“Visceral” fat is a medical term for deep abdominal fat. It is a great risk factor for disease the longer it’s allowed to hang around. This is the kind of fat that sedentary people (those who give little credence to exercise) are bound to develop as the fat, cholesterol and triglycerides ingested during a meal are not adequately burned off with exercise. When this happens day in and day out, your body stores all this fat for future use as fuel.
Researchers have found that if people perform regular exercise, they can reverse this increasing amount of abdominal fat and start to lose pounds. It’s simple really, as an exercising body needs to use fat for energy once it’s burned through any lingering sugar and triglycerides from a recent meal. We didn’t know, however, that it could make a serious dent in visceral fat — but now we do.
It’s very important, too, as this level of fat greatly increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol and a handful of other serious health problems. In studies, overweight individuals who began using treadmills and stationary bicycles started to lose their storage of visceral fat. The ones who didn’t start exercise, remaining sedentary for a half-year, kept putting on the pounds, adding to that visceral fat. This means that the road to deep weight loss and disease prevention truly is in each person’s hands.
These new findings assure us all that exercise could help get rid of even the deepest forms of fat; the ones hardest to shed. Even moderate exercise — brisk walking for a half-hour, for instance — could help prevent you from putting on this abdominal fat. It could even reverse the process entirely. It’s best to get as much exercise as you can manage. Those who lose the most visceral fat are those who exercise the most. Even those “love handles’ started to disappear. The rough estimate is the equivalent of jogging 20 miles a week.
In all, it’s the amount of exercise you do, not the intensity. The more you do, the better the results. They found that people who did the most exercise had an average loss of seven percent visceral fat, while participants who stayed sedentary gained nearly 10% over the six months. Anyone who keeps up some moderate exercise over the long term will do much more for their bodies than any diet ever will. Stay motivated, and do something every day. Even a half-hour walk will suffice on days when you don’t feel too inspired to do more.
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