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Decades of epidemiological research have shown that body fat distribution influences disease risk independently of total body weight or body fat percentage (1, 2).While early investigators regarded adipose as a rather homogenous tissue, contemporary evidence indicates that discrete fat depots function and respond to metabolic challenges (such as increased caloric intake) in different ways ...
- Maintain a Healthy Weight
Reaching and maintaining a healthy weight is important for...
- Maintain a Healthy Weight
- Overview
- 1. Where your fat is located isn’t totally in your control — especially as you get older
- 2. But there’s more than one type of body fat to pay attention to
- 3. Subcutaneous, the ‘pinchable’ kind, actually has some important benefits
- 4. Too much visceral fat can be dangerous
- 5. BMI isn’t always the best predictor of healthy body fat levels
- 6. Your lifestyle factors can affect how much visceral fat builds up
- 7. Six ways to achieve healthier fat distribution
Everything you need to know about fat types, location, and keeping it off.
It’s no secret that having too much body fat could be bad for your health. You probably focus on how much you have, but another aspect worth paying attention to is fat distribution — or where you have it.
Turns out, there are certain places where having excess fat could be problematic. And there are other places where it might not be that big of a deal.
How can you tell the difference? Here’s what you should know about fat distribution and what it can tell you about your health. Plus, here’s how you can achieve a better balance.
You have plenty of say over your total amount of body fat. As for where that fat tends to show up? That can be a little harder to manage.
Most people tend to accumulate fat either in their midsection or in their hips and thighs. But your genes, sex, age, and hormones could affect how much fat you have and where it goes.
Believe it or not, there are three. Not only does each one have a different function. They’re all located in different parts of your body.
Here’s a breakdown of what these fat types are:
•Subcutaneous fat sits on top of your muscle, right underneath your skin. It’s the kind you can poke or pinch, often around your butt, hips, or thighs. This makes up about 90 percent of our fat stores.
•Visceral fat sits deep inside the abdominal cavity. It surrounds vital organs like the liver, intestines, and heart. Unlike subcutaneous fat, you can’t touch or feel it. But it can pose serious health risks. (More on this later.)
Subcutaneous fat is basically stored energy. Small amounts of it can be more helpful than you think.
It pumps out hormones like leptin, which signal to the brain that you’re full and don’t need to keep eating. It also makes adiponectin, an anti-inflammatory hormone that plays a role in maintaining healthy blood sugar levels.
Because it’s stored around your vital organs, visceral fat can make its way into your liver. From there, it’s turned into cholesterol, which travels into the bloodstream and clogs up arteries.
Visceral fat is also thought to signal the release of inflammatory chemicals and contribute to insulin resistance.
You’re more likely to have too much visceral fat if your body mass index (BMI) falls in the overweight (25 to 29.9) or obese (30 or above) category.
But you shouldn’t rely on BMI alone to tell you whether your body fat falls in the healthy range, says Ayoob.
Research shows that 22 percent of men and 8 percent of women who are considered normal weight actually have too much visceral fat. (And are at risk for the health problems that can come with it.)
The opposite can also be true. Around 22 percent of men and 10 percent of women with obesity have levels of visceral fat that fall within the normal range.
Your body doesn’t have all the say over where your fat tends to live. Certain lifestyle factors also play a role.
Here are three common habits that cause visceral fat to build up:
•Eating too much junk food. “These foods have the ability to be absorbed quickly into the bloodstream, triggering a spike in insulin, which acts as a fat deposit hormone,” says integrative weight loss specialist Luiza Petre, MD. Getting too much saturated fat seems to promote the buildup of visceral fat too.
•Being sedentary. The more time you spend sitting, the greater your waist circumference is likely to be, findings suggest. So when Netflix says, “Are you still watching?” use that as a reminder to take a stroll.
6 tips for healthy fat distribution
•Choose complex carbs and protein. •Eat healthy fats. •Exercise 30 minutes a day and increase the intensity. •Keep your stress in check. •Get six to seven hours of sleep every night. •Limit alcohol intake. Was this helpful? 1.Choose complex carbs and protein over the sugary stuff. They digest at a slower rate, so your insulin levels stay steady instead of spiking and prompting your body to store extra belly fat, Petre says. 2.Go for healthier dietary fats. Polyunsaturated fats like walnuts, salmon, and flax seeds are an especially good bet — especially when you swap them in for saturated fats. Findings suggest that polyunsaturated fats promote the growth of calorie-torching muscle tissue, while saturated fats seem to encourage excess fat storage. 3.Exercise — and try to up the intensity. Get the most bang for your buck by breaking a sweat. Strength training helps increase muscle mass, which in turn reduces body fat, explains Petre. High-intensity intervals (like alternating sprinting with walking) are more effective for attacking visceral fat than moderate aerobic exercise, research shows. 4.Try to keep your stress in check. Taming the tension keeps your system from constantly getting flooded with cortisol. That in turn can help keep excess fat from taking up home in your visceral tissue, Peeke says. 5.Get enough sleep. In one six-year study, participants who normally slept for five hours showed a 32 percent increase in visceral fat. Those who logged six to seven hours only increased their visceral fat by 13 percent. 6.Limit your booze intake. Flooding your system with excessive amounts of alcohol in one sitting means more of the calories could get stored as visceral fat. Heavier drinkers tend to have higher levels of belly fat as well, so stick to no more than one drink a day (for women) or two per day (for men). And above all, avoid binge drinking. That’s defined as four or more drinks in two hours. Don’t try all these steps at once if it seems overwhelming. Enjoying the baby steps and building lifelong habits is more effective and healthier for yourself. If anything, remember this key tip: Watch your portions overall. When you eat too much of any food — even healthy ones — the extra calories your body doesn’t need get stored as fat. Marygrace Taylor is a health and wellness writer whose work has appeared in Parade, Prevention, Redbook, Glamour, Women’s Health, and others. Visit her at marygracetaylor.com.
Normal-weight women with a waist of 35 inches or higher had three times the risk of death from heart disease, compared with normal-weight women whose waists were smaller than 35 inches. The Shanghai Women’s Health Study found a similar relationship between increasing waist size and risk of death from any cause in normal-weight women. [11]
Reaching and maintaining a healthy weight is important for overall health and can help you prevent and control many diseases and conditions. If you are overweight or obese, you are at higher risk of developing serious health problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, gallstones, breathing problems, and certain cancers.
May 15, 2006 · By 25 years of age, for example, healthy-weight women have almost twice the body fat that healthy-weight men have. This gender difference begins early in life. From birth up to age six, the number ...
Sep 19, 2022 · The distribution of body fat changes, with an increase in abdominal and trunk fat and a reduction in fat located in the limbs². Lean muscle mass generally contributes up to about 50% of total bodyweight in young adults but decreases with age to be about 25% of total bodyweight by age 75–80 years³. Older men have larger skeletal muscle mass ...
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Sep 24, 2021 · Women with excess abdominal subcutaneous fat (A-FAT) and the distinctive “apple” body shape those deposits create are at greater risk for future obesity-related health problems, such as diabetes, hypertension, stroke and heart attack, compared to “pear” shaped women with the same overall weight but where the excess is deposited as subcutaneous fat in the hips and thighs (GF-FAT).
