Not all fat is created equal. The kind you find around your hips and thighs, is much different than abdominal fat. The latter comes with greater health risk implications.
Visceral Fat vs Subcutaneous fat
90% of body fat is subcutaneous fat. This is the kind that lays beneath your. The other 10% is visceral fat, also referred to as intra-abdominal fat. It’s stored beneath your belly muscles (abdominals), and surrounds the space around your liver, intestines, and other organs.
What’s the difference?
Regardless of your body shape, excess fat isn’t good for your health.
Recent research has proved that fat cells, especially visceral fat are biologically active.
The fat beneath your skin (subcutaneous fat) produces more beneficial molecules like leptin, a hormone responsible to trigger fullness, and burn fat. Adiponectin is another hormone produced mainly by subcutaneous fat, it helps protects against diabetes by regulating the processing of fats and sugar.
Visceral Fat is the culprit for many health complications. It produces hormones which increases your risks of heart disease, cardiovascular disease, asthma, increased blood pressure, insulin resistance and other chronic conditions.
Here’s 5 steps to limit visceral fat:
· Stay Active:
Exercising daily helps to keep visceral fat at bay. Even if the number on the scale doesn’t change, you benefit from reducing visceral fat and building more muscle mass.
Participate in at least 30 minutes of moderate-intense exercise every other day, and supporting active habits goes a long way. Brisk walking, playing sports, jogging and bicycling are all great means to engage in movement. Take the stairs instead of the elevator, park further away from your destination and walk the rest, stand while you’re on the phone.
According to recent evidence, strength training and high-interval training are both very effective in reaching worthwhile weight loss.
· Eat Strategically:
This means much more than simply eating healthy. While you want to make health conscious decisions. Eating right adopting a fat burning nutrition strategy that works for your body type, lifestyle, and goals.
* It would be important to note food is 70-80% of the equation when it comes to weight loss.
· Quality Sleep
Sleep deprivation is real and comes with serious health implications. Lacking sleep causes changes in your hormones which regulate hunger and appetite. It leads to impaired judgement, which manifest itself as poor decision making.
· Peace of mind:
Stress increases cortisol levels which leads to high blood pressure. High cortisol is associated with increase in insulin resistance, also referred to as the fat storage hormone. Studies have found that the bulk of stress induced weight gain goes primarily to your belly, and waist.
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Work Cited
Harvard Health. (2010, August). Taking aim at belly fat. Retrieved from https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/taking-aim-at-belly-fat
Ekberg, S. (Author). (2020, August 14). 5 Easy Steps to Lose Belly Fat [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/7pkuOe3LmnA
Turrill, K. (2018, November 21). How to get rid of visceral fat: Four ways to reduce the 'dangerous' belly fat. Retrieved from https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1048024/how-to-get-rid-of-visceral-fat-sugar-protein-weights-interval-training
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