The Skinny Fat Workout & Diet Guide

Skinny fat is when you’re overfat but undermuscled, giving you a normal BMI but an unhealthy body composition. It’s when you’re not quite fat but not quite skinny, either.

The good news is you aren’t overeating or undereating, so you won’t need to force yourself to eat more food (bulking) or less food (cutting). That’s the hardest part of any physique transformation. You don’t need to worry about that. Not yet, anyway.

Instead, the best way to get rid of skinny fatness is to improve your nutrient partitioning. You need body recomposition. There are a few methods that can help with that: following a good workout program, eating a good diet, living a good lifestyle, and getting enough good sleep. Each can work on its own, but combining them all together works much better.

“Skinny fat” is when you’re both under-muscled and overfat, giving you a normal BMI but a poor body composition. It’s a casual term for someone with normal-weight obesity, also known as Metabolically Obese Normal Weight (MONW).

We covered a study by Wroblewski and colleagues in our article on how age affects muscle growth (study). The researchers compared the MRI scans of people with different exercise habits, looking at their body composition:

Both of these guys have legs that are about the same size, but the skinny-fat man’s leg is made of fat, whereas the fit man’s leg is made of muscle. You can see the difference in bone density, too. Look at the thick pearly white bones on the right.

Skinny fat isn’t a body type. The study found that inactivity led to simultaneous muscle loss and fat gain over time, causing people to grow gradually more skinny fat with every passing year. However, exercising allowed people to maintain their leanness and muscularity into their 70s. (There are other factors, too. More on that in a moment.)

To figure out if you have a below-average amount of muscle mass, you can measure how big and strong you are. The average American man has 13.3-inch biceps and can bench press around 185 pounds (source). If you’re smaller or weaker than that, you’re less muscular than the average man. You might call that being skinny.