Did you know that there are two types of body fat?
Stephen & Karen at Nutrition Leaders UK have been helping many many people for a total of 37 years now lose weight safely and healthily achieving amazing results and most importantly keeping the weight off long term.
We both adopted a healthy active lifestyle and used Herbalife Nutrition supplements alongside this to help us reach our health goals and maintain them long term.
So let's talk about the visceral adiposity that belly fat is associated with alongside high levels of insulin in the body and insulin resistance.
This means that the body isn't listening to its insulin as well as it used to.
So that high level of insulin causes us to store calories and to just gain weight.
Too much Belly Fat is a huge problem.
And it's so easy to fix.
BUT it's not through the AB roller or the Stair Master or whatever online tool, you can figure out how to get your abs, you can't get good ABS through exercise alone.
Eventually you have to do exercise.
But if you just focus on exercise, you will get a stuck.
So, let's talk about this problem.
Because for those of you who are open minded and not stuck in dogma, you know, we are in a staggering health crisis, not just COVID, but the whole pandemic of chronic disease that's driven by poor metabolic health.
And this phenomena of being over fat, you can be overweight or even over fat, or you can be both.
We're going to talk about that today and why it's so important to think about for our own health, for longevity, for preventing disease, and just for feeling good.
Actually, even just getting our own life together and managing our appetite and our metabolism and our energy and all the things that affect us.
We know that where your fat is in your body makes a huge impact.
We used to always worry about pinching an inch, right?
When we were growing up we could pinch an inch right?
But now we realize that the fat that's deep inside the belly, the visceral adiposity, that belly fat deep inside the abdomen is really concerning in terms of overall health.
It's a huge issue.
In fact, it’s a huge pandemic.
For example, in just the United States alone, we know that 70% of Americans are overweight or obese.
BUT 86% are over fat, meaning that they have too much fat and especially concerning is the level of visceral fat, and over half of kids are also over fat.
It’s eating so much.
It's staggering and It's sad, very sad.
It's creating so many health problems from just feeling crummy, to tired, to causing cancer, increasing our risk of cancer, like breast cancer and prostate and colon and lung cancer, of course increasing our risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
It increases our risk of Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline, it increases our risk of stroke and blood clots and high blood pressure and infections.
Also, with COVID, we realize that people with too much fat, people who are over fat, people with too much visceral adiposity have an increased risk of Covid 19.
They have an increased risk, they've lower immune systems, they have increased risk of erectile dysfunction and infertility and hair loss in the wrong places.
This issue is connected to so many things.
Unfortunately, it’s so common.
Sometimes it takes talking about a subject more than one time for people to really kind of put all the pieces together for themselves.
It almost seems too good to be true that all these problems are related to just one phenomenon.
While there are many other causes for many of these things, the majority of these problems from infertility to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, are all related to this one fact.
It’s the deep hidden excess fat around your organs that really matters and not so much the pinch an inch of surface fat we all talk about.
There's one medical study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Where they did a liposuction treatment on a very obese woman who was really very, very big, and they sucked out 40 pounds of fat from her subcutaneous tissue.
So basically, she lost 40 pounds just by sucking out all the fat.
But when they did a CAT scan to look at the fat inside, that didn't change at all!
And what also didn't change was all of her biology.
In other words, if you change your diet, you can change the quality of the fat in the body and make progress very, very quickly within days to weeks.
But for her, even though she lost 40 pounds of subcutaneous fat, there was no change in her blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, any of the markers of poor metabolic health, she was just as sick as she was before, even though she was 40 pounds lighter, because they took out the subcutaneous fat and not the Adipose deep belly fat...
So, this belly fat is really different than the fat on your body, your arms, or your gender, it is a very different fat.
So, let’s talk about this fat, particularly we call it bad fat or adipose tissue, or belly fat or organ fat or whatever you want to call it.
But it's fat around your organs, your liver, your kidneys, your intestines.
It's in that organ compartment.
What's it doing?
It's different than regular fat.
You cannot just liposuction this away, and your blood pressure's not going to come down, like you think.
You might think that you can just liposuction in a way that your Diabetes will go away.
But it doesn't, it doesn't work like that.
Because you're not getting to that deep adiposity fat when you liposuction, that deep belly fat.
And that deep belly fat is really inflammatory.
Deep belly fat produces all sorts of inflammatory markers.
So, it actually results in increased inflammation in the body.
It is associated with increased insulin resistance, and that high level of insulin, and the high level of inflammation, the two things together are really drivers for all of the processes in your body to get out of whack, for the cholesterol to get out of whack, for your inflammation in your arteries to get out of whack, for cancer to like to grow.
That deep belly fat is not just static, it is metabolically active.
It's not just sitting there doing nothing or holding your pants up.
It's actually doing things, it's producing all these chemicals and hormones and it's increasing the inflammation in your body.
So, if there's one thing that people can focus on, as sometimes people get overwhelmed with all the messages regarding health, right?
Like what do I do?
What diet do I follow?
What should I work on?
Where do I focus?
Sometimes people get so overwhelmed, and they almost give up, we see that all the time.
So, the basic thing that everybody can focus on.
Including me as I try my best like everyone else to be healthy right?
But you know, this is an area that we can all focus on that can improve our health, if we just pay attention to what's our waist circumference, and what's our waist to hip ratio, because that's telling us how much belly fat we have.
I often joke and say, there's a simple test you can do to figure out if you have this problem.
It's called the mirror test.
You take up your shirt, your look in the mirror, you jump up and down.
If there's a lot of belly fat jiggling up and down, you probably have a problem.
Sadly 88% of Americans have this problem.
It's metabolically unhealthy.
That's because they have this visceral fat.
It's making them unhealthy and causing all these other problems that we see as separate but in actual fact there not they are all connected to this one issue mainly.
People who have high blood pressure, high cholesterol and high blood sugar they're all the same problem, or low sex drive or low testosterone or pimples and difficult menstrual periods and sleep apnea.
We see them as all separate but they're all connected by this one problem.
Also, with COVID.
The vulnerability of the population with too high visceral fat and COVID has been highlighted.
Approx 63% of hospitalizations could have been prevented if people had a better level of metabolic health and a better diet.
So, the real question is what causes it, and how we start to recognise it.
The waist to hip ratio is a great measurement that we can all do and repeat on our own.
What you do is you get your waist circumference, and to find the right place for your waist circumference, it's in between your lowest rib, and your upper hip bone.
You put the tape measure in between, and that's considered your waist circumference.
So, if you find that lowest last rib, and your hip bone and measure in between the two, that's considered your waist circumference.
It's like your belly button, your thumbprint.
Some people's belly button hangs down or is in a different place.
So, it's not always the belly button.
But it's around that area.
So, the goal for Caucasian people is to have a waist circumference less than 35 inches for women, and less than 40 inches for men.
For Asian and Indian ethnicities, it's stricter, less than 31 inches for women and less than 37 inches for men.
So, if there's one thing that people can focus on, as sometimes people get overwhelmed with all the messages regarding health, right?
Like what do I do?
What diet do I follow?
What should I work on?
Where do I focus?
Sometimes people get so overwhelmed, and they almost give up, we see that all the time.
So, the basic thing that everybody can focus on.
Including me as I try my best like everyone else to be healthy right?
But you know, this is an area that we can all focus on that can improve our health, if we just pay attention to what's our waist circumference, and what's our waist to hip ratio, because that's telling us how much belly fat we have.
I often joke and say, there's a simple test you can do to figure out if you have this problem.
It's called the mirror test.
You take up your shirt, your look in the mirror, you jump up and down.
If there's a lot of belly fat jiggling up and down, you probably have a problem.
Sadly 88% of Americans have this problem.
It's metabolically unhealthy.
That's because they have this visceral fat.
It's making them unhealthy and causing all these other problems that we see as separate but in actual fact there not they are all connected to this one issue mainly.
People who have high blood pressure, high cholesterol and high blood sugar they're all the same problem, or low sex drive or low testosterone or pimples and difficult menstrual periods and sleep apnea.
We see them as all separate but they're all connected by this one problem.
Also, with COVID.
The vulnerability of the population with too high visceral fat and COVID has been highlighted.
Approx 63% of hospitalizations could have been prevented if people had a better level of metabolic health and a better diet.
So, the real question is what causes it, and how we start to recognise it.
The waist to hip ratio is a great measurement that we can all do and repeat on our own.
What you do is you get your waist circumference, and to find the right place for your waist circumference, it's in between your lowest rib, and your upper hip bone.
You put the tape measure in between, and that's considered your waist circumference.
So, if you find that lowest last rib, and your hip bone and measure in between the two, that's considered your waist circumference.
It's like your belly button, your thumbprint.
Some people's belly button hangs down or is in a different place.
So, it's not always the belly button.
But it's around that area.
So, the goal for Caucasian people is to have a waist circumference less than 35 inches for women, and less than 40 inches for men.
For Asian and Indian ethnicities, it's stricter, less than 31 inches for women and less than 37 inches for men.
This is a really simple test you can do, it's something you can check every month, you can redo your waist hip ratio every month, and watch your progress and say, Okay, what am I doing?
What do I need to do?
And it's a really inexpensive way to figure out is this a problem for me?
People who have Indian or Asian descent can have significant visceral fat, and all the complications from it at much lower body weights.
So, if you look at their body weight, there weight might be perfect.
Their B.M.I (Body Mass Index) which might be less than 25 (which is considered overweight), but they may be full of too much visceral fat and they can be diabetic.
They might look thin, which is why we call this condition skinny fat.
They have the same issues as someone who's overweight, but they're just over fat.
What we call “Toffee”, soft on the outside but hard fat on the inside.
If you are a smaller person, then that's where also the waist hip ratio can be really helpful to make sure you are healthy.
Now of course no test is ever perfect for some people, the waist circumference or the waist hip ratio isn't always giving us all of the information.
There's a lot of other indicators that tell us that somebody has too much visceral adiposity, that somebody is carrying too much weight around the belly.
So, if you get inflammation, you get high blood sugar, high insulin, lots of oxidative stress, these are all things that seemingly are separate problems, but they're all connected to this visceral fat.
What's amazing is to watch them improve.
When we make shifts or changes in somebody's lifestyle.
There's lots of things that can contribute to this problem from toxins in the environment to shifts in the Microbiome in your body to poor diet.
Having a nutrient poor diet, eating too many refined carbohydrates and simple sugars, not getting enough exercise, poor sleep, too much stress can all contribute to it.
But, when we help someone make a shift in their lifestyle, and when we help someone make a shift in their nutrition we see these markers improve significantly.
So, it's so exciting and really fun to watch and help someone make these changes.
We see it improve all the time as we help more and more people.
Kind Wishes,
Stephen & Karen
Nutrition Leaders UK
"Making the World Healthier and Happier"
Learn more about the proven nutrition and health solutions we provide by visiting us at Nutrition Leaders UK
Subscribe & get your FREEBIE of our popular 'IT STARTS HERE' booklet -10 Simple Secrets for you reach your Level 10 Personal Best Health Result...
We always send our special offers, discount vouchers and new product launches to our loyal subscribers first!!!