This type of fat builds up around our organs, and not only is it fat in our body, but it’s like toxic fat.

Engaging in strength training is a key way to start to help reduce that.

It’s not just about losing fat in general, but it’s about reducing your overall inflammation and setting yourself up on a path towards better health. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training.

And now for today’s episode. Hey everybody, welcome back to today’s podcast. Today we’re chatting about visceral fat. Have you heard of visceral fat? What do you know about it? What kind of connotations does it have for you?

There are some people that have gained awareness of visceral fat due to receiving maybe a body composition analysis where their visceral fat estimation is listed. There’s some information out there in the world about reducing visceral fat, the dangers of having too much visceral fat. So in this episode today, we’re going to break this down. We’re going to talk about what visceral fat is, why it’s important for you to monitor, how to know if you’re maybe at risk, and what kinds of implications there are to a high amount of visceral fat in the body. We’re going to chat about some things about inflammation and break down how visceral fat is related to systemic inflammation and why that’s important to track as well and the implications for that. So it’s going to be a great episode.

If you don’t know much about this topic, today’s episode is for you. So, Dr. Fisher, let’s just dive right in today. Can you tell us, what is visceral fat?

So, I love that introduction and I think this is a really interesting topic. I’m excited that we’ve had somebody ask this question and I think it’s important to dissociate between subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. So subcutaneous fat is the fat that we have directly underneath our skin. That’s probably what we’re most familiar with when we think about body fat. Visceral fat is slightly different. Visceral fat is a fat that basically builds up around our organs.

And it can have slightly different health implications compared to just subcutaneous fat. Not that an excess of subcutaneous fat is good or is okay, but a higher level of visceral fat can be more hazardous to our health. So when we talk about high levels of visceral fat, we often talk about it in context of systemic or chronic inflammation. And basically that visceral fat, that fat that’s around our organs, is catalyzing a release of pro -inflammatory cytokines. Um, so one of the kind of key ways this is all sort of monitored is if you have a blood test, they might look at something called CRP or C reactive protein levels. And that was really a marker of chronic inflammation or systemic inflammation.

Now that can be linked to ill health. If you’ve been unwell, or if you’ve had an infection or anything like that. So when we talk about inflammation and you’ll have to forgive me, I’m running away on a tangent here already. When we talk about inflammation, that’s a completely normal response. If you have a graze or a cut or if you have an infection, then our body will send cytokines to basically deal with that, to basically wrap it up in it, stop it from spreading and to kill those cells and so forth.

So inflammation is a completely normal process. But what happens with visceral fat is that we are prompting that release of an excess of pro -inflammatory cytokines around our body. And then that’s actually kind of fighting some of the good things that are happening in our body. So it’s almost treating us like we’ve got that infection or we’ve got that illness or that injury, even though we haven’t. and that systemic inflammation can then lead to change in insulin sensitivity, glucose resistance, and so forth. So things like our pancreas doesn’t release insulin in the same way, and multiple other factors that we’ve sort of talked about previously.

But ultimately, we end up with this kind of ill health as a product of this visceral fat. So it’s more than just adipose fat where we’re carrying extra weight and it’s not great for us, visceral fat can be actually quite harmful in the bigger picture.

Okay, so this type of fat builds up around our organs and not only is it fat in our body, but it’s like toxic fat. It’s releasing extra inflammation into our body, which you just described the downfalls of having systemic inflammation. you know, to our overall health. I mean, it’s been said it’s the, one of the underlying causes to all types of diseases. And so we really don’t want that. So it’s not only that we have some fat, it’s, it’s fat that it’s doing a lot more damage just by being there.

Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, chronic inflammation or systemic inflammation is associated with, you know, even things like Alzheimer’s disease. extent, you know, metabolic disorders.

So it can really be quite kind of negative in its causing of other medical conditions. Is there any way we can control where we gain fat? I mean, what if I don’t want the fat that I gain to go around my organs?

Is there anything I can do?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is a, it’s a really interesting question because we can’t control where we add fat. And we, you know, we talked before the show, some people are genetically predisposed to carry fat in certain places. Men will often carry fat around their abdomen in the form of like what’s often called a beer gut or a beer belly. Uh, females might carry around their hips or, or their, or their glutes and so forth. So we really can’t, you know, control where we carry adipose tissue.

I guess a key thing is if we are over fat, if our body mass index is high, or if we do a body composition analysis of some kind, and it comes back with an excess of body fat compared to our fat free mass, then we can probably be relatively safe in assuming that some of that fat is around our organs is visceral fat, not just adipose fat. We also know within the calculations of how you can estimate visceral fat that age is a factor. So if you’re overweight, if you’re over fat in your 20s or 30s, the amount of visceral fat you have might still be relatively low. If you’re over fat in your 60s, then it might be that the amount of visceral fat is higher because you’ve had a longer duration of life naturally to build up that visceral fat. So it’s something that we can kind of estimate based on our existing body fat, but also estimate based on our age as a factor.

Now, when we talk about estimating it, that might be the next question that you’re about to ask, or the other people, the listeners might ask, well, how do I estimate my visceral fat? Well, there’s really no sort of hard and fast way to estimate the amount of visceral fat that you are carrying. But like I said, if you’re over fat, then you can pretty much be safe that you’re carrying more visceral fat than you would like. You can’t do body composition analysis out of the exercise coach, you know, in body and Tanita scales, as we talked about before the show began, uh, can provide some estimation of visceral fat. And again, one of the calculations within the algorithm will be age. Um, just before we started, you know, we looked online, uh, we found that there is a random, a very random estimation based on.

If your waist circumference is more than half of your height. So to put that in perspective, if I take that in inches, then I am 70, about 70, 71 inches tall. That’s five foot 10, five foot 11 tall. And my waist is about 32 inches. So my waist is less than half of my height. So that’s a positive marker.

Uh, the, the way that this was pitched online was that if your. waist circumference is more than half of your height. Now, obviously, there’ll be extremes within that if somebody is very, very tall, or if somebody is very, very short, then that metric might not stand up. But for the general population, it might be a reasonable metric that somebody at home can do. And then again, if they’re in their 20s or 30s, they might think, well, it’s hopefully still relatively low. And I can address that body composition issue.

If they’re in their 60s, there might be a reasonable chance to their visceral fat is a bit higher. One of the other things that somebody can do with they have or if they think they have high visceral fat is they might get some blood markers checked. So again, as we were talking before the show, there’s a marker called C -reactive protein or CRP. And you can have that done in a normal blood test. Now in the UK, you wouldn’t normally go and get that test done.

You can’t just walk into a general practitioner or a physician and request that as a blood test. In the US, I think that you can. I think that you can probably go because obviously you pay for healthcare or you have health insurance to cover that. So if you ever have your CRP levels checked, that can be a marker for systemic or chronic inflammation levels. Um, now what, what’s really interesting in all of this, and I guess one of the key things that I want to get into, so I’m going to jump ahead if that’s okay, is how strength training can impact visceral fats, but also systemic and chronic inflammation and CRP levels. We know that if you engage in strength training and you engage in exercise, then you can improve your metabolism and you can reduce your body fat percentage and you can improve your body composition.

So first and foremost, if you’re carrying high levels of adipose tissue, if you’re carrying more visceral fat or you think you might be carrying more visceral fat, the first thing is engaging in strength training is a key way to start to help reduce that. Now you might also look to the nutrition playbook. or you might seek nutritional guidance. And so long as you’re engaging in strength training and your protein levels are adequate, then you might look to reduce calorie intake so that you can start to create that calorie deficit and hopefully see that reduction in body fat percentage. But the other key way that strength training can impact visceral fitness and systemic inflammation is by releasing myokines.

So, when you engage in strength training, when you do forceful muscular contraction, you prompt the release of myokines. Now, this is really interesting and we’ll do a full -length podcast on this at some point, I’m sure. But historically, muscle has been thought of as being beneficial because it’s metabolically active. But it extends way, way beyond that. Muscle is actually now talked about as being an endocrine organ, which means it interprets signals and measures, uh, and chemical messages. And it releases, um, what’s called myokines, which are effectively cytokines, but because they’re coming from muscle, they’re called myokines.

So, uh, muscle markers and muscle signals. So these proteins that travel off around the body to positively influence other organs and other systems within the body, whether that’s the brain, whether it’s the liver, the kidneys, the lungs, body fat as a whole, and so forth. So when we engage in strength training, we know we can release anti -inflammatory myokines. So we can effectively serve to reduce that fat by engaging in strength training, but we can also reduce that C -reactive protein level by by forcefully contracting our muscles by engaging in strength training. And that’s the key part in all of this, that even if you are carrying more fat than you’d like, and some of that is visceral fat, and you find that your CRP levels are high, Engaging in strength training is combating that in two ways. One, helping to reduce the fat, but two, helping to combat the release of those cytokines, those pro -inflammatory markers, which increase our CRP levels.

And all of this lends itself really nicely back to a paper that we’ve discussed, which was the fat but fit paradigm by Sam Buckner out of Jeremy Lenecky’s lab at Ole Miss University. And within that paper, one of the things that we talked about was that stronger people, even if they’re overweight or obese, have CRP levels similar to normal weight, unfit people.

So being overweight to some extent can be combated simply by engaging in strength training to reduce those CRP levels. Wow, that’s pretty cool. So really, if you’re concerned about visceral fat, if you picture yourself and think about, hey, my waist circumference may be a little bit borderline. This is probably something I should be concerned with. And then you decide to make the lifestyle choices to engage in strength training and improve your nutrition and thereby lose body fat. You are combating the downfalls of visceral fat in several ways all at one time.

You are reducing inflammation in your body overall. Just with the strength training alone, you’re adding or maintaining muscle mass while hopefully dropping body fat in different places, right? And if you can see a reduction in your estimated visceral fat after doing a metabolic comeback, for example, at a studio where you’re combining a focused period of time straight training and good nutrition, anti -inflammatory, lower sugar nutrition, that’s really something to celebrate. That can be a huge, huge positive step in the right direction. And, you know, it’s really just, you can, you can feel better about that on a deeper level with this information. You know, it’s not just about losing fat in general, but it’s about reducing your overall inflammation and

setting yourself up on a path towards better health for the years to come ahead.

So that’s pretty exciting. Yeah. A hundred percent. And that was a really nice synopsis. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that this is the importance of strength training.

It’s not that it’s a single entity of reducing body fat or increasing strength.

It’s, you know, there are so many global, when we say global, I mean the whole body. benefits of engaging in regular and strength training over the course of a lifetime. Absolutely, absolutely. And one thing I should mention too that is on this topic, you know, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the term skinny fat, but what that refers to is the fact that you may have visceral fat or higher levels of this unhealthy visceral fat, even if you look lean from the outside. And so even if you’re a person that doesn’t seem like you’re overweight or look overweight, it doesn’t mean that you’re immune to this. And it just goes back to the high importance for every body type, no matter what type you have, that it’s important for everybody, no matter your starting point, to engage in strength training and to, you know, make steps towards good nutrition.

And if you could use support in that area, we would love to get you some help and support in that. That’s what we do every day and we love it. So.

Just take that and think about what you can do to set yourself up for your best health in terms of this area. Dr. Fisher, thank you for breaking this down for us.

Do you have any closing thoughts or things that you’d like to leave listeners with on this topic?

No, it was my pleasure to discuss such an important topic. So yeah, that was great. Thank you. We will see you next time back on the podcast. Until then, we hope you remember strength changes everything.

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