From my understanding of the science there is no such thing as "spot reduction". You can't lower fat around the midsection without lowering fat overall. Now HRT might make fat move around, none of the fitness books I have ever read took HRT into account.
The way it was said that made the most sense was this, your body stores and burns fat in a more or less set priorty, In other words if your body wants to keep lets say fat under the chin, it might not want to burn that fat until you get to very low levels of body fat. For other people, losing weight might effect their face first before the midsection. Regardless, you can do a million setups and it won't make your midsection thinner than the rest of your body.
Now, in the book I read that in, they provided plenty of evidence for this being how things worked, and that at a low enough body fat percentage your body will burn any fat from anywhere, but generally speaking it would put fat back in the places first where it took it from last. What the book didn't mention is the method with which the body made these sorts of prioritizations. I don't think it could be wholly genetic, because we here know hormones play a role, but I do suspect it is mostly genetic.
