Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Big Problem With Visceral Fat (and How to Lose It)

Episode Date: December 28, 2017

“How the hell can I be this skinny with a stomach this big and fat?” That’s the first line from an email I received earlier this week. And it inspired this episode. You see, I’ve worked with thousands of men and women and if there’s one thing that frustrates people most, it’s having too much belly fat. I’ve written quite a bit about how to lose belly fat, but visceral fat deserves its own treatment because it’s a different beast than the run-of-the-mill ab fat. So, in this episode we’re going to cover what visceral fat is, why it’s dangerous, why some people have more than others, and how to lose it. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hey, this is Mike and welcome to another installment in my in five minutes or less series where I answer one common question quickly and simply because while long form content is great, sometimes it is also nice when someone just gets right to the point and tells you what to do and how to do it in five minutes or less. And that's what I do in these episodes. In this video slash podcast, I want to talk about visceral fat, which is a special type of belly, or I guess you could say abdominal fat that not only looks bad, but actually can be dangerous to your health. Now, the word visceral means having to do with the organs and especially the organs in the abdominal cavity. So visceral fat is fat that is stored around the organs in the abdominal cavity, like the liver, pancreas, and intestines. Visceral fat then is different than the type of

fat that most people think of when they think of body fat, which is called subcutaneous fat. And subcutaneous means under the skin. So this is the fat that's all over our bodies and it is more or less right beneath the skin. It's what wiggles and jiggles and what we are most concerned with getting rid of when we want to get lean. So when we bulk and cut, what we are changing mostly in terms of body fat is our subcutaneous fat levels and not our visceral fat levels. And that also applies to our belly fat. So as we see our stomachs shrink and expand, what we are seeing mostly is changes in subcutaneous fat, not visceral fat. Visceral fat, of course, is involved, but not nearly as much as subcutaneous fat because it is harder to both gain and lose.

Visceral fat also differs from subcutaneous fat in its physiological impact on the body. So subcutaneous fat per se is not unhealthy. Of course, if you have too much subcutaneous fat, if you get simply too fat, it becomes unhealthy, but subcutaneous fat is actually a vital part of your body's endocrine system. It plays a role in hormone production. Like for example, the hormone leptin, which plays an important role in regulating the metabolism and actually many things in the body is produced by subcutaneous fat. And if you lose too much subcutaneous fat, if you get too lean, eventually you die. Now with visceral fat, you want to have as little as possible basically, because research shows that higher levels of visceral fat is

associated with an increased risk for various diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and dyslipidemia, which is the presence of an abnormally high amount of lipids in the blood. So, you know, cholesterol, triglycerides, and so forth. Scientists are still working out why this is exactly, but one hypothesis that is gaining ground in clinical research is that the visceral fat it produces fatty acids and various pro-inflammatory chemicals and because of how close it is to the portal vein which takes blood to the liver these chemicals find their way to the liver and then can cause problems like for example the lipids can accumulate in the liver and then that can lead to various health issues. Subcutaneous fat, on the other hand, produces more beneficial than harmful chemicals. So for example, I mentioned

leptin earlier, which is a hormone that impacts the metabolism favorably. It impacts appetite favorably. It tells your body that it's fed, tells your body it has an abundance of energy. Subcutaneous fat also produces a hormone called adiponectin, which is involved in the breakdown of glucose and fatty acids into energy. I mentioned earlier that you can't pinch or grab visceral fat because it's beneath the abdominal wall. It's beneath the big core muscles that then the skin is on top of and the subcutaneous fat is on top of. So that's why you can have, you see it mostly in guys where you'll have like a beer belly that, you know, a big stomach that is kind of hard. There isn't that much fat to grab on it. That's an instance of a lot of visceral

fat. So if you are curious, if you have too much visceral fat, there's a simple little test you can do. You can take a tape measure and measure waist at your navel. And if you are a woman and your waist is 35 inches or greater, then you probably have more visceral fat than you want to have. And if you are a man, that number is about 40 inches. Now, if you have too much visceral fat and you're curious as to why, how did you get there? Or if you don't have too much visceral fat and you want to know how to not get there, there are several factors in play that ultimately determine how your body stores body fat. Genetics are in play. Hormones are in play. Age matters. Activity level matters. And possibly even birth weight. birth weight, actually, just because that's how it is. As your body fat levels rise and as your belly fat levels rise, a certain percentage

of that is going to be visceral fat. As far as age goes, as people get older, they tend to move less. They tend to lose muscle, which of course then increases their risk for weight gain and obesity. And with that comes increased visceral fat. As far as hormones go, you will see this frequently with post-menopausal women. Research shows that they tend to store more visceral fat because of the hormone changes. And that's primarily because estrogens decrease, and that can lead to an increase in visceral fat storage. storage. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who

might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Now, as far as diet and lifestyle, things we control, studies show that high fat diets are generally associated with higher levels of body fat, not lower levels. And if you want to fact check me on that, you can find the references in the description. If you're watching this on YouTube in the description down below, but high fat diets are generally associated with higher body fat levels and higher below, but high fat diets are generally associated with

higher body fat levels and higher BMIs than lower fat diets. And the fatter someone is, the more visceral fat they will inevitably have. So therefore high fat diets can increase the risk of having too much visceral fat. It doesn't have to because obviously if you know what you're doing in terms of energy balance, how you work your macros is not really going to have much of an impact on your body composition. But remember, most people don't know anything about energy balance. And many fatty foods, many high-fat foods are hyperpalatable, so they're very easy to overeat. And of course they contain a lot of calories. Also sedentary living, uh, of course increases the risk of weight gain and obesity.

And with that comes an increase in visceral fat. Um, alcohol also can increase visceral fat storage. Research shows that. So that means that there is something to the beer belly phenomenon. The more alcohol you drink, the more likely you are to have higher than average levels of visceral fat. The trans fats are preferentially stored as visceral fat, which probably is one of the reasons why they are extremely unhealthy and why researchers at this point say that you want to have basically as little trans fat in your diet as possible. And again, these are artificial, these are man-made fats. So when you see highly processed foods that contain stuff like partially hydrogenated oils, for example, those are trans

fats and they increase the shelf life of foods. That's primarily why they're used, but they also increase palatability. Um, if you want to learn more about trans fats and just dietary fat in general, head over to muscleforlife.com, search for dietary fat, and you'll see an article that I wrote that is called, I think if I remember correctly, how many grams of fat you should eat per day, and it breaks this all down. So when we take age and hormones and genetics out of the picture, and we look at the stuff that we can directly control our diet and lifestyle, we can see that the recipe for visceral fat gain is doing very little exercise, eating too much food, eating too many crappy foods, highly processed foods that contain trans fats in particular, and drinking alcohol regularly. That's the recipe for disaster for many reasons, not just visceral fat,

but I would say on overall health, that's how you ask for disease basically. All right. So let's wrap up with a quick little summary of how to lose visceral fat. And the good news here is despite all of its menacing health implications, studies do show that it yields pretty easily to standard fat loss protocols. So as long as you are burning more energy than you're consuming, you will lose visceral fat regardless of your genetics or age or hormones or anything else. Now, if you want to speed up the process, there are a few things you can do. One, you can cut out trans fats completely from your diet, which you should do anyway, just for your general health and longevity. And if you're not sure what

kind of foods contain trans fats, just hit Dr. Google and search for foods that contain trans fats and just don't eat any of those foods. You also want to make sure that you are not drinking too much alcohol. Ideally, you would just cut it out altogether, at least while you are working on losing the visceral fat. But if that's not an option for whatever reason, then you should know that studies show that while drinking frequency doesn't seem to affect visceral fat levels all that much, drinking intensity does. So what that means then is the more you drink each time you drink, the harder it is going to be for you to lose visceral fat. Another tip is to do resistance training because not only is it good for fat loss and obviously improving your body composition, studies show that it is also extremely effective

at reducing visceral fat in particular. Next tip is to do high intensity interval training because similarly, not only is it just more efficient in terms of time for fat burning, you lose more fat in less time. Studies show that it is particularly good for losing abdominal fat and visceral fat in particular, and probably because at least partially because of increased blood flow to the abdominal region. Another little interesting point here is that research shows that's true regardless of whether you are reducing your total fat mass or not. So even if you're not decreasing your overall body fat percentage, if you are doing aerobic activity and in particular high intensity aerobic activity regularly, you are just going to store less visceral fat and just have less visceral fat. So in a way, what it does is it

promotes a, you could say it promotes a healthier distribution of body fat in your body. Now, as far as hormones go, of course they can't cause you to gain fat. In the end, you can only increase your total fat mass or your total amount of visceral fat by overeating. However, your hormone profile does influence how your body stores the fat that it does have. For example, studies show that low testosterone is a predictor for visceral fatness in men and that as testosterone levels rise, visceral fatness decreases. And in women, when you have higher amounts of testosterone and lower amounts of estrogen, which is what occurs during menopause, that is associated with increased visceral fatness. Now, unfortunately, as far as hormones go, there aren't any quick and easy fixes if you

have some sort of hormonal imbalance, except for exogenous hormones, of courseonal imbalance except for exogenous hormones of course so except for hormones that you inject or otherwise introduce into your body but as far as men and testosterone goes if you want to learn more about how to i mean you could i could say raise but it's more like optimize your body's testosterone levels naturally head over to legionathletics.com, search for testosterone. You'll see a long article that I wrote on just that. And for women, unfortunately, I actually don't have a long form piece for women right now for as far as hormones go, but that'd be a good one to write. Actually, I'm gonna make a note. I should, I should put that together. Sorry, coming, coming soon. Another little tip for maximizing visceral fat loss and minimizing visceral fat gain is to keep your cortisol levels under control. So cortisol

is a catabolic hormone. It breaks substances down in the body and it is produced primarily in response to stress. So when you have, whether it's physical stress or psychological stress, cortisol levels rise. And again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Acute spikes in cortisol can be helpful. So like when you exercise, your cortisol levels spike and it helps your body break body fat down into energy, for example. But when you have chronically elevated cortisol levels, that can cause various types of problems in the body. And one of them has to do with body fat distribution because studies show that chronically elevated cortisol levels skews your body's distribution of fat toward the abdominal

region. So by keeping your cortisol levels generally low, you can again, maximize visceral fat loss. If you are working on losing visceral fat that you have and minimizing visceral fat gain, if you don't have a visceral fat problem now and don't want to have one in the future. And the last tip here is another good kind of just general health and general wellbeing tip. And that is to maintain good sleep hygiene because research shows that both sleeping too little and too much too frequently can increase visceral fatness. And just to be specific there, what science has found is that there was an association between sleeping less than five hours per night on average and more than eight hours per night on average with greatly increased visceral fatness.

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