I've recently been checking my web stats, looking at some of the search terms with which visitors arrive here. Some of the obscure ones are quite amusing. I rather suspect that the person searching for 'big and fat bums and boobs' was rather hoping to look at someone elses, rather than lose their own. The person searching for 'photos of my wife shaving' must have been similarly disappointed.

Quite a lot of people are searching for 'spare tyre exercises' or some variant of that. If you are one of them then I've got some good news and some bad news for you.

Let's get the bad news out of the way first. The direct consequence of any exercise that you do is to build muscle, not to lose fat. So, you can do 200 abdominal crunches per day and your abs muscle will be perfectly developed with superb six-pack definition. However, if it's hidden behind 12lbs of abdominal fat then sadly it's not going to turn any heads on the beach.

Now the good news. When you do prolonged cardiovascular exercise, such as running, cycling or rowing, then your fat deposits will be one of the two sources of energy used for this. Plus, if you do this at a high intensity then it will raise your metabolic rate, so you will continue to burn fat at a higher rate for several hours just through your normal day-to-day activities. Doing weight training also raises your metabolic rate, to the same effect.

So, you can't spot reduce your stomach fat, but you can burn off your general fat deposits. If your stomach is mostly where fat goes on then similarly that is where it will mostly come off. As ever more details can be found in Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.