On the average overweight person male or female the fat cells/receptors seem to be most prolific in the abdomen/glut/thigh area.

You don't see too many people with fat ankles or wrist or fore-arms or calves.

Yet...these muscles are the ones that receive most activity during the day.

Be it "intelligent design" or "evolvement"...why are the fat cells clustered in such concentration in the midriff area?

Is it because the fat supply is more accessible as fuel in this region?

Meaning....when the body burns fat, does it's placement near the human equator make it somehow more efficient to get at from a utilization point-of-view?

If fat could be burned close to the site where it is needed then having fat calves and fore-arms would make sense. Obviously it doesn't work that way...but how come?

When you burn fat there is of course a process whereby the fat is accessed and then taken and converted to energy.

Does having it around your waist make it more efficent for the body process to get at?

Possibly our ancestors used fat as insulation for vital organs...so I can see that part of it......but seeing as how we've come so far for centuries where everybody wear clothes and can insulate or de-insulate at will...what's the point of having so many fat receptor/cells in the mid-riff?

Some may say protection......which is ironic because many animals and carnivores do not use this mid-riff fat for protection (or insulation). Many of them simply use stored fat as energy during hibernation etc., and often can not hunt or kill efficiently when they are in an overweight state.

? :read::doh::twitch:

I think it's what you were getting at about the insulation point.

Obviously, historically food was hard to come by. So, people develop so they can store fat relatively easily in order to make sure they didn't starve, and also to insulate themselves. Most of your body heat would be stored in the middle part of your body, so it kind of makes sense. I don't really know for sure though.

Possibly because people were never meant to actually get so fat that they have an enormous gut it's not for any reason at all? This actually makes the most sense to me now that I think of it...

On another note, I learned evolvement is a real word today :blank: (not being sarcastic, I'd never heard it and I just looked it up and it was real)

If fat were stored around your more used areas, those areas would end up weighing more because of it, and causing greater calorie burn for every movement of those high use areas - thus burning that stored fat. This would be great to keep fat off, but since fat is meant to be stored energy for later use, it defeats the storage purpose.

Therefore, fat is stored around the center were it doesn't get in the way so that it can be stored in such a way to keep it for later use.

In evolution terms, you want to have energy stores in places where they are difficult to get to so they are used in emergencies. With feast-or-famine environments, those who can store and keep fat during feast are the ones who survive. Having it somewhere not easily burned is a feature, not a bug. At least, in those environment.

I'm just curious how long it takes for evolution to catch up to environment. Will humans die out from bad diet before our bodies evolve to handle what we eat? The race is on!

allrighty.....but nature usually takes the path of least resistance...so I'm wondering what is the process by which the body takes fat out of stores and converts it to fuel or energy.

The shortest fastest route would be directly from the subcutaneous fat supply direct to the muscle.

But obviously this isn't how it works. Or is it?

If you lose weight the last supply to diminish is the gut fat (internal or subcutaneous).

So the body must be making a selective choice to burn certain areas off first.

Therefore...barring the fact that there are more fat cells around the waist/glute region the body is still selectively burning fat from areas because of "survival mode" which trumps "Nature's path of least resistance".

The body is going to burn off the "extremity" fat first because the visceral fat is considered important for survival ultimately.

Which makes me think that the body can selectively burn fat from any area it deems necessary at will.

The actual process by which the body burns fat I'm not sure of ( it seems it doesn't have to routed through organs or intestines or anything else to do this).

I know a lot of modern weight loss techniques are structured to make the body think that there is no "survival crisis"....thereby fooling the body into shedding fat that it would otherwise store.

Padding is another function of fat. Isn't the subcutaneous fat at the stomach greater (even in a lean person) than any other part of the body? A lot of vital organs in there without skeletal protection.

Will humans die out from bad diet before our bodies evolve to handle what we eat? The race is on!

As amazing machines as our bodies are, our mental and physical hardwiring will never catch up to our socio-economic evolution at its current rate. We'll need our bureaucracies to continue to decide what's best for us by banning certain foods and activites.

Hevy -

I don't think the body picks where it looses fat from (for the most part) but is designed to loose fat more easily from certain areas. Having fat arms and legs lowers the survivability of an individual by throwing off manuverability and balance. The body more easily handles fat around the middle.

One thing I heard (maybe Zen made it as a comment) that made logical sense for why belly fat was more stubborn then other fat, there aren't the huge blood vessels in the area; as a transport system, that area is not as well fueled as the arms and legs and lower fat areas.

Fat addition is usually a slow process. Add 1 lb of body fat per week, and it will be slowly disperesed through the hours of that week to every part of the body.

Go weight training and cardioing and working hard, the body needs to respond quickly to that activity, so more readily available channels are tapped for the resouraces - the areas with greater blood flow. This isn't a concious or even subconcious decision of the mind: its just of the amount of blood flowing through one area is higher that through another, thus able disperse more hormones to burn the fat in those areas.

Now, if this is actually true, it would then make sense that slow dieting and other activities that create burn over greater length of time would have a better fat loss across the whole body then the quicker burn-at-the-time methods, but overall, the higher blood flow areas will always have a faster burn rate, hence the stomach flab being the last to go.

As amazing machines as our bodies are, our mental and physical hardwiring will never catch up to our socio-economic evolution at its current rate. We'll need our bureaucracies to continue to decide what's best for us by banning certain foods and activites.

Sadly, I agree. Not necessarily with the bureaucratic banning/promoting of certain foods and activities. I think the biggest problem that faces consumers, at least in the US, is Marketing. Information on eating and being health is buried in favor of things people can make money on.

There is no feeling of social responsibility; seen those McDonald's commericals where the father gets to spend time with his daughter by taking her the McD's (and it makes Mom, Dad, and Daughter happy)? Sure, she might be eating the apple slices and drinking milk, but once she's hooked on McD's (learned behavior of going there), she'll likely graduate to Big Macs and Milkshakes.

No one puts out the commercial showing the day spending time with his daughter by cooking a homemade, healthy meal with her, explaining proper eating and portion controls, and then going and playing outside. But that's not the money-making commercial.

Personally, I think the whole US society would need to be utterly rebuilt before any signifcant change happens. Too much stress, too much negativity, and not enough education about health and relaxation.

If anyone mentioned evolution they were absolutely correct. Most animals put on weight in the "mid rif". Think of a spoiled dog with a bunch of extra weight. It's all in the mid rif, right? Answering why this is so in humans is a little tricky. Probably deduction is the best method. We don't store the weight in our hands/feet/legs because the farther from the fulcrum the weight is stored the heavier the load becomes. This load also increases as a quadratic function to the distance from the fulcrum. What use is the extra energy stored when storing it would cause an equal increase in EE from movement. In addition to the reasons already mentioned, fat does insulate. Maintenance of the insulation of the core is vital, and this can be seen in the patterns of blood shunting during cold exposure. Also, to be used for fuel, fat must be mobilized into the blood stream. By storing fat in our mid rif we centralize our fat stores, thus limiting the time needed to move FFA in the blood to the needed muscles.