Will exercise slim my chubby cheeks?

Q: I recently had the weight and everything seemed to go to my face and torso. So now I have chubby cheeks, a double chin and a fat belly. I will lose it, but do not want to be too thin elsewhere. Is it true that the latter gained the weight is the first to be lost? What would be the best way to get rid of my cheeks, belly and double chin?

A: Different people get fat in different places, or fat depots in the body. People lose weight from different places, too. A 1997 review in the journal Human Reproduction says that where the body fat stored tend to be influenced by genes. The heritability, or part of a move that can be attributed to genes, have been estimated at up to 50 percent, depending on the fat depot.

How much and where fat is lost varies as much as how much and how it is achieved. Many studies have shown that no matter what method of weight loss, have a tendency to fat to be lost in the torso or stomach for most people, rather than, say, thighs or lower body. But the amount as a percentage of total fat loss you can lose in certain areas of the body is unclear. Studies of twins have shown that where fat tends to be lost is also very genetic.

Fat in the stomach seems to be won and lost quite easily. So it is probably safe to assume that if you exercise and diet, you will lose fat from your belly.

But it is unclear how the fat is away from other areas such as the face. Most weight-loss studies do not measure facial fat loss. One reason may be that there is no easy way to do it. Most body fat measures that look at specific fat depots using skin folds (where the subcutaneous fat on the back, waist and thighs are "squeeze" and measured) or tape measure (which can determine your waist, hip or thigh circumference, for example).

New technology may be better able to capture the fat around his cheeks and chin. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and CT (CT) scanner can capture the location and amounts of body fat, but these scans are expensive and it is not often used in weight-loss studies.

The specific sequence of when and where fat is lost is not easy to measure, since a study to determine this would be expensive. It will probably require MRIs taken every week or two for a large number of subjects who are dieting and / or training to measure the displacement of fat over a longer period. A quick Medline database search revealed no such studies.

Anecdotally, of course, you can hear that some lost weight in a certain pattern, such as in the upper body first and the last body, or from her cheeks before your stomach. But you can hear an opposite effect as well, since the pattern can all be dictated by an individual's genes.

Exploring the nuances of fat loss is a new area in obesity research. Several lectures in the 2009 annual meeting of The Obesity Society reported studies looking at the functions of different areas and types of fat in the body. But since this type of research is in its infancy, there may be a while before the practical information is known.

It is safe to say that you will lose weight from your entire body, including abs and face, if you eat sensibly and do the recommended amount of physical activity for weight control. The U.S. government's 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans and American College of Sports Medicine Position Stand on Appropriate Physical Activity Intervention Strategies for Weight Loss and Prevention of Weight Regain for Adults recommends a minimum of 150 to 250 minutes of moderate to heavy physical activity each week, walking, running, cycling or using a cardio machine. You should also make sure of one to three days of weight training on nonconsecutive days a week.