You Should Be Alarmed If Being With Healthy BMI but Carrying Excess Weight Around the Waist
Why my waist size is important?
When most of us think upon what a healthy weight is, we usually use body mass index (BMI) as a marker of our health.
While our BMI is one of several measures we can use for a healthy weight, it is not the best indicator of health on its own.
For this reason, healthy individuals who are low in body fat but high in lean muscle mass often are with a high BMI and be wrongly categorized as unhealthy. Instead, others with less muscle mass and higher body fat distributed as excess weight around the waist will have a healthy BMI, which is the reason to be incorrectly classified as healthy.
Despite its limitations, BMI is used widely for its simplicity and because it provides a fast estimation of weight targets for people who are overweight or underweight.
Role of Body Fat Distribution and Metabolic Complications
The deeper abdominal fat — the visceral fat that collects around internal organs — is metabolically active and has been tightly linked to a host of severe disease risks.
There is evidence that the distribution of fat in our body(PMC) is a more reliable indicator of a health risk than the weight along. The truth is, the weight around your waist may indicate that you are actually at higher potential risk. Why?
It has been well established that fat located around the waist is rather visceral fat. Those are all fat tissues that surround and accumulates around our internal organs. When it starts to accumulate progressively, this fat is responsible for triggering inflammatory responses and the release of adverse hormones in the body that, in consequence, increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, high blood, diabetes pressure, and high cholesterol.
According to research from Harvard and the NIH (National Institutes of Health), the excess fat around the waist may raise death risk for women. Overall, women who carry excess weight around their waists were at higher risk of dying early from heart disorders or cancer than were women with small waistlines, even if they are in healthy weight norms.
Women who had a bigger waist circumference and are also obese are at a higher risk of early death. Researchers settle if a woman was overweight by calculating her body mass index (BMI) and measuring the waistline. When BMI figures are higher than 30.0 is considered as obese.
Another Scary Facts
Every additional 2 inches (ca. 5 cm) in the women’s waist size boosted doubled their risk by 10 percent of developing heart disease.
A Dutch study published last year about an elevated risk of breast cancer features the total body fat and abdominal fat as significant factors. When women have lost weight — average about 12 pounds (5.44 kg) — have happened changes in cancer biomarkers for estrogen, leptin, and inflammatory proteins, which indicates a decline in breast cancer risk. Given that two-thirds of American women are overweight or obese, weight loss may well be the only best threat for lowering the high incidence of breast cancer in this country.
The large abdomen elevated dementia risk in women even if they were of normal weight overall and lacked other risks related to dementia as stroke, heart disease, and diabetes.
Here’s why visceral fat cells are so critical to your well-being. Unlike the cells in subcutaneous fat, visceral fat is an endocrine organ that releases hormones and a host of other substances linked to diseases. One such chemical is named retinol-binding protein 4 (RBP4) that has harmful effects on body insulin resistance, which can lead to Type 2 diabetes and development of the metabolic syndrome.
Key Factors Contributing to Excess Weight Around the Waist
It’s not necessary to be overweight or obese to face these hazards. Even people of a healthy weight can accumulate harmful amounts of hidden fat beneath the abdominal wall if as adding excess fat inside the abdomen trough destructive living habits.
Several significant factors affect body fat distribution in both lean and obese adults and may lead to more metabolic complications. These are environmental factors that have a substantial impact on our modern society as alcohol intake, smoking, bad eating habits, sedentary lifestyle.
Apart from the unhealthy life but also the hormonal changes taking place in us related to our age also have a significant impact. Before midlife, men usually harbor a more percentage of visceral fat than women do, but this model often reverses as women pass through menopause. Few females are happy to escape a midlife waistline expansion as body fat increases and visceral fat blow out the bellies.
But not last the genetic predispose of person, which also seems to play a significant role in how fat spreads and gain in the body.
What to Aim for?
Furthermore, this is not fat that you can release simply by toning up abdominal muscles with exercises like planks or situps. Weight loss using a specific weight loss plan or trough wholesome diet and exercise — activities like running and strength training — is the only surefire way to get rid of it.
Average waist circumference in women should be less than 88 cm ( 35 inches) and in men less than 102 cm (40 inches). If your waist circumference is above those numbers, no matter what your BMI is showing, you are probably at higher risk for diseases like that.
The good news is that you can always start work to modify this by making positive lifestyle changes in terms of your activity and diet. Reducing the fat around your waist is the greatest gift you can give yourself to satisfy in your quest for a healthy weight quickly.