Getting Rid of Skinny Fat in 2024 | The Ultimate Guide

You’ve just stepped off of the treadmill of your local neighborhood gym, and you find yourself in your familiar shirtless posture, flexing in front of your gym’s full-length mirror and poking away at the stubborn layer of muffin-top body fat encircling your waistline. 

“That’s called ‘skinny fat’,” remarks the personal trainer in an offhanded fashion as he casually strolls into the locker room. “You should probably lift more weights if you want to get rid of that.”

“Lift weights?!” you answer. “That doesn’t make any sense! I run for 40 minutes every day, and I don’t eat that much. I shouldn’t have any fat here at all!”

“It’s not all about cardio, weight loss, and fat,” answers the trainer. “You’ve got to build up your muscles if you want to reshape your body and burn off that fat.”

You’ve never heard of skinny fat before, and everything about the term is confusing to you. Yet, if that term is an accurate title for your condition, you’re now determined to do whatever it takes to reshape your body so that the skinny fat label can never be applied to you ever again.

Understanding Skinny Fat

To most people, skinny fat sounds like a contraction in terms. After all, skinny and fat are usually used as direct antonyms — or polar opposites. The idea that there is such a thing as a skinny fat physique sounds ludicrous. 

Well, skinny fat is neither a medical term nor a scientific designation; you simply know it when you see it. And if you’re a skinny fat person and never realized it before, you’re about to recognize it and also learn how to rid yourself of the label as you read the upcoming sections.

What is Skinny Fat?

No matter how odd the concept of being skinny fat may seem, a simple explanation will demystify what it is and why it can be problematic.

Here are the basics behind being skinny fat: First, skinny fat individuals are of normal weight. No one with functional eyeballs and a rational mindset toward size is going to look at a skinny, fat person and suggest that person is obese or even overweight.

Second, a skinny fat person typically has a low amount of muscle mass. Despite being clearly skinny, they are not going to inhabit the lean and toned physique of someone who regularly engages in strength training.  

Third, skinny fat individuals tend to have an accumulation of abdominal visceral fat. Again, we’re not talking about someone with high body weight; this is simply someone with excess body fat deposits in "stubborn" areas that give the illusion they're not very "lean."

What is Not Skinny Fat?

Again, it is very helpful to be clear about what skinny fat is not in order to diagnose it properly. For example, it is quite possible for someone to have the same general shape of many skinny fat guys — as in they are clearly carrying around more body fat than they probably should be — but they are also in a Body Mass Index (BMI) range that would clearly place them in a category of overweight or obese.

On the other hand, there are also individuals who may be lean and toned in segments of their body because of frequent strength training, but they could simply prioritize reducing body fat to acquire the toned physique that they desire.

So to be clear, the order of the words skinny fat is the best way to diagnose the issue. The first adjective that nearly anyone would use to identify skinny fat guys would be “skinny,” which also suggests to you that they could stand to eat more. 

At the same time, there will also be an obvious protrusion of visceral fat around their waist that will cause you to think they might want to burn fat to bring about the changes they want.

If any of this applies to you, you’re probably wondering, “How do I get rid of skinny fat?” Well, the recipe to go from skinny fat to lean is pretty straightforward, but it’s going to take regular exercise, consumption of the right foods, and a few months of diligent attention to detail.

Exercise Regimen

Obviously, to transform a skinny fat build into a more aesthetically pleasing form, you’ll have to address your body composition through physical activity, particularly resistance training and some cardiovascular exercise.

Intuitively, adding more muscle will correct the "skinny" part of the equation. Yet, you also need to take strides toward achieving some sort of fat loss if you’re going to trim away the excess fat. So what sort of exercises should you do to develop your muscles while you shed your excess body fat? We’re about to tell you. 

Strength Training

The first answer to the question of how to get rid of skinny fat involves building muscle with strength training exercises. Whether you make frequent use of unweighted exercises like push-ups and pullups, or you engage in direct weight training as your preferred way to add more muscle mass, you’re going to need to challenge your body’s strength potential.

The fastest way to build lean muscle is by taking a targeted approach to training by focusing on the muscles you want to break down and rebuild. To build muscle mass in the fastest manner possible, the advised path is to use weight training to target multiple muscle groups simultaneously through the use of compound exercises.

Compound exercises engage multiple muscle groups because they are multi-joint movements. This makes them efficient at building muscle since they engage more than one set of muscles simultaneously.

For instance, chest presses are a multi-joint movement that targets the pectoral muscles. The hinging of the elbow brings the triceps into the movement, and the shoulders also move against resistance from a rearward position to a forward position, challenging the anterior delts.

In short, one key to adding more muscle mass is the form and volume of your strength training. 

Cardio Exercise

In your quest to go from skinny fat to a more desirable body type, you might be tempted to lean heavily into cardio. After all, the association with frequent cardio and losing fat is well documented, so it is understandable that you might think a heavy dose of daily cardio is exactly what you require in order to initiate fat loss.

Unfortunately, this would be a case where your instincts are likely to mislead you, and you may wish to place your focus elsewhere. 

Don’t misunderstand the intent of this message: The benefits of cardio extend well beyond creating caloric deficit and losing fat. All improvements to body composition aside, regular cardio is one of the most efficient ways to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and keep physically harmful conditions like heart disease at bay.

In this particular case, trying to lose fat through excessive use of cardio is going to do your plans to get rid of skinny fat a disservice. Your body is going to require even more calories than normal if it’s going to do the hard work of building muscle in the aftermath of your weight training. Therefore, relying heavily on cardio to eliminate calories should not be the strategy you employ to alter your body composition.

This also isn’t to say that cardio will be of no benefit to your plan to go from skinny fat to a more athletic body type. In fact, engaging in some form of cardio can improve the circulation of blood and nutrients through your muscles during strength training, leading to improved gains in muscle mass.

Sample Training Plan

A simple training plan that could be utilized to efficiently build muscle mass and transition away from a skinny fat physique is available below. 

Every strength training or weight lifting movement listed is a compound exercise that simultaneously trains multiple muscle groups. Certainly, isolation exercises could be comfortably inserted into this workout plan; this list is intended as a foundation for each workout day to ensure that you will efficiently build muscle through your efforts at the gym. 

Monday: Chest, Triceps, Shoulders 

Bench Press/Chest Press

Bodyweight Dips

Barbell Overhead Press

15 minutes of low-intensity cardio

Tuesday: Cardio

30 minutes of low-intensity cardio

Wednesday: Back, Biceps

Pull-Ups/Chin-Ups

Barbell Rows

Lat Pull Downs

15 minutes of low-intensity cardio

Thursday: Cardio

30 minutes of low-intensity cardio

Friday: Legs

Squats

Deadlifts

Leg Presses

Walking Lunges

15 minutes of low-intensity cardio

Saturday: Cardio

30 minutes of low-intensity cardio

Sunday: Rest

Nutrition Strategies

Along with your strength training routine, another vital ingredient for how to get rid of skinny fat has to do with adopting healthy eating habits. If you’re going to build muscle mass and shed body fat, you’ll need to focus on several aspects of your diet that you may have ignored in the past.

Caloric Intake

When it comes to cultivating a healthy approach to eating, it’s practically instinctive to think that cutting calories is the way to go. Well, diet strategies seldom tackle circumstances where a person who is of a normal weight would be described as thin, yet has excess fat that needs eliminating. 

In this case, consuming fewer calories and creating a caloric deficit is going to have the opposite of the intended effect. Studies indicate that the most rapid way to efficiently increase muscle mass when adequate strength training is being performed is to increase your daily caloric intake [1].

Eating a certain quantity of calories is necessary to support the creation of new muscle in response to the weight training you’re engaged in. If you’re skinny fat and trying to improve your body composition, there’s a high likelihood that your caloric intake will have to increase. 

With this being the case, it should go without saying that extreme dieting or cutting calories through excessive means will not help you achieve your goals. If anything, it can cause your physical activity in the gym to be almost entirely in vain.

Clearly, a reduced-calorie diet can be one component of a helpful strategy if your stated goal is to lose weight, but if the ultimate goal is to pack more muscle mass onto your body, eating the same amount of calories you always consumed—let alone lowering the amount—will do your muscles no favors.

Macronutrient Balance

If you plan to start eating more calories than usual in your plan to go from skinny fat to a lean, toned body type, you’re off to a good start. To take things a step further and ensure that you’re actually progressing along a path to rid your body of excess fat while you build muscle, you want to make sure that you also eat more protein than usual.

To be more precise, you want to ensure that you eat within a recommended range of protein daily based on your body mass. At a baseline level, around one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight — or just a shade under half a gram of protein per pound of body mass — is recommended to sustain a body that is involved in regular physical activity [2].

On the higher end of the protein intake spectrum, it is advised that you consume up to two grams of protein for every kilogram of body weight (or about one gram of protein per pound of body weight). At this point, you are ensuring that your body will be efficiently building muscle, and a continual positive nitrogen balance that will contribute to healthy muscle growth.

This is where things can get tricky because even a very high quantity of protein — like 150 grams of protein each day — will only amount to 600 total calories in your daily allotment. Depending on the sources of protein you choose to eat, it’s quite possible for you to correctly focus on consistently eating more protein than usual while still not achieving the necessary surplus of calories required to gain muscle.

Although there are examples of individuals making significant muscle gains in a physical environment caused by a calorie deficit, the best evidence for this happening is with previously untrained, overweight individuals. 

For normal-weight individuals, the accepted guidance established through physical studies is to begin with a calorie surplus of 1,500 to 2,000 calories per day and closely monitor your progress to ensure that you aren’t accumulating body fat at an accelerated rate [1]. In some cases, it might even be advisable to increase your surplus of calories by up to double if you aren’t building muscle rapidly enough.

Despite the need to eat more calories, you still want to eat more calories within the confines of a healthy diet without consuming a bunch of junk. This means that eating refined carbs or consuming sugary drinks is going to elevate your caloric intake, but you’ll also be missing out on opportunities to fuel your body with vitamins and minerals that can fuel your exercise, improve the value of the time you spend at the gym, and assist you with fat loss. 

Ideally, nothing you eat during your attempts to eliminate skinny fat would compromise the optimal, healthy functioning of your body in any way. 

What eating to get rid of skinny fat looks like

Again, the presumption is that a person with a skinny fat body type is of a normal weight, and would generally be described as thin. This means they are probably eating in the realm of 1,500 to 2,000 calories per day, and likely fewer than 0.3 grams of protein per pound of body mass.

If this describes your daily calorie consumption, and you want to overcome the problems posed by skinny fat, you will want to increase the daily quantity of calories you eat to between 3,000 and 4,000. 

In terms of arranging your diet in a healthy fashion that will help you build muscle and potentially lose fat at the same time, there are several strategies you can employ. One strategy might be to ensure that you eat three core meals each day, and that you eat an identifiable lean protein source during each of the meals. 

In addition, ensuring that you are eating roughly 1,000 calories with each of your main meals — not including what you gain from snacks in between meals — will provide you with a solid caloric foundation within your diet that will help you to build muscle.

Lifestyle Changes

Eating and exercise are essential elements to the equation of how to get rid of skinny fat. However, if you want to build muscle as efficiently as possible and banish skinny fat from your body for all eternity, there are some other lifestyle changes that you’ll want to initiate as quickly as possible.

Sleep

It can be tempting for people who are active to associate sleep with laziness. All the same, this is a perilous misconception when it comes to sustaining a healthy lifestyle. 

Not only is getting adequate amounts of sleep important for the sake of recovering enough energy to make the most of your gym activities, but it’s also necessary for the proper operation of muscle protein synthesis. 

To put it another way, if you don’t sleep, then you can only reap a fraction of the benefits that you would otherwise unlock through a proper diet and exercise routine. 

Therefore, a mindset with the proper focus on a healthy approach to eliminating skinny fat is going to look for opportunities to capitalize on recovery, and that includes racking up ample sleep.

Stress Management

Stress is one of those areas that is often unaccounted for when we consider the conditions that govern how our bodies are shaped. Well, if you’re going to take stock of every factor that might be slowing your body recomposition efforts, you should probably take account of how stressful your life is.

This is because stress is a major contributor toward increasing your cortisol levels. When your body experiences an increase in cortisol, it perceives your circumstances to be such that an increase in fat storage becomes necessary so that your body has a source of reserve energy to tap into during an emergency.

As a consequence of stress, your body may inexplicably amass a layer of stubborn body fat that is difficult to rid yourself of. Well, if you ultimately want to permanently banish that fat from your waistline, you’ll need to take steps to eliminate as many stressful circumstances from your daily life as you can.

Consistency and Patience

When it comes to body-altering training plans — whether your objective is to lose fat and get lean, or to bulk up and gain muscle — it’s impossible to achieve your aim without consistency.

Fortunately, the human body has a tendency to pack on muscle quickly when the conditions that favor building muscle are sustained. This means that if your diet calls for you to eat the right types of food, and in the right quantities, you are probably going to gain muscle rapidly. 

This rapid muscle gain can potentially occur at a rate of multiple pounds of lean muscle each month for the first couple of months, just as long as you are also doing the right types of training at the gym.

However, these are changes that only take place if you eat the right things day in and day out, while maintaining your diet and resistance training strategy for several months at a time. 

If you were expecting to rapidly build muscle and lose fat while shifting away from occupying a skinny fat body, it will probably take months of the right diet and exercise plan before you notice a significant difference. 

It may also take up to a year of gaining muscle and losing body fat in the right places before you can comfortably say that you are no longer skinny fat.

Supplement Recommendations

Since it can take a very tactical approach to overcome a skinny fat physique, you need to adopt a supplementation strategy that is different from the sort of strategy you might try if you simply wanted to lose weight or body fat — or if you had a physique that was clearly overweight and you wanted to recompose your body into a lean form.

The first supplement someone who is skinny fat should probably reach for is a protein supplement. This is because it is often a challenge for anyone to eat all of the protein required to build muscle and change their body type. 

Whether your protein supplement offers you 20, 40, or upwards of 50 grams of protein per serving, it is likely to represent a massive infusion of protein into your daily diet, and take some of the pressure off of your meals to supply you with all of your required protein.

If you’re hoping to eliminate skinny fat, the next supplement you might reach for is a mass builder. Yes, mass builders generally come packaged with large doses of protein to help you pack on lean muscle, but they also serve as meal-equivalent powders that provide ample calories for hard-gainers. 

In essence, a mass gainer that adds 750 or more calories to your diet can simplify the process of creating the caloric surplus required to accelerate muscle growth, add attractive weight, and transition away from a skinny fat body type.

Finally, creatine is an excellent supplement for people who wish to go from a skinny fat body type to a more favorable look. 

For starters, creatine accelerates muscle growth and helps its users to pack on desirable weight. However, it is virtually impossible to acquire the amount of creatine necessary to achieve this boost through ordinary eating. Therefore, supplementation is essentially mandatory if you’re going to experience this boost to muscle strength and growth.

Aside from helping to build your muscles, at least one study shows that mixing a creatine supplement into your diet has been proven to accelerate the process of losing fat even through resistance training [3].

In essence, if you want to lose body fat while adding muscle, creatine will help you accomplish this, and all without directly targeting your body fat through cardio training. 

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

At this point, the pathway to shedding the skinny fat label should seem fairly straightforward. Yet, there are always going to be some misconceptions about some of these skinny fat avoidance measures, and misinterpreting this advice is only going to slow the muscle growth and body fat reduction processes.

The fight against skinny fat is a multi-front war; overcommitting yourself in one or more areas may ultimately lose you the battle with skinny fat. That’s why it’s important to make as few mistakes as possible

Focusing Only on Cardio

Cardio is one of the tried and true methods people use to get rid of body fat. However, skinny fat is a different animal than most body recomposition strategies are accustomed to tackling. 

Overdoing things in the cardio department can hinder the development of new muscle by hindering the caloric accumulation required to grow muscle tissue. 

Given the painstaking effort you’ll be undergoing to eat the right things and maintain a diet that’s conducive to muscle building, it’s important that you don’t sabotage your efforts with too much cardio. 

Instead, focus your activities in the gym on weight training, and other activities that will help you add the type of lean body weight that will help you sidestep a skinny fat diagnosis.

Neglecting Nutrition

Again, resistance training is only the first step toward adding muscle and reshaping your body; your diet is going to matter far more to the process. 

The type of food you eat and the volume of what you eat are going to matter mightily in the calculus of how rapidly you’re able to add the right type of weight to your body. All of the weight training in the world is going to become sadly irrelevant if your diet lacks ample protein or sufficient calories.

Then again, there is also the challenge of eating too many of the right kinds of foods and going from skinny fat straight to overweight. 

For people who are a normal weight, obesity can be right around the corner if you don’t place a tight rein on what you’re doing. That’s why it’s imperative that you focus on getting all of your nutrition in the right quantity, and in the right proportions.

Inconsistent Training

If you’re going to achieve the ultimate victory over skinny fat, it’s helpful to be all-in on the training plan. One reason for this is because there is often substantial overlap between people who are called skinny fat, and people who occupy some other categories of physical description.

In many cases, the types of people who would get diagnosed as skinny fat would also be diagnosed as hard-gainers. These are folks whose bodies have difficulty gaining muscle under any circumstances. In circumstances where training is intermittent or inconsistent, their bodies are likely to revert back to the form they’re accustomed to occupying, and rather quickly.

This is why it’s especially important for trainees with a skinny fat frame to adhere to a training program as rigidly as they can if they want to rid themselves of the skinny fat label as rapidly as possible.

Unrealistic Expectations

Since skinny fat is often linked with hard-gaining, it’s difficult to envision a scenario in which a person who qualifies as skinny fat would overcome their condition in less than three months. 

Yet, skinny fat exercisers are just as susceptible to the belief that their efforts should result in supernaturally rapid results as anyone else who has either hoped for rapid muscle growth, or abrupt weight loss.

As with anything else, freeing yourself from skinny fat takes time. It may appear as if nothing of consequence is happening. Yet, slowly but surely, you’re going to see results as your muscles grow, your belly fat fades, and your skinny fat condition becomes a thing of the past.

Say So Long to Skinny Fat

At this point you’re armed with all of the tools necessary to rid yourself of the affliction known as skinny fat. In the process, you’ve also acquired the formulas that can also help you achieve and sustain lean muscle growth under almost any circumstances. 

Just remember, the solution to the skinny fat paradox may seem confusing, but it’s the solution to nearly any question that revolves around muscle growth and fat loss. In short, the right foods and right exercises — applied in the right quantities and at the right times — will result in low body fat, increased muscle mass, and a healthy body. 

In that respect, all of the questions surrounding skinny fat have very familiar answers.