How Your Diet Affects Where You Lose Fat

When you’re trying to lose weight, most of the focus goes straight to the number on the scale. As long as it’s going down, it feels like you’re losing weight. However, the scale can’t tell you what type of fat you are losing, or exactly where you’re losing weight.

As you lose weight, your body can draw from different types of fat, and these don’t all have the same impact on your health. This raises an interesting question: can the way you eat influence where that fat comes from?

Not All Body Fat is the Same

Before getting into whether the way you eat can influence where you lose fat, it’s worth understanding the two main types of body fat:

Subcutaneous fat: This is the fat that sits just under the skin. It’s the fat you can see and pinch.

Visceral fat: This is the type of fat that is stored deeper in the abdomen, surrounding your organs.

While both types of fat can decrease as you lose weight, they don’t behave the same way in the body.

Visceral fat is more metabolically active, meaning it plays a larger role in processes like blood sugar regulation, inflammation and hormone signaling. Higher levels of visceral fat ****are associated with insulin resistance, elevated blood lipids, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Subcutaneous fat, while still not ideal for our health in high amounts, is less strongly linked to these outcomes.

So while any fat loss is generally positive, reducing visceral fat tends to have a more meaningful impact on your health.

Why Your Body Loses Fat in Different Places

You might have noticed that fat loss doesn’t happen evenly across the body. Some areas change quickly, while others take longer.

Part of this comes down to how different fat stores respond to hormones, particularly insulin.

When you eat carbohydrates, they’re broken down into glucose and released into your bloodstream. Your body then releases insulin to help manage your blood sugar levels.

Alongside blood sugar management, insulin also plays a role in fat storage.

• When insulin levels are higher, your body is more likely to store fat
• When insulin levels are lower, your body can more easily use stored fat for energy

Visceral fat is more sensitive to these changes. It tends to be broken down more readily when insulin levels are lower (such as during a lower carbohydrate diet) and stored more readily when insulin is elevated. Subcutaneous fat doesn’t respond in quite the same way to lower insulin levels , which is why it can be slower to reduce.

Where Diet Comes In

Because carbohydrates have the biggest influence on insulin levels, the way your diet is structured can affect how often your body is in a “fat storing” versus “fat using” state.

A lower-carbohydrate approach doesn’t remove insulin entirely, but it generally reduces how often and how much insulin is released across the day. Over time, this may make it easier for the body to draw on certain fat stores, particularly visceral fat.

Research looking at different dietary approaches supports this idea. In a recent study, people followed either a lower-carbohydrate or lower-fat diet for 12 months. Both groups lost a similar amount of weight, but the group following the lower-carbohydrate approach lost more visceral fat (1). Importantly, these weren’t extreme diets. Both approaches were moderate and designed to be sustainable, which makes the findings more relevant to how people actually eat.

What Does This Mean for Your Weight Loss?

The most important thing to keep in mind is that overall calorie intake still drives weight loss. However, what this study highlights is that the composition of your diet can influence how that weight is lost.

For some people, slightly reducing carbohydrate intake may support better appetite control, more stable energy levels and a pattern of eating that makes it easier to stay within their calorie target.

This doesn’t mean there’s one “best” diet. The approach that works best is the one you can follow consistently, without needing to rely on extreme restriction.

One of the best ways to understand how your own diet is structured is to track what you’re currently eating. By logging your meals in the fatsecret app, you can review your daily macronutrient breakdown and see what percentage of your calories are coming from carbohydrates. Looking at how much of your daily calorie intake is coming from carbohydrates can help you better understand the overall balance of your diet and whether there may be opportunities to make small adjustments that better support your weight loss goal.

Key Takeaways

• Not all fat loss is equal, and the type of fat you lose matters for your health
• Visceral fat has a greater impact on metabolic health than subcutaneous fat
• The way you eat can influence how your body loses fat
• A lower-carbohydrate approach may help reduce visceral fat more effectively, even when weight loss is similar (1)
• The most important factor is still finding an approach you can follow consistently

Reference

1. Suissa K, Benedetti A, Daskalopoulou SS. Effect of low-carbohydrate vs low-fat diet intervention on visceral fat estimated from dual energy X-ray absorptiometry in a 12-month randomized controlled trial. Research Square (preprint). doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-4926524/v1.