Waist Size Is Not Just About Aesthetics

Yes, believe it or not, your waist size can tell more about the state of your health than you think. It’s obvious that a bulging waistline is far from aesthetically pleasing. However, just as unpleasing could be the hints it’s giving you about the state of your health. To get right down to it, there are links between increased risks of morbidity, cardiovascular disease, and other serious heart conditions and the fat around your waist, the visceral fat.

Visceral fat is the fat that is packed in between the organs in the abdominal area. Excess visceral fat pushes the organs out and leads to a pot belly. One of the dangers of visceral fat is that since it is between the organs in the abdomen and underneath the muscle, it can go undetected until there are large excesses of it and the pot belly forms.

Visceral fat is a very dangerous threat. Now you may ask, isn’t all body fat a threat? First let me say that there are two kinds of body fat. There is subcutaneous fat, which is fat that is underneath the skin. Then there is visceral fat. What makes visceral fat so dangerous is that, according to Donovan Baldwin,

Unlike “subcutaneous fat” which is found below the skin, visceral fat secretes inflammatory hormones which can cause organ damage (heart, kidney, brain) at a cellular level. So, while obesity in general is a problem to be dealt with, visceral fat (belly fat) in particular demands immediate and special attention.

So exercising and eating better to trim down that pot belly won’t just make your clothes fit better, it will also decrease your chances of serious health conditions. And you can also say that your slim stomach isn’t just sexy on the outside, but it’s healthy on the inside.