CELLULITE MYTHS -- BUSTED!
"I'm 20 pounds overweight but have no cellulite; my friend is rail-thin and has lots of it. My husband has none. What's up with that?" Think of the legs and butt as quilts. The quilt's top piece of fabric is your skin, the stuffing is your fat and the stitches are the fibrous attachments that course through the fat and attach to the underside of the skin, says Lisa Donofrio, M.D., assistant clinical professor of dermatology, Yale University School of Medicine. The fewer of these fibrous attachments one has, the more likely the skin will lie smoothly.

"The size and thickness of the cellulite attachments are genetically and sexually determined," Donofrio says. "Men have sparser, thinner fibrous bands than women." Age also leads to thicker bands, Donofrio continues, and those changes are compounded by loss of skin elasticity and integrity. Your friend may have more of these fibrous attachments, making dimpling more obvious. Other people, like you, have few enough to have dimple-free skin, even if there's a layer of fat. Meanwhile, if you have enough muscle (as men often do and as you might), your skin may lie more smoothly atop the fat layer.

"If I bust my butt on the treadmill, I won’t get any more cellulite, right?" "Remember, cardiovascular work is not enough to develop the muscles of your lower body," says fitness researcher Wayne Westcott, Ph.D. To see a difference in cellulite, you must strengthen key lower-body muscles. The most effective way is with exercises that isolate and fatigue each muscle.