Comment from Dean Piazza your online personal trainer @ www.getfit.com.au
Its easy to put on weight without even realising it especially if you always wear loose fitting clothes.
There are 2 types of fat , fat that is stored externally on the body and fat which is stored internally on the body,
(especially around the organs which is the most dangerous type of fat.)
With most people as you put on weight it will be a combination of external and internal fat building up on the body slowly over time.
An easy way to monitor your weight gain without stepping on the scales is to regularly wear jeans or tight fitting tops as this allows you to monitor your body shape in real time - if the clothes feel tighter it can set off alarm bells to
eat better and exercise more and it gives you subtle reminders that you cant slacken off !
The article below makes you realise reducing your body fat is not just about losing weight and looking good, its also about staying healthy ,staying alive and warding off chronic disease.
dean piazza
www.getfit.com.au
Even skinny people may be carrying a mother lode of toxic fat, writes Lissa Christopher.
Haven't been getting much exercise lately? Thickening around the waist? Need a fright to get you moving more and eating better? Then look no further than visceral fat, an extremely common if lesser-known type of body fat that builds up inside the abdomen and grows around your vital organs, much like a strangler fig. It's highly chemically active - about 10 times more toxic than the pinchable, under-the-skin fat that interferes with the fit of your jeans - and it's linked to a growing list of chronic diseases.
The quickest, simplest way to check if you're carrying too much visceral fat is to look down. Do you have a bit of a belly? Are you carrying a lot more fat in your upper than your lower body? If so, then it is very likely you are also carrying too much visceral fat.
''Visceral fat is far more metabolically active than regular fat and produces a host of inflammatory chemicals,'' says Dr David Carey, an endocrinologist, weight-loss specialist and medical director at the Brisbane Metabolic Research Institute. Between its prime location in the vicinity of the vital organs and the toxic chemicals it promotes, it is more than capable of creating havoc.
"It can become one big inflammatory mass of fat inside the belly," Carey says. Because it ''squashes'' the stomach, kidneys, veins and even throat and neck structures, it causes or exacerbates conditions including reflux, hypertension, swelling of the legs and sleep apnoea. It promotes fatty liver, LDL (aka ''bad'') cholesterol and insulin resistance (an early step on the path to type 2 diabetes). The same dangerous fat ''extends around coronary arteries, inflaming and narrowing them and promoting heart attacks independent of cholesterol. And it gets into the heart muscle, causing enlargement and, ultimately, heart failure.''
Men, thanks to their hormonal profile, are particularly prone to laying down visceral fat. It wouldn't have been a problem when they tracked across the savanna for days at a time in search of a meal, says Carey. But in a couch-happy world of abundance it has become a problem.
Post-menopausal women, who often morph from a healthy pear shape to a less healthy apple shape as their oestrogen levels drop, are also prone to the build-up of visceral fat.
"A number of studies have shown that as women progress across the menopause, even if they have no change in overall body weight, they develop an increase of central abdominal fat of between 20 and 40 per cent," says Professor Susan Davis, chair of women's health with Monash University's department of medicine.
And with that change also comes an increased risk of heart disease and insulin resistance.
Menopausal weight gain was probably not a problem back in the hunter-gatherer days, either, or even a few hundred years ago - not because women ate less and moved more, though that might have helped, but simply because they didn't live long enough to reach menopause. Much like modern Western diets and lifestyles, menopause is new to the human body.
''If our bodies weren't really designed to live into a healthy old age then I guess that means we need to treat them with a lot of respect along the way to get there,'' says Davis. ''That's something I'd like to be able to get through to younger people.''
The fat belly on the outside, fat belly on the inside guideline does have its exceptions.
Japanese studies of sumo wrestlers, for example, have found that these obese men are commonly ''fat on the outside but thin on the inside'', says Carey. This is because sumos are very physically active, tend to be of a genotype that allows them to lay down a lot of relatively healthy subcutaneous fat all over, rather than just concentrated in and around their bellies, and they eat a healthy, if calorie-laden, diet.
But in the general population, such people are in the minority. And the reverse of the sumo scenario also exists: people who look normal size or even skinny on the outside but who are carrying a toxic mother lode on the inside.
Women who restrict their kilojoule intake to keep their dress size down, but have a generally poor diet and also smoke and drink, can be prone to building up visceral fat, says Davis. And people with Aboriginal, Asian and Indian heritage tend to respond particularly poorly to even small amounts of visceral fat. ''Even a small paunch on an Indian man, for example, the kind of paunch you probably wouldn't think twice about, is bad news for his health,'' says Davis.
Waist-to-hip ratio (see below) is proving to be a particularly useful tool for assessing abdominal fat levels and their consequences because it takes into account an individual's frame-size and build (thus, indirectly, their ethnicity) - as well as where they store their fat.
A large study by Professor Tim Welborn and Associate Professor Satvinder Dhaliwal from Perth's Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and Curtin University, published in The Medical Journal of Australia in 2003, found that after cigarette smoking, waist-to-hip ratio is the best single predictor of death from heart disease in Australia; better than a simple waist measurement and better than the much-touted body mass index.
In further studies published this year in the American Journal of Cardiology and Preventive Medicine, Dhaliwal and Welborn found that when it comes to determining a person's risk of cardiovascular disease, waist-to-hip ratio is also equal to if not better than the traditional set of risk predictors used by most doctors, which includes cholesterol and blood pressure readings. It's also simpler and cheaper.
Furthermore, because central obesity has such a primary link with heart disease, they say, ''a public health focus on identifying and modifying central obesity is at least as important as the measurement and treatment of [cholesterol, triglycerides and high blood pressure].''
Several scientific studies have found that a high-risk waist-to-hip ratio is linked not only to the development of heart disease and diabetes, but also to Alzheimer's disease, depression, some cancers and even deep vein thrombosis. The precise mechanisms behind these links are yet to be established.
After all that, there is some good news. Visceral fat is easier to get rid of than the stubborn subcutaneous stuff. It burns off about three times faster, says Carey, and it's particularly responsive to exercise. And those with borderline high blood pressure, a poor-ish cholesterol profile or very early signs of diabetes who reduce their visceral fat have a strong chance of preventing or significantly delaying the onset of more serious disease, he says.
The message is clear: take action sooner rather than later.
smh.com.au
