09/22/2009
post work out meal
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llulko's Blogs
Visceral fat: the unpinchable fat
By Helen Kollias,
http://www.precisionnutrition.com/visceral-fat-location
Correlations between total body fat and visceral fat range quite a bit.
Lean people have the worst correlations (0.4), which means that having a relatively low body fat doesn’t necessarily mean you have low visceral fat.
Body fat and visceral fat in overweight people usually correlate better (0.8). This means if you’re overweight, you’ll have a fair bit of visceral fat.
If you’re lean and sedentary, you may have visceral fat and if you’re overweight and sedentary you almost certainly have too much visceral fat.
It’s always fun to look at exceptions.
One exception to the “more body fat equals more visceral fat” rule is sumo wrestlers.
Sumo wrestlers eat over 7,000 calories a day, have BMIs over 36 kg/m2 but with very little visceral fat, and by all other medical measures, they’re healthy. Sumo wrestlers give us a big clue (pardon the pun) about how to prevent and reduce visceral fat.
Too much visceral fat: health consequences
Since getting rid of your visceral fat won’t reveal your six-pack, why should you bother?
Well, visceral fat is linked to a laundry list of diseases:
-Insulin resistance
-Cardiac dysfunction (left ventricular dysfunction)
-Hyperglycemia (high blood glucose)
-Hyperlipidemia (high blood fat)
-Coronary artery diesel
-Sleep apnea
-Diabetes
-High blood pressure
How to lose (or gain) visceral fat:
Being a women means you’ll have less visceral fat, since women have less visceral fat compared to men of the same BMI.
This seems to be linked to women having more sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) and waist-hip ratio. Once women hit menopause, the freebie runs out: they start getting as much visceral fat as men.
As we get older we not only accumulate cats, ties, single socks, and ear hair, but visceral fat too.
Families tend to have the same amount of visceral fat and so far, a mutation in the gene for the beta-3-adrenergic receptor seems to increase visceral fat.
Reduce your sugar.
Finally, something you have control over. High-sugar diets have been shown to increase visceral fat in people and animals.
Remember the sumo wrestlers with little visceral fat even though they were obese?
All the physical activity they do prevents and reduces visceral fat.
Well, there might be another option: Weight training.
REad this study if you are interested
Study
This study, in contrast, used obese women between the ages of 40-60 — precisely the type of folks who should be weight training for improved health and body composition.
The researchers didn’t just look at whether weight training would help these women lose fat, but whether weight training affected where they lost fat.
Diet versus diet + weight training
The researchers randomly split up the women into one of three groups:
Group 1: Control group – this group kept doing what they were doing before.
Group 2: Diet-only group – this group ate 500 calories less a day than before the study, with 55% calories from carbohydrates, 15% from proteins and 30% from fat. The goal was weight loss of 0.5 kg (about 1 pound) a week for the 16 weeks during the study.
Group 3: Diet + weight training – these folks were on the same diet as Group 2, the diet-only group, plus they got to work out. Workouts were whole body workouts twice a week, with at least two days between each workout, for 16 weeks
Results
Weight training and belly fat
After 16 weeks, Group 2 and Group 3 both lost about 7 kg (15.4 lb) of body weight, decreased their waist by nearly 7 cm (2.75 in) and dropped their BMI by over 2 kg/m2.
The control group saw no changes in weight, waist girth or BMI.
There were no differences in the traditional, scale-and-tape-measure results, but there were differences in the more high tech measurements.
Since the only way to find out how much visceral fat you have is using a scan (CT or MRI), everybody had an MRI scan to find out how much visceral fat they had (you knew there had to be a reason for the introduction).
Group 3, the dieting weight lifters, lost the most visceral fat between lumbar disks L2-L3 compared to just dieting or doing nothing (control). This lost fat is closer to the liver.
Conclusion
In this study, weight training changed where women lost fat while dieting, but not the amount.
Women who weight trained twice a week lost more visceral fat near their liver (L2-L3), compared to just dieting where visceral fat was lower (closer to their toes, L5-S1).
Bottom line
Eating 500 calories less a day for 16 weeks will lead to weight loss, reduced BMI, smaller waists, and reduced visceral fat, but adding weight training to the mix can change where you lose the visceral fat.
http://www.precisionnutrition.com/visceral-fat-location
Correlations between total body fat and visceral fat range quite a bit.
Lean people have the worst correlations (0.4), which means that having a relatively low body fat doesn’t necessarily mean you have low visceral fat.
Body fat and visceral fat in overweight people usually correlate better (0.8). This means if you’re overweight, you’ll have a fair bit of visceral fat.
If you’re lean and sedentary, you may have visceral fat and if you’re overweight and sedentary you almost certainly have too much visceral fat.
It’s always fun to look at exceptions.
One exception to the “more body fat equals more visceral fat” rule is sumo wrestlers.
Sumo wrestlers eat over 7,000 calories a day, have BMIs over 36 kg/m2 but with very little visceral fat, and by all other medical measures, they’re healthy. Sumo wrestlers give us a big clue (pardon the pun) about how to prevent and reduce visceral fat.
Too much visceral fat: health consequences
Since getting rid of your visceral fat won’t reveal your six-pack, why should you bother?
Well, visceral fat is linked to a laundry list of diseases:
-Insulin resistance
-Cardiac dysfunction (left ventricular dysfunction)
-Hyperglycemia (high blood glucose)
-Hyperlipidemia (high blood fat)
-Coronary artery diesel
-Sleep apnea
-Diabetes
-High blood pressure
How to lose (or gain) visceral fat:
Being a women means you’ll have less visceral fat, since women have less visceral fat compared to men of the same BMI.
This seems to be linked to women having more sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) and waist-hip ratio. Once women hit menopause, the freebie runs out: they start getting as much visceral fat as men.
As we get older we not only accumulate cats, ties, single socks, and ear hair, but visceral fat too.
Families tend to have the same amount of visceral fat and so far, a mutation in the gene for the beta-3-adrenergic receptor seems to increase visceral fat.
Reduce your sugar.
Finally, something you have control over. High-sugar diets have been shown to increase visceral fat in people and animals.
Remember the sumo wrestlers with little visceral fat even though they were obese?
All the physical activity they do prevents and reduces visceral fat.
Well, there might be another option: Weight training.
REad this study if you are interested
Study
This study, in contrast, used obese women between the ages of 40-60 — precisely the type of folks who should be weight training for improved health and body composition.
The researchers didn’t just look at whether weight training would help these women lose fat, but whether weight training affected where they lost fat.
Diet versus diet + weight training
The researchers randomly split up the women into one of three groups:
Group 1: Control group – this group kept doing what they were doing before.
Group 2: Diet-only group – this group ate 500 calories less a day than before the study, with 55% calories from carbohydrates, 15% from proteins and 30% from fat. The goal was weight loss of 0.5 kg (about 1 pound) a week for the 16 weeks during the study.
Group 3: Diet + weight training – these folks were on the same diet as Group 2, the diet-only group, plus they got to work out. Workouts were whole body workouts twice a week, with at least two days between each workout, for 16 weeks
Results
Weight training and belly fat
After 16 weeks, Group 2 and Group 3 both lost about 7 kg (15.4 lb) of body weight, decreased their waist by nearly 7 cm (2.75 in) and dropped their BMI by over 2 kg/m2.
The control group saw no changes in weight, waist girth or BMI.
There were no differences in the traditional, scale-and-tape-measure results, but there were differences in the more high tech measurements.
Since the only way to find out how much visceral fat you have is using a scan (CT or MRI), everybody had an MRI scan to find out how much visceral fat they had (you knew there had to be a reason for the introduction).
Group 3, the dieting weight lifters, lost the most visceral fat between lumbar disks L2-L3 compared to just dieting or doing nothing (control). This lost fat is closer to the liver.
Conclusion
In this study, weight training changed where women lost fat while dieting, but not the amount.
Women who weight trained twice a week lost more visceral fat near their liver (L2-L3), compared to just dieting where visceral fat was lower (closer to their toes, L5-S1).
Bottom line
Eating 500 calories less a day for 16 weeks will lead to weight loss, reduced BMI, smaller waists, and reduced visceral fat, but adding weight training to the mix can change where you lose the visceral fat.
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