics of aging than we have room to get into in our articles at 10almonds, this book is a highly recommendable perfect opportunity.

    Click here to check out How We Age, and learn about the science of longevity!

    PS: we’ve reviewed a few books about the science of aging/longevity recently, and they’ve each been good, but if you’re going to get only one, we recommend this one, as in this reviewer’s opinion, it’s the best 😎

    Share This Post

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  • How Your Exercise Today Gives A Brain Boost Tomorrow

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Regular 10almonds readers may remember we not long back wrote about a study that showed how daily activity levels, in aggregate, make a difference to brain health over the course of 1–2 weeks (in fact, it was a 9-day study):

    Daily Activity Levels & The Measurable Difference They Make To Brain Health

    Today, we’re going to talk about a new (published today, at time of writing) study that shows the associations between daily exercise levels (amongst other things) and how well people performed in cognitive tests the next day.

    By this we mean: they recorded exercise vs sedentary behavior vs sleep on a daily basis (using wearable tech to track it), and tested them daily with cognitive tests, and looked at how the previous day’s activities (or lack thereof) impacted the next day’s test results.

    Notably, the sample was of older adults (aged 50–83). The sample size wasn’t huge but was statistically significant (n=76) and the researchers are of course calling for more studies to be done with more people.

    What they found

    To put their findings into few words:

    • Consistent light exercise boosts general cognitive performance not just for hours (which was already known) but through the next day.
    • More moderate or vigorous activity than usual in particular led to better working memory and episodic memory the next day.
    • More sleep (especially slow-wave deep sleep) improved episodic memory and psychomotor speed.
    • Sedentary behavior was associated with poorer working memory.

    Let’s define some terms:

    • general cognitive performance = average of scores across the different tests
    • working memory = very short term memory, such as remembering what you came into this room for, or (as an example of a test format) being able to take down a multi-digit number in one go without it being broken down (and then, testing with longer lengths of number until failure)
    • episodic memory = memory of events in a narrative context, where and when they happened, etc
    • psychomotor speed = the speed of connection between perception and reaction in quick-response tests

    These are, of course, all useful things to have, which means the general advice here is to:

    • move more, generally
    • exercise more, specifically
    • sit less, whenever reasonably possible
    • sleep well

    You can read the study itself here:

    Associations of accelerometer-measured physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep with next-day cognitive performance in older adults: a micro-longitudinal study

    Want to know the best kind of exercise for brain health?

    Check out our article about neuroscientist Dr. Suzuki, and what she has to say about it:

    The Exercise That Protects Your Brain

    Enjoy!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Brain Wash – by Dr. David Perlmutter, Dr. Austin Perlmutter, and Kristen Loberg

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    You may be familiar with the lead author of this book, Dr. David Perlmutter, as a big name in the world of preventative healthcare. A lot of his work has focused specifically on carbohydrate metabolism, and he is as associated with grains and he is with brains. This book focuses on the latter.

    Dr. Perlmutter et al. take a methodical look at all that is ailing our brains in this modern world, and systematically lay out a plan for improving each aspect.

    The advice is far from just dietary, though the chapter on diet takes a clear stance:

    ❝The food you eat and the beverages you drink change your emotions, your thoughts, and the way you perceive the world❞

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    Bottom line: if you’d like to give your brain a gentle overhaul, this is the one-stop-shop book to give you the tools to do just that.

    Click here to check out Brain Wash, and spruce up yours!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Vitamin C (Drinkable) vs Vitamin C (Chewable) – Which is Healthier?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing vitamin C (drinkable) to vitamin C (chewable), we picked the drinkable.

    Why?

    First let’s look at what’s more or less the same in each:

    • The usable vitamin C content is comparable
    • The bioavailability is comparable
    • The additives to hold it together are comparable

    So what’s the difference?

    With the drinkable, you also drink a glass of water

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    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: