Gaining fat in the right places
What things affect where fat is stores?
Day 15/30 of posting daily
You want to gain weight in the “right places”. Generally as a man, this means gaining muscle (which will be discussed separately), and as a woman this means gaining both fat and muscle. I will discuss here for women on how to try to gain desirable fat deposits (hips, thighs, buttocks, breasts) rather than in undesirable places (abdomen, back, chin, arms).
Yet again, as said in the weight cycling and down-cycling post, the most important factor is making sure your hormones are correct. Some of this will naturally cause your fat to redistribute in desirable way. This has the strongest effect of anything here.
A lot of content from here is directly inspired by this Mesityl post.
Interventions
(beyond making sure your hormone levels are correct)
Surgical/Fat Grafting
It’s not specific to gaining weight, and there is a lot of content on this, so it mostly warrants its own post. You need to have enough fat on your body as a whole to to be able to graft it to desireable areas though.
The main option for gaining fat in areas is to do surgical fat transfer. This includes hip/butocks procedures like BBL, and in the breast like FTBA. These typically lose around half of the transferred fat in the final results (depending on method, technique, and after-care), but is still typically quite effective.
There do also exist procedures for implanting more guaranteed forms such as silicone instead, though some dislike that it can have an unnatural effect, and may need to be replaced after a long time. There have been various methodological advances all of these surgical procedures, and some older methods can be quite risky and dangerous.
Active Interventions
Exercise
This page is more focused on desired fat gain rather than muscle gain. But you should also be considering muscle gain and some exercise anyway.
This should be obvious. If you aren’t doing it, do this first. It is, for the most part, basically free. (Yes you! Stop ignoring this! I know you don’t want to hear it!)
If trying to get a wider hips, lower body exercises such as trapbar deadlifts or hip thrusts would help increase hip circumference, and would improve both your waist-to-hip ratio and shoulder-to-hip ratio. Even 2x per week having like 3 sets of both of these is good. It’s really much less effort than you are probably putting into reading.
Exercise can reduce waist circumference independent of body-weight change—i.e., you can gain/maintain weight from lean mass while the waist still shrinks (android fat/visceral fat falls).
Sleep and Stress
Cortisol can cause some increases in abdominal fat. You should get enough sleep because this decreases cortisol and stress somewhat. Prioritise getting 7-9h sleep per night.
Alcohol Avoidance
Alcohol has modest androgen increases in women, raises cortisol, and also of abdominal fat. You don’t want that.
Weight gain supplements
Thiazolidinediones (TZDs)
One can take TZDs, most commonly Pioglitazone or “pio”, though there exists others such as Rosiglitazone (which is less good).
Pioglitazone
“Pio” is an anti-diabetic medication that activates PPAR-gamma systemically, reducing insulin resistance, gluconeogenesis and overall blood sugar.
Here is a more detail blog post on pioglitazone.
High insulin resistance is associated with android fat distribution/higher WHR. It has been shown to lower visceral fat and WHR even in patients who’s overall BMI remained the same.
It has been associated with some risks to bladder and bone-fractures, but for short-term use it should generally be fine. Using it long-term continuously generally not recommended.
Anecdotal reports of people taking it seem good too. Trying it for a few months while upcycling, or having a few phases month-on month-off are some strategies that people do use.
Topical Pioglitazone
Typically people take it orally, but there are some reports of taking it topically: * Topical Pio + AH38. Unclear how much it helps or not, probably a lot is from systemic absorption.
Topical Solutions
Most of these are highly speculative, and rely on anecdotes and small industry funded studies.
Acetyl-Hexapeptide-38 (Adifyline®)
Adifyline®, topically applied increases PGC-1alpha expression, stimulating adipogenesis and lipid accumulation as a consequence
The local effect of the drug could be leveraged to selectively increase fat in certain areas and thus improve WHR/fat distribution.
In general, reports are pretty hit-or-miss, unclear if due to application method differences or genetic differences or both. There is like, one study on it:
Stories from people:
Reddit post on Adifyline with information on dosing, as well as Follow up comments from the author, seems to think it works.
Other reddit post, no method reported, didn’t seem to work for them.
Other reddit post, strong positive results, reports increasing from A/B-cup to C-cup. “I made the mistake of putting it on my butt and I feel like an hourglass and I don’t like it perhaps because I wasn’t ready for such a transition”
Acetyl-Hexapeptide-39 (Silusyne®)
Topically AH-39 supposedly decreases PGC-1α expression, diminishing adipogenesis and lipid accumulation as a consequence.
It could potentially be used topically to selectively reduce fat accumulation in certain areas and thus improve WHR/fat distribution.
However, there is, in general, very little literature on this.
The Mesityl - MTF Weight Cycling post has some discussion on this, and implies that it would work for the down cycle, though it could also make sense for the up cycle to inhibit growth in certain areas.
Volufiline
Volufiline is a patented cosmetic preparation containing Sarsapogenin which has been reported to stimulate adipocytic differentiation and adipogenesis by activation of PPAR-gamma. Similarly to the hexapeptide-38, it can be applied topically and perhaps even used synergistically.
Some recommend buying sarsapogenin directly:
I am less convinced about this than some other things here.
Growth Hormones and Various Peptides
There exist various other peptides and growth hsure i fixed theseormone related products, these are generally used for gaining weight in general, or trying to gain muscle. These are out of scope for the topic of this post.
Overall
There are some things you can try doing to improve distribution of fat, and muscle. Some of this is limited by your bone structure, but that is discussion left for another post, and often people perhaps overestimate what is doable through shaping of soft tissue too.
In general, a lot of these are under-studied, so if you are interested in funding research in this, or trying to take any of these things and record your results, then that would be helpful in understanding how effective any of this is.