Visceral fat is a type of body fat that’s stored within the abdominal cavity. It’s located near several vital organs, including the liver, stomach, and intestines, which is why it can be particularly concerning.
Unlike subcutaneous fat, the kind that you can pinch with your fingers, visceral fat is buried deep inside and can go unnoticed, even in lean individuals. Your outward appearance may not always reflect the amount of visceral fat you carry, making it important for everyone to be aware of its presence and potential health risks.
Even people who are relatively lean can accumulate unhealthy amounts of visceral fat around their abdominal organs. This hidden belly fat sets the stage for serious health issues like heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. The good news is that with the right dietary, exercise, and lifestyle changes, you can take steps to get rid of excess visceral fat. Losing this dangerous type of fat starts with understanding what visceral fat is, how to tell if you have too much, and the most effective science-backed ways to reduce it.Â
Let’s take a deep dive:
Understanding Visceral Fat
Visceral fat is a type of body fat that’s stored within your abdominal cavity. It’s different from subcutaneous fat, which lies beneath your skin. Visceral fat surrounds important internal organs such as the liver, heart, and intestines. While it plays a vital role in cushioning and protecting your organs, an excess of it can be harmful to your health.
As you age, your body may accumulate more visceral fat. Men often hold more visceral fat compared to women, but sadly the risk increases for everyone as years go by. This accumulation is linked with serious health conditions like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Can lean people have visceral fat?
Even if you are lean with a flat tummy, you can still have visceral fat. This sneaky fat is tucked away and surrounds your internal organs within the abdominal cavity and is not always visible from the outside. There’s even an acronym for this – TOFI – thin outside but fat inside.
Body weight or body mass index (BMI) isn’t an accurate indicator of visceral fat.
Facts to Consider:
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- Despite a lean appearance, everyone has some level of visceral fat.
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- Too much visceral fat can increase your risk for health issues such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.
How to know if you have too much visceral fat?
Here are some signs that may indicate you have excessive visceral fat:
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- Large waist circumference – Generally, a waist circumference over 40 inches in men and 35 inches in women is considered excessive and a sign of too much visceral fat.
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- Apple (an uneaten one) body shape – Carrying extra weight around your middle with a relatively slimmer lower body gives an “apple” shape, which is associated with visceral fat.
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- High waist-to-hip ratio – A ratio higher than 1.0 for men and 0.8 for women indicates increased visceral fat.
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- Protruding belly – A belly that protrudes outwards can be a sign of excess visceral fat.
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- High blood pressure and blood lipids – Too much visceral fat is linked to high blood pressure, high triglycerides and low HDL (“good”) cholesterol.
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- Insulin resistance – Excess visceral fat is related to increased insulin resistance and higher blood sugar levels.
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- Fatigue – The metabolic abnormalities caused by excess visceral fat can lead to fatigue and low energy.
The best way to definitively assess visceral fat is to get a CT or MRI scan but the signs above can provide clues that you may need to take steps to reduce dangerous visceral fat.
Lifestyle and Dietary Adjustments
The good news is that with the right dietary, exercise, and lifestyle changes, you can take steps to get rid of excess visceral fat. With some diligent effort focused on targeted belly fat reduction techniques, lean people can ditch excess visceral adipose tissue and achieve a healthier body composition. This does not require drastic weight loss, but rather strategic lifestyle changes to shed stubborn fat from the abdominal region.
Eat a Whole Foods Diet
This is a way of eating that focuses on unprocessed, unrefined, and minimally handled foods. The key characteristics of a whole foods diet include:
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- Emphasizes natural, minimally processed foods – This includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, eggs, fish, meat and dairy. Foods are consumed as close to their natural state as possible.
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- Limits or avoids processed foods – Things like frozen meals, fast food, white bread, pasta (check out my favorite pasta alternatives), pastries, sugary snacks and cereals are avoided. Foods with health claims, artificial ingredients or preservatives are minimized.
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- Focuses on whole grains – Instead of refined grains like white flour, whole grains like whole wheat, oats, quinoa, barley and buckwheat are chosen for their higher fiber and nutrient content.
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- Includes healthy fats – Sources like avocados, olive oil, nuts, seeds and fatty fish provide healthy unsaturated fats. Saturated and trans fats are limited.
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- Limits added sugars – Things like table sugar, high fructose corn syrup, honey and maple syrup are avoided. Desserts and sugary snacks are limited as well.
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- Emphasizes water over other beverages – Water and unsweetened tea take the place of sugary drinks like soda and fruit juice.
A whole foods diet provide nutrients through unrefined sources and avoid highly processed foods, added sugars and unhealthy fats.
Physical Activity and Exercise
Many people assume that exercise is only necessary for weight loss or for people who are overweight. However, regular physical activity provides significant health and wellness benefits for the lean and thin as well.
Exercise helps preserve muscle mass, strengthen bones, reduce disease risk, improve mental health, and boost energy levels. While you may already be at a healthy weight, exercising allows you to maintain cardiovascular health, mobility, balance, and metabolic rate.
No matter your size or weight, exercising delivers physiological and psychological advantages that extend far beyond weight management alone, making it a vital component of a healthy lifestyle for people of all body types.
Here are a few ways that exercising helps reduce visceral fat:
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- Burns calories – Exercise burns calories which helps create a calorie deficit. When the body is in a calorie deficit, it will tap into fat stores for energy, including the visceral fat.
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- Increases metabolism – Exercise, especially strength training, builds muscle mass. More muscle mass increases resting metabolism, burning more calories around the clock.
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- Reduces appetite – Exercise is shown to reduce levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin and increase satiety hormones like PYY and GLP-1. This can reduce appetite.
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- Lowers stress hormones – Exercise lowers cortisol and other stress hormones. Chronic stress elevates these hormones which promote visceral fat storage.
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- Decreases lipogenesis – Exercise decreases the activity of lipoprotein lipase, an enzyme that promotes fat storage. This makes the body more likely to burn fat than store it.
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- Improves insulin sensitivity – Exercise improves insulin sensitivity in cells, reducing insulin resistance. This allows the body to efficiently use insulin and regulate blood sugars, which favors fat burning.
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- Reduces inflammation – Exercise has anti-inflammatory effects in the body. Chronic inflammation is linked to visceral fat accumulation.
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- Increases blood flow – Working muscles helps increase blood flow and improves circulation. Improved blood flow helps mobilize and burn visceral fat.
As you can see, combining cardiovascular exercise and strength training provides a multi-pronged approach to mobilizing, burning, and reducing visceral fat stores.
Get Good Quality Sleep
(Why don’t I look like that when I sleep?)
When you sleep, your body secretes hormones that help control appetite and burn fat. Getting 7-9 hours of quality sleep per night allows your body time to burn calories, regulate hormones properly, and prevent fat storage.
Plus, lack of sleep or poor quality sleep increases levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which signals your body to store more fat, especially around the midsection.
Establishing healthy sleep habits like going to bed and waking up at consistent times, limiting screen time before bed, and creating a cool, comfortable sleep environment will support the natural sleep cycle.
Prioritizing sleep and making it a regular part of a healthy lifestyle is a powerful but often overlooked way to help trim visceral belly fat and lower disease risk.
Reduce Stress
It’s not called stress belly for nothing.
Chronic stress leads to increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which can directly cause visceral fat to accumulate. To counteract a “stress belly”, you need to find ways to manage and reduce stress.
Activities like exercise, meditation, yoga, and getting adequate sleep can all help lower cortisol levels. Even short mindfulness interventions have been shown to reduce cortisol and visceral fat in overweight women.
Limit Alcohol
Alcohol can increase visceral fat accumulation through several mechanisms. The excess calories from alcohol are often stored as visceral fat in the abdomen. Alcohol also interferes with fat metabolism in the liver, preventing the breakdown of fat and promoting fat storage. Plus, you know as well as I do that booze increases your appetite and cravings for unhealthy foods, further contributing to weight and fat gain.
Limiting overall alcohol intake, especially heavy consumption, can help reduce visceral fat buildup. In fact, one study found that reducing alcohol intake led to decreases in visceral fat even without changes in diet or exercise.
Intermittent Fasting and Meal Timing
You are probably well versed with the concept of intermittent fasting (IF) but for the sake of the uninitiated, intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that cycles between periods of fasting and eating. It doesn’t specify which foods you should eat, but rather when you should eat them.
Intermittent fasting is also sometimes called time-restricted eating (TRE).
Some common intermittent fasting methods include:
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- 16/8 method (or a variation of this) – Fast for 16 hours per day, and restrict eating to an 8 hour window. For example, skipping breakfast and eating between 12pm-8pm.
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- 5:2 diet – Eat normally 5 days per week, and limit calories to 500-600 for 2 days per week.
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- Alternate day fasting – Alternate between a day of normal eating and a fast day where you eat just 500-600 calories.
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- Eat-stop-eat – Do a 24 hour fast 1-2 times per week, eating normally on the other days.
During the fasting periods, you can consume water, black coffee, tea and other non-caloric beverages. The idea is that the fasting period triggers fat burning while the eating window allows for nutrition.
By restricting the time period when you eat, intermittent fasting naturally leads to an overall reduction in calories consumed. Plus, during the fasting period, your body will start burning fat stores for energy instead of glucose from food. This includes visceral fat stores.
Intemittent fasting can improve your metabolic flexibility, which is your body’s ability to switch between burning carbs or fat for energy. This makes it easier to burn visceral fat.
Fasting decreases insulin levels, allowing stored visceral fat to be more readily tapped for energy. Giving your digestive system a break can also reduce systemic inflammation in the body. Chronic inflammation is linked to visceral fat accumulation.
To effectively address visceral fat, embrace lifestyle changes that include both diet and exercise. Aim for a balanced approach that is sustainable in the long term rather than short-term hacks.
Remember that these efforts should be consistent and adapted to suit your health needs. Monitoring your progress over time can help you stay on track. Adhering to these strategies will not only help in reducing visceral fat, but also contribute to overall health benefits.
Regular check-ins with your healthcare provider can ensure that your approach to reducing visceral fat remains safe and effective. Stay motivated and patient, as positive changes in your body may take time to manifest.
