Overnight weight gains or losses on your scales are from water shifts. Muscle weighs more than fat, so it is possible to work out and build up muscle tissue, lose fat, and then have the scales deceptively tell you that you are gaining. The body uses practically no energy to metabolize fat in your diet, whereas it uses about 20-25 percent of the calories in carbohydrates and protein for metabolizing them. In other words, when you eat 200 calories of meat or pasta your body actually gets only about 150 calories. Fat in your diet, on the other hand, goes lickety-split to wherever it can find some room to be stored.
Spot reducing is a myth.
Fat comes off in the same sequence it was stored. Depending on your genes, it may be stored as love handles, jodhpur thighs, jowls, butt, or pot-belly. It's not really a diet, but a way of eating, with the emphasis on reducing the amount of fat you consume. Written by Dr. Martin Katahn , a professor at Vanderbilt, the book has good, solid, accurate information based on research data. Neither alone is the answer, and there are no shortcuts.