What is Visceral Fat?

Visceral fat are deposits of fat that surround your internal organs including heart, liver, brain, lungs, kidneys, etc. It is not just an inert fat; in fact, it is metabolically very active, releasing inflammatory cytokines, interleukins, metalloproteinases, etc, which damage nearby organs and tissues.

How Do I Get Visceral Fat?

Most people who eat a Standard American Diet of fast food, processed foods with sugars and seed oils are depositing visceral fat every time they eat. Sadly, this has been building up since childhood.

Because of the inflammation it causes, visceral fat leads to obesity, diabetes, atherosclerotic heart disease, arthritis, and cancer among many other chronic disease states.

How Do I Get Rid of Visceral Fat?

The best way to follow the amount of visceral fat and make sure it’s reducing in amount is with serial MRI scans while you are switching to a low carbohydrate diet, either ketovore, carnivore or paleo diet. Eating carbs and processed foods continues the deposition of this lethal kind of fat. Polyunsaturated cooking oils and margarine mostly contain linoleic acid and this is a chief component of visceral fat. Switching to lard, tallow or butter with which to cook is a safe method which has been used for thousands of years.

On a strict low carbohydrate diet, visceral fat can be mostly removed within a year; however, most people experience major benefits within 2-3 weeks of starting a low carb diet and these continue the longer you eat this way.

How Do I Get the MRI Scan?

The first step is to see your visceral fat by having your doctor order an MRI scan of the abdomen. Once you actually see this fat hiding in your abdomen, it will motivate you to switch to a low carbohydrate way of eating. As the pounds come off and your chronic inflammation subsides you will feel like a new person.

I Do Not Feel Like Exercising

The good news is you don’t have to exercise to lose the visceral fat, you will start losing it immediately when you consume a low carb diet. As time goes on however, you will actually want to begin to exercise. At first just take a 30 minute walk as the sun comes up. If you are already doing yoga or stretching, continue that too and you may want to add variable resistance training with elastic bands to help speed up muscle building. Work up to adding short sprints like 25-50 feet since intensive exercise like sprinting improves blood flow and oxygenation to your tissues, helps you sleep better and stimulates the production of nitric oxide. You can get all this done in just 10-20 minutes a day.

Keep Your Provider in the Loop So Changes Can be Made to Your Medications

Make sure to tell your practitioner that you are beginning this way of eating since in a short time, you will no longer need to take as many pharmaceuticals for the control of your chronic disease. You doctor will need to guide you on the best methods of tapering off these drugs. Some drugs like SSRIs must be tapered slowly for up to a year or more due to withdrawal symptoms.

This new paradigm shift occurring in medicine will allow patients to be in control of their health and to use food as medicine as Hippocrates suggested over 2400 years ago.