The Internet can be such a terrific source of knowledge and information. It is unfortunate though that factual information is so often twisted in ways that promote marketing efforts and used to allow the uneducated to sound authoritative.
Such is the case of visceral fat. Long on hype and short on facts. It’s time to set the record straight.
Let’s be clear from the start: stored fat in the human body is normal. Most any pathology related to fat is in relation to the proportion of it in relation to the rest of the body composition. There is nothing inappropriate about having visceral fat in your body. Problems have to do with having too much fat in your body overall.
Fat serves your body in a number of healthy ways.
- It is a supply of energy that can be broken down and used when there is not enough energy coming in from meals.
- Stored fat provides insulation and protection to vital organs of the body that do not have natural protection. (The heart and lungs have a surrounding rib cage that the abdominal organs do not. That’s why fat is normal in the abdomen but abnormal in the chest.)
- Visceral fat participates in hormonal control for your body (i.e. insulin).
The biology of fats in our bodies traces back to our distant ancestors who were not always certain of when their next meal would be caught. As hunter/gathers, our bodies learned to adapt to irregular meals by developing efficient storage mechanisms.
Fat is stored where we have fat cells. While fat cells are found throughout your body, a large proportion are located underneath the abdominal muscles (where your “six-pack” would normally be found) in a sheet-like structure.
We also have fat cells underneath the skin (called “subcutaneous”) that provide additional storage sites for the extra calories we eat but do not burn.
The more recent media attention being paid to the underlying visceral fat storage has been its role in hormonal controls. Insulin, the major player in metabolizing sugar in the blood when things are working well (and in Diabetes when it isn’t), can be influenced by these stored sites of fat.
But this is only part of the story.
When fat stores are creating problems in your body, a lot has to do with proportion. If you have a lot of stored fat in your abdominal region, you have a lot of stored fat throughout your whole body. It is not just a regional problem.
The common measurement of whether you have to be concerned about abdominal fat is taking the measure of your waist (measured at the level of your belly button). If this number is greater than ½ of your height, measured in inches, you need to be concerned.
There are plenty of them! Oh, they are easy to implement and you probably already know them too.
Diet – eating a balanced diet of predominately whole foods and avoiding processed foods. There is no visceral fat diet or spot-reducing diet that is effective and safe.
Exercise – getting up and moving on a regular and consistent basis. Besides aerobic workouts, including some resistance training will help to create additional muscle tissue that helps to burn calories at a higher rate. To safely lose weight, you want to burn more calories than you consume on a regular basis.
Get Your Sleep – sleep deprivation sets off a hormonal cascade that ends up promoting the deposition of body fat. Get at least 7 hours of sleep each night.
Lower Your Stress – lowering stress helps reduce the hormonal storage of fat in your abdominal region. When we are stressed, our bodies respond with cortisol, a hormone that promotes a protective response of storing fat.
Reduce Alcohol Intake – alcohol is metabolized as a sugar, so in excess it tends to be stored as fat. It is also a highly suspicious culprit in Diabetes.
Stop Smoking – large amounts of stored abdominal fat creates an inflammatory response in the body and nicotine contributes to this effect.
So relax when the latest Health guru cries about the evils of visceral fat in his/her latest book. This type of fat is truly just normal anatomy to which you need to pay attention. If you are carrying around some extra poundage across your midsection, start working with these tools. If you lower your overall fat storage, the horrors of visceral fat are greatly reduced.
And by the way, for those creative thinkers who reason that liposuction could be a shortcut, that procedure only removes the subcutaneous fat and does nothing for the underlying visceral fat. Sorry.
“First, it was a dream to lose weight, then it was a goal, then it became a fight, now it’s a lifestyle.”
― Fortas Abdeldjalil
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