The short answer is no. “You can’t pick where on the body you want to lose fat,” said Eric Ravussin , a physiologist at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. If you lift weights, for instance, you can build up muscle beneath the fat. But unless your achieve a net calorie deficit — that is, expending more calories than you consume — you will not lose weight, in the spot where you would like to lose it or anywhere else.