If you look in the mirror and see a round belly, your life might be at stake. Not only is a spare tire unsightly, but it probably is hiding a more serious problem.
“If you have a pot belly, you likely have a lot of visceral fat,” says Carol Shively, a professor of pathology-comparative medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Visceral fat is the interior fat that becomes interspersed around your organs, especially the liver, pancreas and intestines. This type of fat increases the risk of:
- Fatty liver
- Higher levels of bad cholesterol and lower levels of good cholesterol
- Heart disease
- Diabetes
Most of us are obsessed with subcutaneous fat, the flab (“belly fat“) visible around our midsections. But it is the deeper visceral fat that causes health issues.
An imaging test – such as a CT scan – is the only way to know how much visceral fat you have. But your outward appearance offers a pretty good clue about what lurks within.
3 ways to lose belly fat
Losing weight is rarely easy, Shively says. “It’s hard to increase your energy output and decrease your energy input,” she says.
Science especially has struggled to find answers for losing visceral fat, which is usually the most challenging fat to eliminate. “Nobody has figured out how to target it specifically,” Shively says.
However, three behavioral changes can help you shed belly fat. For starters, eliminating trans fats from your diet typically goes a long way toward slimming down.
“That’s part of the reason why you’ve seen a massive campaign to get trans fats out of the national food supply,” Shively says.
Decreasing alcohol consumption also can help you lose belly fat.
However, it is the third solution – reducing stress – that offers the most surprising help. “All things being equal, stressed individuals will deposit more fat in the viscera than nonstressed individuals,” Shively says.
Research by Shively and others has found that monkeys subjected to higher levels of social stress tend to have increased levels of visceral fat. Social stress for monkeys boils down to having a lower role in the social hierarchy.
A lower social status can trigger stress in humans, too. That fact might help account for higher obesity rates among the poor.
Other social stressors have a negative effect on people regardless of socioeconomic status. “If your teen is making you crazy, if you don’t have enough money to pay the bills, if you lose someone you care about – that’s what I mean by social stress,” Shively says.
Reducing the impact of stress
Although we can’t always control social stress, we are in charge of how we react to it.
Shively says people who engage in mindfulness – being more aware of the present moment, while also accepting your feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations – experience many benefits, including:
- Less self-reported stress
- Better sleep
- Reduced anxiety
“You really have to take classes, then figure out how to adhere to it,” she says. “But we know that it works.”
Feeling more connected to your community also can have a big impact on reducing stress. That might mean attending your church, synagogue or mosque, or joining the YMCA or YWCA.
Finally, exercise is a “tried and true method to reduce stress,” she says.
Shively says it’s important to keep a positive outlook and to understand that this is a long-term project. “It’s not going to happen if you just try really hard for two weeks or a month,” she says.
She urges people to make their health a priority, and to take a slow-and steady approach. “Every day, do a little bit,” she says. “Connect to somebody, go for a walk.”