The bad news when it comes to blasting your body fat: You don't get to decide where your weight loss happens on a part-by-part basis. Enormous amounts of research have been devoted to exploring the concept of spot-specific fat loss in a specific area.

In one recent study, participants exercised just one of their legs, performing a whopping one thousand leg presses per workout session over a period of twelve weeks.If slimming down an individual body part were possible, this kind of targeted exercise would certainly do the trick. But that study reached the same conclusion as all its predecessors: The body will shed fat in response to a caloric deficit, the kind achieved through diet and exercise, but it's impossible to control where that fat comes from. In the leg press study, participants lost a pretty significant amount of fat — 10.2 percent, to be exact — in their upper extremities, suggesting that a high-rep training regimen (like a barre workout, for example) is a good bet for those who want to burn fat and build muscle. But the body part being worked out — their legs — retained more or less the same composition as when they started, with no significant difference between the trained leg and the control leg.

In short, if you want slimmer legs, you may have to lose a significant amount of weight from other parts of your body before the fat stores in your hips, thighs, or calves get their turn.