APEX PWR  |  Lessons in Longevity

Visceral Fat Climbs With Age. Get the Number Before It Does.

Most of the numbers on a body composition report are things you could roughly guess about yourself. You have a sense of your weight. You have an approximate sense of your body fat, if only from how your clothes fit this year compared with last year.

Visceral fat is the exception. It is the one number on the page that almost nobody can estimate about themselves, including people who are otherwise well informed about their own bodies, and including lean people.

It is also the number we would pick if we only got to track one.

What Visceral Fat Actually Is

Your body stores fat in two different places, and they are not interchangeable.

Subcutaneous fat sits between your skin and your muscle. It is the fat you can pinch, the fat you see in the mirror, the fat a caliper measures. It is the one everyone is thinking about.

Visceral fat sits deeper, behind the abdominal wall, packed in and around the organs. You cannot pinch it. You cannot see it. Someone can carry a meaningful amount of it while looking perfectly ordinary with a shirt on.

These are two separate storage compartments and they can change at different rates depending on training, diet and other lifestyle factors. That is not a technicality. It is the reason people occasionally come back from a second scan confused, having seen their visceral fat fall while their overall body fat percentage held or ticked up. Those two things can both be true at once, because they are measuring different tissue.

What We See Across Ten Years of Scans

We have been running DEXA scans in Tigard since October 2016. As of this month that is 8,308 clients and 13,691 scans, and it lets us say something specific rather than general about how this number behaves.

Looking only at first scans, so nobody is counted twice and nobody's training history is in the mix:

Roughly four times as much. In women the same comparison runs from about 0.44 pounds in the 20s to about 1.22 pounds in the 50s, so the pattern holds with a different slope and a lower starting point.

How common is it

The 2.2 pound line, which is one kilogram, is a descriptive cut rather than a diagnosis. Nobody gets diagnosed with anything at 2.2 pounds. It is just a round number that lets us talk about how many people are carrying a lot of it.

Across all of our adult male clients of every age it is 37 percent, from 3,793 first scans. More than half in the 50 to 59 group. These are people motivated enough to book and pay for a body composition scan, which means they are, if anything, a more health engaged group than average.

Why This Number and Not Another One

Here is the argument for tracking visceral fat specifically, and it has two halves.

It is the number you are least likely to already know

Weight you know. Waist size you know. Visceral fat you do not, and no bathroom scale, smart scale or tape measure can separate it from the subcutaneous fat sitting on top of it. The only way to get it is a scan that can see through the abdominal wall.

Lean people are included in that. A low body weight does not guarantee a low visceral number, and that is precisely why the measurement earns its place rather than being redundant with the scale.

It does not move unless several other things are going right

This is the part worth sitting with.

There is no exercise that reduces visceral fat specifically. There is no supplement for it. There is no food that targets it. Nothing on the market moves this number in isolation, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What moves it is the unglamorous stack: a sustained energy deficit, enough protein and fiber to make that deficit survivable, resistance training to keep the lean mass you have, regular aerobic work, sleep you actually get, and alcohol kept in check.

The Encouraging Half

Visceral fat has a reputation as the stubborn kind, and in our data the opposite shows up: it tends to be among the first fat to go.

Among our clients who came back for a repeat scan and had lost five or more pounds of fat between scans, with the visceral measurement available on both:

Visceral fat came off at roughly half again the rate of fat overall. Sixty-two percent of the fat those clients lost came off the trunk, which held 53 percent of their fat to begin with, so the trunk gave up more than its share.

And among clients who came in above that 2.2 pound line and rescanned, about one in three were below it by their most recent scan, with a median drop of 0.69 pounds, around 20 percent.

Two things to keep straight about all of that. These are clients who rescanned, and people who come back are more motivated than people who do not. And none of it proves that training at APEX, or scanning at APEX, caused the change. It describes what happened to people who lost fat. The causal arrow is the ordinary one: they changed what they were doing, and the number followed.

Where Nutrition Does the Heavy Lifting

If you want to move this number, food is where most of the leverage sits. Training protects your lean mass and builds the engine. The deficit that takes fat off is mostly built in the kitchen.

What our Nutrition Director, Jennie Carolan, MS, works on with clients in this situation, and the order she tends to work on it:

• Protein first, at every meal. It is the most common shortfall we find, it protects lean mass during a deficit, and it does more for appetite than anything else you can change.
• Fiber second. Underrated, and it is the other half of staying full on fewer calories. It is also what the carb to fiber check in this week's Nutrition Nook is screening for.
• Alcohol, honestly accounted for. This is usually the single largest uncounted input in a week, and it is specific to this topic rather than a general health lecture.
• A deficit you can hold for months. The aggressive version works until it does not. Visceral fat responds to a moderate deficit sustained across a couple of scan cycles better than to a hard one abandoned in week five.
• Sleep treated as an input, not a luxury. It changes appetite regulation and recovery, and it is the one people are most willing to trade away.

If you want your own numbers rather than principles, the One-Time Macro Breakdown builds them from your questionnaire and your DEXA results. If the hard part is consistency rather than information, the 12 Week Nutrition Challenge adds weekly structure and support. Both run remotely.

When to Scan Again

One scan is a data point. The number only becomes useful when you have two, and our own data has something to say about the gap between them.

Clients who retested on a three to five month schedule improved about three times in four. Clients who waited more than a year were close to a coin flip. That gap holds within every starting body fat group, so it is not simply heavier clients coming back sooner.

The honest caveat is the same one as before: people who return quickly are probably more committed, and commitment is doing some of the work in that comparison. What we take from it is practical rather than causal. The clients who do well are the ones who book the follow up before they leave, while the plan is still fresh and the date is still abstract.

What We Want You To Do With This

If you are in your 30s or 40s, the case for getting a baseline now is that this is the stretch where the number tends to climb and where you still have every lever available to you. A baseline today makes every future scan interpretable. Without one, a scan at 52 tells you where you are and nothing about how you got there.

If you are already in your 50s, the case is that over half the men and a quarter of the women your age who walk through our door are above that 2.2 pound line, usually without knowing it, and that the number responds well once somebody is actually watching it.

Either way, the step is small. One scan, seven to ten minutes, and a number you almost certainly cannot guess about yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions