Why your belly fat doesn't want to go

Are you carrying some extra weight? Do your fat deposits tend to concentrate around your belly predominantly? This is so-called visceral fat, and in your attempts to get rid of it, you might be tackling it from a completely wrong angle. Read on for successful strategies.

First question first, if you are reading this, you are probably over age 40 and have noticed that you are accumulating extra fat in a different pattern that used to happen to you before. What is going on?

When you were in your teens and 20s, mostly likely your body had a bit of fat all around - some on your arms, some on the legs and bum, some around the belly, your face may have looked a bit podgy too. Remember those times? If you tried to lose weight back then, you simply stopped eating sweets and buns and went for a regular run for a month or so, and that was it.

In your 30s the extra weight and fatty deposits may have come and go, some weeks or months were better, some were worse. You put it down to eating out a lot, work meetings and traveling, to drinking quite a bit of alcohol at events and a stressful career plus family life. But it was still quite easy to lose excess fat.

But now when you’re over 40, your fat seems to have a mind of its own. It is sitting primarily around your belly area, glowing at you daily and would not budge no matter what you try to do. You’ve tried various diets and eating approaches, but they work only for a brief period of time. You exercise regularly, but the stubborn fat is still there. What is happening and why is the body not cooperating anymore?

It is important for you to know you’re not alone, many people over the age of 40 ave exactly the same problems as you. But leaving this body fat to its own devices is not only going to bother you longterm, it will also impact your overall health negatively. Here’s what you need to know about the reasons of fat accumulation for successful riddance of it.

Your body has three types of fat , or adipose tissue, that it can store. Each of these types has different mechanisms of storage, different root causes for fat buildup and different drainage points. From the perspective of maintaining robust health into old age, it is exactly the fat drainage systems that are of the most important value.

The adipose tissue in your body has multiple functions , from energy storage and expenditure, giving you insulation against heat and cold, regulating glucose and cholesterol levels, sustaining energy balance to ensuring your immune system runs well, metabolising sex hormones, and quite a few more.

The fat you can see, the subcutaneous fat, is the type of fat your body prefers to store most. Even though it is the most noticeable type of fat, and perhaps has become a sore of your eye, it is the least harmful of the three. Sitting under the skin, you may see it on your face, arms, thighs, bum, chest and back. The accumulation of this fat is slow and subtle - through lack of activity, eating food in excess, not moving enough, etc.

Your body stores the subcutaneous fat in big membrane-bound structures called vacuoles within an adipose cell. The vacuoles can overgrow and get overfilled with time. When they expand and balloon, eventually they can burst, which results in the fat leaking into the fat cell itself. Your body will respond to this process by creating several messenger actions: first it will activate macrophages that clean up dead tissue cell, secondly it will send anti-inflammatory cytokines to the dead tissue site in order to remove the debris of grease and suppress inflammation.

This is the beginning of the inflammation response. The drainage of these inflammatory molecules and the debris of fat plus the dead cells is done via your circulatory system, the volume of distribution of which is your blood supply - between 5,5 and 6 litres daily.

If there is too much of subcutaneous fat, your body is constantly activating inflammatory responses to clean up the dead tissue and fight inflammation. While it is busy diverting anti-inflammatory molecules to the sites of inflammation caused by fat, it fails to provide adequate response to the sites of acute inflammation, elsewhere in the body. If you have a physical injury, or a bacterial infection, or a longstanding chronic condition that won’t go away, this is the reason.

If you have been putting on weight gradually over the past while, you may wonder, is there a safe limit to your excess weight? In the subcutaneous fat deposits, this amount is about 10kg over your ideal body weight.

The fat that is sitting around your belly is visceral fat, this is fat deposit number 2. The structure of the actual adipose tissue is very similar to subcutaneous fat, it is called white adipose tissue or (WAT).

The accumulation of this fat is mainly caused by stress, by the hormone cortisol, more precisely. Cortisol regulates energy homeostasis by tapping into the body’s fat deposits, in the forms of triglycerides, and repositioning them from one location to another or by giving this energy to the muscles in times of intense exercise.

When the body is undergoing stressful conditions, cortisol via the process called gluconeogenesis can convert amino acids into useable carbohydrates (glucose) in the liver. It can also reposition body fat into visceral fat both as vivid belly fat and also the invisible fat around the inner organs.
In addition, the deep abdominal fat has a great blood flow and several times more cortisol receptors compared to subcutaneous fat.

Because the drainage system of visceral fat is done via the liver, the safe amount of this fat accumulation is much smaller than subcutaneous fat, at about 5 Lb, according to Robert Lustig, Professor Emeritus of Paediatrics, Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.

The question to ask yourself here, is not how much extra weight I’ve gained and not even how much belly weight I’m carrying, but what is my HWR - hip-to-waist-ratio.

1. Measure your hips around the buttocks where they have their maximum extension.
2. Measure your waist using your fingers to find the top of your hips and the base of your rib cage. Your waist is the section between these two bony parts (look for the smallest part of your waist).
3. The hip-to-waist ratio is considered unhealthy in men of >0.96 and in women of > 0.84.

The other measurement you can take is your waist circumference. If your waist circumference is greater than 88 cm (>35 inch) for women and greater than 100 cm (>39 inch) in men, you have substantial visceral fat and are considered at a higher risk of metabolic diseases.

WAT, the white adipose tissue, is a state of chronic inflammation in the body that is also promoting obesity. By the way, have you heard the term skinny fat? You may have normal body weight, but there’s large fat concentration in the form of visceral fat. Not long time ago, it was discovered that visceral fat is actually an active endocrine organ, which synthesises and releases fatty acids, hormones, growth factors and adipokines - cell signalling molecules produced by the adipose tissue (such as leptin, resistin and adiponectin) - the factors that control your metabolism and induce its ill state.

By promoting inflammation, visceral fat cells also secrete inflammatory cytokines such as interleukin (IL)-6, tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α and others. These inflammatory cytokines are associated with a higher risk of various diseases, including some cancers.

If you are a woman over the age of 50, your estrogen production (the two types of estrogen. such as estrone and estradiol) is increased in visceral fat, again where visceral fat overtakes the production of these hormones.

Some researchers claim that adipose tissue can contribute up to 100% of circulating estrogen in postmenopausal women and 50% of circulating testosterone in premenopausal women. Having higher testosterone to estrogen ratio in perimenopausal women is associated with higher prevalence of sleep disorder and vasomotor symptoms (hot flashes).

Lastly, there is fat deposit number 3: liver fat. It is considered the worst fat, perhaps for its main danger of being unseen to the eye and often showing no telltale signs. Your liver can suffer up to 75% damage and yet show no visible signs. I wrote about the dangers of liver fat in my previous piece.

The liver is your master organ, if your liver is struggling or sick, your insulin levels will go up causing hyperinsulinemia and hypercholesterolemia. These are already diagnosable conditions, which are best avoided with an optimised lifestyle strategy.

Need my professional help? See the examples of my work and what’s covered in my Health Coaching here.

Stay healthy, be joyful!
Love,
Katya