Can you burn off neck fat and make your neck thinner? Yes, you can, but you can’t just eat less calories to do it.
The Anatomy of Neck Fat
Neck fat is not regular fat—it is correlated with heart disease and diabetes.
Let’s take a look at a 2020 study titled Neck adipose tissue accumulation is associated with higher overall and central adiposity, a higher cardiometabolic risk, and a pro-inflammatory profile in young adults.
Researchers looked at 139 “healthy” young men and women using a CT scan to look at their necks.
Here’s a CT scan of what they found:
This is complicated to understand, so I’ve added a few things to the image to help you understand what we’re looking at.
- BLUE—Subc. Nat = Subcutaneous Neck Fat. This is normal fat, the kind that we can use for energy.
- RED—Interm. Nat = Intermuscular Neck Fat. This is a bad fat storage pattern, which is linked to inflammation, heart disease, and diabetes.
While it’s true that the obese and overweight necks had more regular subcutaneous fat, even a severe calorie restriction wouldn’t fix the extra intermuscular fat, which is linked to bad health outcomes. On a diet, someone might look slightly less fat, but they’d still have the fat neck.
Neck Fat Is Developing Heart Disease / Diabetes
Here’s what the researchers found correlated with neck fat.
- More neck fat = more cardiometabolic risk
- More neck fat = less physical fitness
- More neck fat = worse glycemic control and blood lipids
- More neck fat = high inflammation levels
These health effects of neck fat were seen in both men and women.
How Do I Fix The Fat Neck / Double-Chin and Make My Neck Thinner?
To solve this type of fat on the neck, the bad visceral and deep, superficial fat (also found at the belly), you must improve your health.
This means halting and reversing heart disease and diabetes (insulin resistance).
You must work with a medical professional to do this, like a licenced naturopath or integrative functional doctor. Someone who will help you find the root cause of the inflammation. Most people are deficient in some sort of nutrient and are either doing or eating something that is causing inflammation.
There are some things that are known to improve health generally, and these may help make your neck thinner.
Do more of these things
- Get 7,500 to 10,000 daily steps. To help do this, take one walk each day outside in the sunshine.
- Do resistance training, like lifting weights, a couple of times a week.
- Eat more wild seafood, pasture-raised and 100% grass-finished meat to get more omega-3s, vitamin E, and phytonutrients.
- Drink spring water, which is rich in minerals and doesn’t contain fluoride or chlorine
- Consume more bone broth or collagen-based sources of protein like gelatin or collagen powders.
- Get at least 7 hours of sleep each night, and aim to get closer to 8-9 hours.
Stop doing these things
- Stop eating all forms of processed sugar like soda pop and candy.
- Stop eating all forms of iron-fortified white flour (burger buns, pizza, pasta, muffins, croissants, etc.)
- Stop eating all forms of industrially processed oils (deep-fried foods, chips, foods from restaurants, etc.)
- Stop eating all forms of food that include additives, particularly citric acid and titanium oxide. This rules out most boxed foods.
- Stop eating all forms of foods treated with glyphosate or other herbicides and pesticides. Go for organic for thirty days and see how you feel.
- Stop drinking hard alcohol and wine treated with sulphites. This only leaves natural wines.
- Stop using LED or fluorescent lighting in your house which disrupts melatonin release at night. Switch to incandescent lights, which are less disruptive to melatonin.
- Stop showering and bathing in fluoridated and chlorinated water. Get a shower filter or buy a whole-house water filter.
It may seem complicated, but it’s well worth learning because you can get your health back, and feel great, and look great, while you’re doing it. Each day you can feel a little bit better than the last.
If you want more help, we cover the exact game plan of what to eat and how to lift weights and exercise in the Skinny Fat Fix program. Many of my clients have seen the puffiness in their face, and their neck fat go away after putting these principles into action.
