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Your body starts storing fat around your hips, thighs & essential organs(belly area). Once these places start to get hefty, your body then moves outwards towards your arms and feet. If you are at the point where you are storing lots of fat in your arms then when you burn calories, your body will take it from heavily favor fat in your arms rather than your belly fat. (This has something to do with protecting and/or warming your vital organs in the event of disaster) This is why if you start an intense running program, the first place you will start to lose fat is in your arms and lower legs. Eventually, if you continue an intense running program, that weight will start to come off of shoulders and thighs. Finally, once all of the remote fat stores are depleted, your body will start using the fat around your vitals(belly).
Your body stores fat using a F-I-L-O algorithm. (First In Last Out). An analogy: If you were to stack 10 papers, in order to get the first paper off of the stack, you would have to remove the top 9 papers. In other words, if you want to get at the belly fat, you have to attack your whole body mass % as a whole. It is impossible to "Target" belly fat. If someone told you they did a bunch of crunches and they got a flat stomach, its because of the calories they burnt, not because their stomach got amazingly strong. Having a six pack is about low body fat, not super big stomach muscles.

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ORIGINAL: Lynnxz

I was going to type out some long thing, but my views pretty much line up with this guys post I found.

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Your body starts storing fat around your hips, thighs & essential organs(belly area). Once these places start to get hefty, your body then moves outwards towards your arms and feet. If you are at the point where you are storing lots of fat in your arms then when you burn calories, your body will take it from heavily favor fat in your arms rather than your belly fat. (This has something to do with protecting and/or warming your vital organs in the event of disaster) This is why if you start an intense running program, the first place you will start to lose fat is in your arms and lower legs. Eventually, if you continue an intense running program, that weight will start to come off of shoulders and thighs. Finally, once all of the remote fat stores are depleted, your body will start using the fat around your vitals(belly).
Your body stores fat using a F-I-L-O algorithm. (First In Last Out). An analogy: If you were to stack 10 papers, in order to get the first paper off of the stack, you would have to remove the top 9 papers. In other words, if you want to get at the belly fat, you have to attack your whole body mass % as a whole. It is impossible to "Target" belly fat. If someone told you they did a bunch of crunches and they got a flat stomach, its because of the calories they burnt, not because their stomach got amazingly strong. Having a six pack is about low body fat, not super big stomach muscles.

TLDR: No shortcuts. Gotta drop total body fat before you get abs.

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ORIGINAL: Missokyst

ugh...
lol just what I feared.

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ORIGINAL: kalikshama

I have found swimming to be the best *overall* exercise. I do a variety of strokes to work muscles differently - breast, crawl, backstroke - and roll more than I need to during the crawl and backstroke to perhaps work my obliques more. Before I started having all these problems with my knees, I squeezed more during the frog kick of the breast stroke. My knees apparently don't like the frog kick, so now I swim with flippers and just do the arms part.

Note I said "overall exercise" above - I'm not disagreeing with what Lynnxz posted about FILO.

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ORIGINAL: Missokyst

lol sadly my boobs shrunk with the first round of lost inches.
I went from a solid C, to a packed B cup.  I can still see tummy.  phhht.

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ORIGINAL: MistressDarkArt

Add maca to your diet.

About 6 months ago I started putting 1 tsp in my a.m. protein drink and 10 lbs went bye bye in a couple weeks. I just wanted to eat less, though it wasn't a conscious decision.

It has not come back.

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ORIGINAL: shiftyw

It increases fertility and libido too though?
That makes me nervous- my man is already struggling to keep up with my sex drive, and we certainly aren't trying for babies.