What is belly fat?
Belly fat is the excess fat that is located around one’s midsection. There are three types of fat: the fat that circulates in your blood which is referred to as triglycerides; subcutaneous fat which lies between the abdominal area and just below the skin surface and visceral fat which is found deep within the abdomen area and poses health risks to your body.
Belly fat isn’t just physically unattractive; it brings about negative health consequences. Belly fat affects almost all organs in your body by causing overproduction of hormones and holds on to toxic chemicals. Too much visceral fat also puts you at risk of getting Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some forms of cancer. In fact, the Mayo clinic recently published a study indicating that an additional 25 pounds of weight increases your risk for heart disease by 360%, high blood pressure by 260% and type 2 diabetes by 2660%!
Main Causes of Belly Fat
- 1. One of the major causes of belly fat is high levels of stress, which in turn produces high levels of cortisol. High levels of cortisol cause the body to hold on to the belly fat. One thing to consider is to change the level of stress that you have in your life. This stress comes in 3 forms; emotional, physical and chemical stress.
It is important to find ways to create the balance that you need in your life. Granted, it may not be easy but putting your health first is important to ensuring that you live better and longer. Reducing these stressors in your life can lead to significant weight loss. - 2. Fatty liver is another common cause of belly fat that is on the rise due to our lifestyle choices. Fatty liver is basically a term that refers to the buildup of fat in the liver, in this case, 5 – 10% of liver weight is fat, hence fatty liver.
The liver is one of the most important organs in our body and it typically processes everything that we eat and drink and filters harmful toxins and substances from the bloodstream. The presence of a fatty liver interrupts and interferes with the efficiency of the liver function and if left untreated can become harmful to your overall health.
Main Cause of a Fatty Liver
Over 90 million Americans are believed to have a fatty liver. In most cases, the main cause of a fatty liver is our sugar diet. So, consuming products that are high in sugar levels – sugar drinks and energy drinks, fruit juices all put a lot of stress on the liver and cause the liver to dump fat around it.
This high sugar diet causes the liver to burn sugar for energy instead of burning fat for energy and causes other negative effects such as converting inactive thyroid hormone into active thyroid hormone, impacting the production of cholesterol and affects the balancing of glucose which directly affects the pancreas leading to insulin resistance.
Is There a Way Forward?
The optimal way to manage this condition as per Spokane Weight Loss parameters is to identify what’s really going on in the liver and to clean that up.