Belly Fat and its types

Belly Fat and its types

Despite of all new trends set by the society, having a little fat in your belly is absolutely normal. It helps to protect and insulate your body. However, having too much belly fat can be harmful for your health and body and increase your risk of developing certain chronic diseases. As such, keeping your total body fat, including your belly fat, at a healthy level can be helpful.

What are the different types of belly fat?

As compared with the rest of your body parts, only a little amount of fat is positioned in your belly. There are two major types of belly fat — one is found beneath your skin and the second one is found deeper inside your abdomen, surrounding your internal organs.

Subcutaneous belly fat

Subcutaneous fat is the fat that’s found under your skin which is soft, and it’s the fat you see “jiggling” on your belly. Unlike the fat that’s found deeper in the abdominal cavity, subcutaneous fat isn’t as strongly linked to increased disease risk.

However, having too much body fat, in general, including total belly fat, may increase your risk of developing some chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers Contrarily, maintaining healthy levels of belly fat and overall body fat may help reduce your risk of developing a chronic disease.

Visceral belly fat

Visceral adipose tissue (VAT), or visceral belly fat, is the fat that surrounds internal organs like your kidneys, liver, and pancreas, so it’s much deeper in your abdomen than subcutaneous fat. This is commonly referred to as “harmful” belly fat. Visceral fat is comparatively more metabolically active than subcutaneous fat. This type of fat contains more nerves, blood Vessel and cells and is strongly connected to increased resistance to the hormone insulin, which regulates the level of blood sugar in our body. Over a period of time, insulin resistance may lead to elevated sugar levels in blood and chances of having Type-2 diabetes. It also contributes to systemic inflammation, which may elevate risk of disease in body.

Interestingly, the distribution of fat in body changes with Age. For example, while pre menopause the levels of subcutaneous belly fat is more in a woman body, whereas post menopause women are likely to have higher levels of visceral fat, which adds up to an increased possibility of having metabolic disease.

Why excess belly fat may harm health?

While having a little belly fat is normal and essential for good health, having too much belly fat can have harmful effects on your body and may increase your disease risk.

This is because visceral fat is “active” fat, meaning it produces hormones and other substances, including inflammatory proteins, which harm your health by increasing insulin resistance, systemic inflammation, blood fat levels, and blood pressure

Although subcutaneous belly fat isn’t as strongly linked to the risk of having a disease as visceral fat, it’s still crucial to focus on reducing overall belly fat and not just the visceral type. Excess body fat accumulation is proven to be a major factor in the development of fatty liver , high blood pressure , Type 2 diabetes , heart diseases , insulin resistance, blood vessel dysfunction, metabolic syndrome and many other diseases.

Maintaining a healthy waist circumference and reducing waist circumference leads to significant improvements in many aspects of health, especially heart health and diabetes risk.

FCBS is a weight loss center in Dubai that helps thousands of women to achieve their health goals. Through a team of DHA certified therapists, we offer our clients medically proven weight loss and physiotherapy programs along with nutritional guidance. To know more about our weight loss services in Dubai, call us on +971 4 3255481 or email us at info@fcbsglobal.com.