Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The "Secret" to Losing Your Face Fat and Double Chin

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

Face fat can be slightly baffling. You can be fairly lean, with decent muscle definition and even a nice set of abs underneath your shirt, and still see double chins in every picture. Why? And what the hell can you do about it? Well, I have good and bad news. Let’s eat the frog first: There are no amount of face stretches or exercises that you can do to slim your mug. Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet or quick fix. Now the good news: You absolutely can lose face fat, and it’s easier than you probably think. I can’t promise that you’ll get that superhero jaw or those superheroine cheekbones, but if you feel your face is too fat, there is something you can do about it. So, let’s dive in and find out why some people’s faces seem disproportionately fat when compared to the rest of their bodies, and how to get leaner, more chiseled features. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

This episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my fitness book for men, bigger,, Leaner, Stronger. Now, this book has sold over 350,000 copies in the last several years and helped thousands and thousands of guys build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 3,100 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that are keeping you from achieving the lean, muscular, strong, and healthy body that you truly desire, and if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate male body, then you want to read Bigger, Leaner,

Stronger, which you can find on all major online retailers like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can get the audio book 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do if you're not currently listening to audio books. I love them myself because they let me make the time that I spend doing stuff like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth, so much more valuable and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, then simply go to www.bitly.com slash free BLS. And that will take you to Audible.

And then you just click the sign up today and save button, create your account. And voila, you get to listen to Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for free. All righty. That is enough shameless plugging for now, at least. Let's get to the show. Hey, Mike Matthews here from Us For Life and Legion Athletics. And welcome to another video podcast. And this one is going to be about how to lose face fat. And if that sounds a bit odd to you because you're familiar with me and my work and figure I wouldn't normally make a video like this, the reason why I am making it is because I actually get asked

about this fairly often. And keyword research has revealed that a lot of people are searching for help with losing face fat. So I figured I'd make this video and it's going to be short. It's going to be simple, but it is going to teach you everything you need to know really about losing face fat. So the first thing that you need to know, let's just get the bad news out of the way. Let's eat the frog first. And that is there is nothing special you can do to lose face fat, specifically to target face fat, to lose just fat in your face faster, as opposed to other areas in your body. That said, the good news is you can lose face fat.

Everyone can. It is very straightforward. And while I can't promise that you can get that superhero jaw that you might be after or those super heroin high cheekbones, if you feel that your face is too fat, there is something you can do about it. your face is too fat, there is something you can do about it. mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Twitter at Muscle for Life and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Okay, so let's quickly talk about the two things that make a face look too fat. First is body fat levels being too high, and that could simply be expressed as body fat percentage. And second is your facial structure

and your genetics, which can predispose your face to roundness like me. I have big cheeks that get bigger as I get fatter. You see, most of the fat in our bodies is stored beneath our skin. It's subcutaneous fat and it is distributed in varying degrees all over our bodies including areas that most of us wouldn't associate with body fatness, like our faces, our fingers, and our feet. And as most of us have subtler facial features, it doesn't take very much fat to mass them. And that's why most of us need to get pretty damn lean before we really start to notice changes in our facial appearance. Specifically, most guys need to get to around 10% to start noticing a real shift from

roundness toward angularity. And most women start to see that shift around 20%. And as you get leaner, as you get beneath 10% as a guy or 20% as a girl, you really start to notice changes in your face. So that's how it is for most people. For example, people who know me are used to my rounder face and really start to comment on how hollow my face starts to look or sunken it starts to look when I get down around 7% or so. I've had people that hadn't seen me in a while see me when I was really lean and ask if I was okay. And if I was sick or what happened, like, why do I look so gaunt? Now, in case you are not familiar with what those body fat percentages look like in both men and women, I'm going to put images up on the

screen here for those of you watching. And for those of you who are listening, if you want to read everything that I'm talking about here and see these images, head over to Muscle for Life and search for face fat, and you will find an article I wrote on this subject. So here is a visual chart of body fat percentages for men. And here is women. Now, as you can see, 10% in men and 20% in women is pretty lean. That is around optimal for most people, at least in my experiences, having worked with thousands of men and women over the last several years. Now, that being said, while getting to those body fat percentages or even slightly below is definitely going to give you nice muscle definition.

It's going to give you vascularity, probably more if you're a guy because you're going to have more muscle mass to push those veins up to the surface of the skin. And you are going to have nice abs and so forth, but it may not give you the facial features that you want. You've probably also noticed that some people are noticeably fatter than you are, but have more chiseled defined faces. And on the other hand, some people are noticeably leaner than you are with rounder, more fuller, fatter faces. And that brings me to the second factor that I mentioned earlier that determines how lean or fat your face looks, and that is genetics. You see, all of our faces are built differently. Some of us have very sharp features. So some people have those high prominent cheekbones or strong jutting jaws,

while other people have more muted, more softer, rounder types of facial features like me. So people with bolder facial features are generally going to look leaner in the face than people with more rounder facial features. And while we definitely can reduce the fatness of our faces, the literal fatness, we can reduce the body fat, the amount of body fat stored under the skin of our faces, we cannot change the underlying structures. And that means there's nothing we can do, and that includes weird facial exercises. There's nothing we can do to make our cheekbones higher or to make our jaw lines more prominent. And what that means then is that at any given body fat percentage, some people are going to have leaner looking faces and others are going to have fatter looking faces, rounder looking faces.

Now, if you are a guy who is particularly interested in attracting women and you're feeling a little bit let down right now because you have genetically, you have a fuller, rounder, maybe more feminine looking face, and you were hoping that you could develop a hyper-masculine looking face, take heart. Because research has shown actually that most women prefer facial features in men that are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between very feminine and very masculine. So chances are you are somewhere in the middle because this is really just a bell curve of what we're looking at in terms of facial features. Most guys are somewhere in the middle. And then you have some outliers on the end of a very masculine looking face. And then on the other end of a

very feminine looking face. So my point is, if you're a guy and your face is more or less symmetrical, you can be perfectly attractive to women despite not having the Tom Cruise jaw. And especially if you also work out and take care of your body and have just a decent physique, which by normal standards can actually stand out as extraordinary. And that's to say nothing of the emotional and psychological aspects of attraction, which for many women are more important, are more influential and have a great effect on how they perceive you physically. They have a great effect on your perceived physical attraction level. And these days, it seems like the bar is so low just based on conversations that I have with

women I know. It just seems like there are so many shitty guys out there that if you can simply have a good conversation, actually listen to what a woman has to say, ask interesting questions about her and her life and care about her answers and if there is anything even remotely interesting about you which by the way comes from not trying to act interesting and trying to get attention be cool or whatever but from being genuinely interested in the world or at least in something in the world if there's a topic or an activity that you are genuinely interested in and that you put time into educating yourself on and practicing, if you have that as well, and you can simply demonstrate that through just normal conversation, then at least

according to the women, the single women that I speak with here and there, you are going to stand out. And I understand because let's face it, a lot of guys out there, I don't know about most, but a porn, and sports. That's it. That's all they know. And then of course, many of those types of guys wonder why it's so hard to find a good girl. Why are there so many sluts out there? They don't stop to think that they are the common denominator in all of their failed relationships and all of their failures in general. That thought doesn't occur to them. It's always that the women are so bad out there. It's not them. It can't be them. Anyways, I'm ranting on a completely different subject here.

Maybe that could be another video. I'm going to getanting on a completely different subject here. Maybe that could be another video. I'm going to get back on topic to losing face fat. So to that point, let's now talk about how to lose face fat effectively. Now it's very simple. It is this. No, I'm just kidding. It is simply reducing your body fat percentage. That's all you have to do. You just got to make your total body fat levels go down and your face will get leaner. Unfortunately, there is no way to effectively accomplish targeted fat loss. There is no way to specifically reduce body fat in certain areas of your body, like your face or your stomach. While research shows that exercising muscles does increase fat burning in and around them a little bit,

the effects are too minor to make any real difference. What you can do though is simply focus on losing fat. If you just focus on reducing your body fat percentage, your face will get leaner. Your genetics will determine how much fat you will ultimately have to lose to get the kind of face that you want. And you may also find that in the beginning you are losing fat in other areas of your body, that other areas of your body are getting lean, but your face is not. And don't worry, that is normal. Just know that once you get down to around 10% body fat, if you're a guy and around 20% body fat, if you are a girl, you are going to have a lean looking face. Your face is not going to make you look fat. That's for sure.

Now, just so you can see a few examples of this, I'm going to show you a couple of success stories from people who followed my Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leaner Stronger programs. And we can look at me too. So you see me here, of course, but here is a picture of me after a couple of years of weightlifting. I was probably 19, maybe 20 in this picture. And at about, I don't know, 13, maybe 14% body fat. The cheeks, the cheeks, they're so big. And here's a shot of me about five years later, pretty lean, probably somewhere around 8% body fat, but still I got the cheeks. And then here's another shot a few years after that, I was even a bit leaner. I was probably around six or 7%. And that's about as lean as I'll ever get.

But my face is a bit fuller than what you might expect for that body fat level. Many guys have a very gaunt kind of hollowed out look by the time they get down to that body fat level, but not me. And what you see here is about 9% body fat. So it is what it is. I have a naturally fat face. I'm okay with that. Anyway, that's about it for losing face fat. And if you are not sure how to best go about losing fat, head over to Muscle for Life and search for lose weight fast. And you'll find a long article that I recently wrote. I think I published it three to four months ago or so, maybe a little bit longer, but it is in-depth. It is thorough, gives you everything you need to know to lose, not just weight, but lose fat quickly. I also did record a podcast on the same topic using that article as an outline. So

you can find that here on my YouTube channel or my podcast feed. If you search for lose weight fast or quickly, I don't remember exactly, just lose weight and it'll come up. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode

goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscle for life.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine,

specifically my fitness book for men, bigger, leaner, stronger. Now this book has sold over 350,000 copies in the last several years and helped thousands and thousands of guys build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 3,100 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that are keeping you from achieving the lean, muscular, strong, and healthy body that you truly desire, and if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate male body, then you want to read Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, which you can find on all major online retailers like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can get the audio book 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that

you do if you're not currently listening to audio books. I love them myself because they let me make the time that I spend doing stuff like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth, so much more valuable and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, then simply go to www.bitly.com slash free BLS. And that will take you to Audible. And then you just click the sign up today and save button, create your account and voila, you get to listen to Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for free.