How to Lose Stubborn Fat, Ranked From Easiest to Hardest

Quick Answer: How To Lose Stubborn Fat?

Different areas of body fat can appear to come off at very different rates. Visceral fat is relatively responsive to diet and exercise, while visible areas such as love handles and lower-belly fat tend to hang on until you’ve lost considerably more overall body fat.

You can’t simply choose where your body burns fat. But depending on the area you’re trying to improve, the right strategy can include reducing water retention, building specific muscles to change your proportions, adding cardio, increasing your daily steps, or creating a more tightly controlled calorie deficit.

Key Takeaways

• You can't choose where you lose fat, but different areas do come off at very different rates. The five areas covered here rank from least to most stubborn: visceral fat (1/10), face fat (3/10), upper-body fat (6/10), love handles (8.5/10), and lower-belly fat (10/10).
• When it comes to how to lose stubborn fat, visceral fat is the easiest to lose, and the most important to. The deep fat around your organs responds well to a calorie deficit plus cardio, with vigorous aerobic exercise and HIIT ranking among the most effective options in a 2023 review of 84 trials.
• A puffy face is often water retention, not fat. Cutting back on high-sodium takeout and processed foods can reduce facial puffiness within about 24 hours; actual face fat is usually one of the first places you'll see real dieting progress.
• Building muscle can make an area look leaner before you lose any fat. For upper-body areas like the backs of the arms and the chest, training the muscle underneath improves shape and definition, but it doesn't spot-reduce fat.
• Love handles and lower-belly fat are the last to go and need tighter calorie control. Progress here usually isn't visible until you're fairly lean (roughly below 20% body fat for men, 30% for women), and the final lower-belly fat may require reaching about 10–12% for many men.
• The leaner you get, the more careful you have to be. Fat loss should stay controlled rather than aggressive — pushing too hard risks muscle loss. A useful weekly ceiling is your body weight in pounds × 0.007.
• Decide whether the last bit is worth it. Getting extremely lean takes real time and consistency, and only you can judge whether chasing that final pocket is worth what it takes.

How To Lose Stubborn Fat

Here’s how five of the biggest problem areas rank from least to most stubborn:

• Visceral Fat: 1/10
• Face Fat: 3/10
• Upper-Body Fat: 6/10
• Love Handles: 8.5/10
• Lower-Belly Fat: 10/10

Your love handles can start looking smaller in a matter of days — but actually burning off the fat itself can take months. Other areas behave differently again.

That’s because your love handles, lower-belly fat, face fat, and even the fat hidden around your organs don’t all behave the same way.

Some areas respond quickly. Others won’t seem to budge no matter how hard you try.

Let’s start with the easiest fat to lose — but also the most dangerous to keep.

How Do You Lose Visceral Fat? — 1/10 Stubbornness

Visceral fat is the deep fat stored inside your abdomen around your organs. Unlike subcutaneous fat, which is the visible fat that sits just under your skin and covers your abs, visceral fat is strongly linked with health problems including heart disease, diabetes, and early death.

And you can’t reliably tell how much of it someone has just by looking at them.

Eric is a good example.

He carries a lot of muscle and looks healthy from the outside. But when I had him undergo a DXA scan (also spelled DEXA), we found something you couldn’t see: a large amount of visceral fat.

Compare him with Brian. Both had a similar overall body-fat percentage, yet their scans looked completely different.

Brian had 75 grams of visceral fat.

Eric had 1,084 grams.

That meant Eric was carrying more than 10 times as much visceral fat despite having a similar overall body-fat percentage.

And even being skinny doesn’t necessarily protect you.

My video editor Andy is skinny almost everywhere. But after moving from Ukraine to North America, he noticed that his stomach had gradually become bigger and felt firm to the touch.

His scan showed about 1,200 grams of visceral fat — even more than Eric and higher than anyone else I’d measured.

Luckily, within just a few months, we were able to cut that down to roughly a third of where it started.

Why Do Some People Store More Visceral Fat?

Genetics may play a role in how much visceral fat someone carries. For example, research has found higher levels of visceral fat among South Asians, which could partly help explain why a “pot belly” physique is relatively common in some of these populations.

But lifestyle matters too.

Research suggests that when you overeat, especially foods high in sugar and saturated fats such as fatty meats, butter, and deep-fried foods, those surplus calories are more likely to be stored as visceral fat.

That fits with what we saw in both Eric and Andy’s diets.

Brian’s situation was different. Although his weight had also gradually increased over the years, he ate a much cleaner diet with less added sugar and more healthy fats from foods such as avocados, fish, and nuts.

So surplus calories were more likely to contribute to muscle gain or regular fat storage rather than accumulating as visceral fat.

Brian also did one thing that neither Andy nor Eric did at all:

Cardio.

What Exercise Is Best For Visceral Fat?

When it comes to how to lose stubborn fat, visceral fat responds particularly well to exercise, and vigorous aerobic exercise and HIIT appear to be especially effective options.

A 2023 review of 84 randomized trials compared different types of exercise for reducing visceral fat.

Resistance training alone helped, but ranked lowest among the exercise approaches examined.

Combining resistance training with steady-state aerobic exercise was more than twice as effective in the ranking.

The highest probabilities of being the best exercise approaches were:

• Vigorous Aerobic Exercise: 81.2
• HIIT: 68.4
• Aerobic Plus Resistance Training: 63.5
• Resistance Training: 30.2

So even if you already lift weights, when it comes to how to lose stubborn fat, adding 15–30 minutes of cardio after your workouts can help.

For the best results for how to lose stubborn fat, at least once or twice per week, choose a form of cardio that gets your heart rate up significantly.

That could mean intervals, fast running, hard cycling, or another form of intense cardio. The effort should be hard enough that carrying on a conversation would be difficult.

But don’t push yourself too hard right from the start. Ravin literally vomited after just 10 seconds.

What Diet Helps Reduce Visceral Fat?

Vigorous cardio and HIIT can accelerate visceral-fat loss, but the single most reliable driver when it comes to how to lose stubborn fat is still a calorie deficit. Of everything covered here, this is the factor that matters most.

For how to lose stubborn fat, you may not even need to start counting calories immediately.

Simply cutting back on sugary and high-fat foods while adding some cardio can be enough to get things moving.

That’s essentially what my brother-in-law Dayton and my editor Andy did. So how long does it take to lose visceral fat this way? For both of them, it was a matter of months to cut their visceral fat by more than half.

That makes visceral fat the easiest area on our list to lose:

Stubbornness Rating: 1/10.

But visceral fat is invisible, which can make progress difficult to see.

There’s another area where losing even a tiny amount can make you look dramatically leaner.

How Do You Lose Face Fat? — 3/10 Stubbornness

Face fat tends to respond relatively quickly during a diet, but a puffier-looking face isn’t always caused by fat. Water retention can temporarily make your cheeks, eyes, and jawline look significantly less defined.

Only around 1–2% of your overall fat is stored in your cheeks and chin, yet it can have an outsized effect on how lean you look.

And sometimes, fat isn’t actually the problem.

Is It Face Fat Or Water Retention?

I tested this on myself.

I took one photo at 6 p.m. Then I ate a big, salty bowl of soup containing much more sodium than I’d normally eat.

By the next morning, my face looked puffier and more swollen.

I asked my director and editor to run the same experiment.

The next morning, all of us had puffier eyes and cheeks, redder-looking skin, and less facial definition.

But none of us had suddenly gained meaningful amounts of body fat overnight.

The extra salt caused our bodies, including our faces, to retain more water under the skin to help balance sodium levels.

Because much of the sodium in a typical diet can come from takeout and processed foods, cutting back on those foods can quickly reduce this water retention. In some cases, your face can look noticeably leaner within 24 hours.

That changes how your face looks.

But getting rid of actual facial fat requires fat loss.

How Do You Lose Actual Face Fat?

Compared with areas such as your lower belly and love handles, your face is often one of the first places where you’ll notice visible progress while dieting.

We saw this with Manson, who felt that he genetically stored more fat in his cheeks and chin.

In just 30 days, we helped him reduce both the fluid buildup and a significant amount of the actual fat in his face.

And he didn’t even need to start counting calories.

Instead, he followed a couple of simple rules.

First, rather than eating out almost every day, he started preparing most of his meals at home using whole, unprocessed foods.

Second, instead of drinking calories from things like bubble tea and lattes, he switched to calorie-free alternatives including herbal tea, diet soda, and Americanos.

We had Melody follow a similar diet, built around filling whole foods that are naturally lower in calories.

The result in both cases was slimmer cheeks, healthier-looking skin, and more defined jawlines.

Stubbornness Rating: 3/10.

But there’s another area where, just like your face, losing more fat isn’t the only way to improve how it looks.

How Do You Lose Upper-Body Fat? — 6/10 Stubbornness

Improving the appearance of upper-body fat requires two things: losing enough overall body fat to reveal more definition and building the muscles underneath the area to improve its shape.

The exact problem area, however, may differ between men and women.

After analyzing more than 100 DXA scans from participants we’ve worked with, I noticed a pattern.

Across the female scans, body-fat percentage in the arms was, on average, about 3.1 percentage points higher than total body-fat percentage.

For the men, the pattern went in the opposite direction. Their arms averaged about 4.2 percentage points below their total body-fat percentage.

Instead, much of their upper-body fat seemed to accumulate as chest fat around the pecs — potentially helping explain why so many men complain about “man boobs.”

But the strategy for improving both areas is similar.

It doesn’t just involve losing fat.

Why Can Building Muscle Make You Look Leaner?

Muscle gives a body part shape. Building more muscle underneath an area can therefore make it look firmer and more defined even before you lose additional fat.

This is also one of the issues behind the “skinny fat” physique.

It’s not necessarily that you’re carrying a huge amount of fat. If you also have very little muscle, the fat you do have can look looser and less defined.

Training the right muscles underneath these problem areas can therefore change how lean or “toned” they appear without any immediate change in body fat.

How Can Women Improve The Back Of Their Arms?

For many women, the main complaint is the back of the upper arm — the area that can hang and jiggle when you wave.

Underneath that fat is the long head of the triceps.

This portion of the triceps is often overlooked in typical gym routines and seems to respond particularly well to overhead extensions.

You can perform these with either dumbbells or cables.

Ever since my wife started incorporating them, she’s noticed that this area feels firmer and less loose.

How Can Men Improve Chest Definition?

For men concerned about their chest, more upper-chest development can help.

Building the upper chest makes the chest appear higher and fuller, creating the appearance of less sag.

Two good options are incline dumbbell presses and one of my personal favorites: machine flyes performed with a slight forward lean to target the upper chest.

A good approach is to put these exercises near the beginning of your workouts while reducing some of the volume you currently dedicate to lower-chest exercises such as the bench press and dips.

But building muscle only solves half of the problem.

If you want to reveal more definition and lines, you’ll also need to reduce the fat covering that muscle.

That means doing what we did with Luke and my brother-in-law Dayton:

Combine resistance training with a calorie deficit.

What Diet Helps Reduce Upper-Body Fat?

When it comes to how to lose stubborn fat, upper-body fat generally requires more overall fat loss than facial fat before the visual difference becomes obvious, so your diet and daily activity need to become more deliberate.

You still probably don’t need to start counting every calorie at this stage.

Instead, build on the earlier strategies and add one fist-sized serving of lean protein to every meal.

That helps support muscle growth while also keeping you fuller, making it easier to naturally eat less.

Then increase your daily calorie expenditure by walking at least 8,000–10,000 steps per day.

It’s tougher than the earlier stages, but still very doable.

Stubbornness Rating: 6/10.

The next area is different.

Here, the fat cells themselves respond differently — which helps explain why this area can seem almost impossible to get rid of.

How Do You Lose Love Handles? — 8.5/10 Stubbornness

Love handles are a particularly stubborn area of subcutaneous fat. You can improve how prominent they look by building a wider upper body, but actually shrinking them requires losing enough overall body fat.

One reason they’re so stubborn appears to come down to receptors inside your fat cells.

Why Are Love Handles So Stubborn?

There are two types of receptors we need to understand.

Think of them like jail guards deciding whether your stored fat gets released.

Beta-receptors are the chill guards. When your body needs energy, they’re relatively willing to release stored fat.

Alpha-receptors are the strict guards. They’re much more resistant to letting that stored fat go.

Part of why we think fat from areas such as the face, chest, and arms comes off more easily is that these areas have more of the “chill” beta-receptors.

Back in 1987, researchers measured the receptor balance in different types of fat.

In deeper visceral fat, there was almost a 50/50 split between the two receptor types.

But in the fat directly under the skin — like your love handles — roughly 60% were the stricter receptors and only 40% were the more permissive ones.

That helps explain why you can seemingly do everything right while your love handles barely change.

Can You Make Love Handles Look Smaller Without Losing Them?

You cannot spot-reduce your love handles, but building a stronger V-taper can make them appear smaller before the fat itself disappears.

Building your shoulders with lateral raises and developing your upper back with pull-ups widens your upper body.

That creates the illusion of a narrower waist, making your love handles less visually prominent even before you’ve completely lost them.

But if you want to actually shrink the fat itself, you still need to lose overall body fat.

How Lean Do You Need To Get To Lose Love Handles?

Because love handles are so stubborn, you typically won’t start noticing substantial progress until you get below around 20% body fat for men and below around 30% for women.

At this point, simply “eating healthy” usually isn’t enough.

You need more control over your calorie intake.

Multiplying your body weight in pounds by 10–13 can give you a rough starting point, or you can use a calculator to estimate how many calories you need.

This is the stage where tracking becomes much more useful.

When I started working with Luke and his wife Nicole, I had both of them begin at around 12 calories per pound of body weight.

They also used the Built With Science app, which adjusted their calories over time based on their progress while giving them workouts designed to develop their V-taper.

At first, their love handles barely changed.

After about two months, however, they finally started coming off.

And after four months total, the difference was dramatic.

Even with an app taking care of the guesswork — which you can try free for two weeks by heading to builtwithscience.com — losing love handles still requires time and consistency.

Stubbornness Rating: 8.5/10.

But even after those four months, Luke still had one small pocket of fat that refused to disappear.

It’s usually the very last place to lean out.

The final boss of fat loss:

Your lower belly.

How Do You Lose Lower-Belly Fat? — 10/10 Stubbornness

When it comes to how to lose stubborn fat, lower-belly fat is often one of the last areas to disappear, particularly for men. Unless you genetically store relatively little fat there, getting the area very lean can require reaching a low overall body-fat percentage and continuing your calorie deficit carefully as your body becomes lighter.

For women, this area can sometimes come off faster because they tend to store less fat there compared with men.

You could see that clearly with Nicole and Luke.

They dieted for the same amount of time and lost a similar relative amount of fat.

By the end, Nicole’s belly fat was almost completely gone.

Luke was different.

Even at around 15% body fat, he had visible upper and middle abs while the fat over his lower belly was still hanging on — a clear case of still having belly fat at a relatively low overall body fat percentage.

Unless you genetically store less fat in this area, most men will need to reach roughly 10–12% body fat for their lower belly to really lean out — and reaching that level, as you might expect, takes longer than most people think.

And despite what you might see on social media, that level of leanness is extremely uncommon.

When our team analyzed DXA scans from more than 5,000 American men, not a single person measured below 12% body fat.

That doesn’t mean getting leaner than 12% is impossible.

I’ve done it. Many members of our app have done it. And with a few more months, Luke could have as well.

It’s just rare.

Why Is Lower-Belly Fat So Hard To Lose?

The leaner you become, the fewer calories your lighter body naturally burns each day. Maintaining the same calorie deficit can therefore require gradually eating less, moving more, or adding more cardio.

The exact numbers will differ from person to person.

But among average-weight men I’ve worked with who reach this stage, many are taking at least 10,000 steps per day and eating fewer than 2,000 calories per day to keep their fat loss moving.

There’s also another problem.

Earlier in a diet, you have considerably more stored fat available from the easier areas.

By the time you’re fighting for that final pocket of lower-belly fat, you’ve already lost a lot of it.

So simply pushing harder and harder isn’t necessarily the answer.

If you become too aggressive, your body may start pulling more from muscle instead.

How Fast Should You Lose Weight When You Are Already Lean?

When you’re already lean and trying to lose the final pockets of fat, fat loss should remain controlled rather than becoming increasingly aggressive.

A useful rule of thumb is:

Body Weight In Pounds × 0.007 = Maximum Weekly Weight Loss

If you weigh 160 pounds:

160 × 0.007 = 1.12 pounds per week

So around one pound per week would be the upper end.

Is Losing The Last Bit Of Lower-Belly Fat Worth It?

Before you commit to getting this lean, be honest with yourself about whether it’s actually worth it.

Even when I’m around 10% body fat, there’s still a little bit of lower-belly fat I could obsess over if I wanted to.

At some point, you have to decide whether eliminating that final small pocket matters enough to justify what it takes to get there.

If it does, you simply have to be more stubborn than the stubborn fat itself.

Stubbornness Rating: 10/10.

And there is one more option if you’re already lean enough.

Building your abs can make them look better without requiring you to lose additional fat.

By the way, here’s the article summed up into a YouTube video:

How To Lose Stubborn Fat: Frequently Asked Questions