Diet & Fitness 

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Slim your inner thighs

Ah, the old my-thighs-rub-together-and-give-me-a-rash problem. Unfortunately, along with the hips, stomach, and back of the arms, the inner thigh is a traditional problem area for women. And again, unfortunately, there simply isn't a particular exercise that will make fat disappear from your inner thighs as opposed to your stomach. The inner thigh is where you happen to store fat. On someone else it may be the hips or gut.

Another popular misconception is that you can replace fat with muscle. By the time we reach adulthood, we have a finite number of fat cells and muscle fibres. The only thing we can do is try to influence their size. Reduce your body fat and all of your fat cells will be smaller, including the ones located in your inner thigh area. When you build muscle, you increase the size of the muscle fibres you already have, but you don't add new cells.

So let's talk about reducing fat in general. Some of the major themes are:

Don't diet. Rather than trying the latest fad diet or skipping meals, just reduce the total amount of calories you consume daily. If you consume the number of daily calories you need, you will maintain your current weight. If you reduce this amount by just a couple of hundred calories a day, it will create a deficit between the calories you take in and the calories you expend. You can trim fat from your diet, but make sure you’re still getting around 30% of your calories from fat.

Burn calories. Reduce your daily calorie deficit even more by increasing the amount of time you exercise over the course of a week. Aerobic exercise (walking, cycling, rollerblading, swimming), performed three to five times a week for 30-60 minutes can help you increase your daily calorie deficit. The obvious reason that this is beneficial is that when you've burned more calories than you've taken in, your body gets the other calories it needs for energy from the fat already stored on your body.

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