The Different Types of Body Fat

I've recently been learning a little bit about the various different types of body fat and thinking about how that affects my health and my fat loss. There are three primary types of body fat:

• Subcutaneous - sits underneath the skin
• Visceral - deposits around the internal organs
• Intramuscular - is weaved throughout our muscle tissue

The subcutaneous fat is the stuff we see on the surface, it's what's makes us flabby and wobbly. Got bingo arms? That's the subcutaneous stuff! This is the kind of fat that I suspect most women are thinking about when they want to lose fat. Losing this kind of fat will make you look leaner.

The visceral fat is hidden away but this is what gives people that pot bellied look. Beware, this is the dangerous fat and makes you susceptible to obesity-related diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Those of you who are more apple shaped than pear shaped have a tendency to store visceral fat.

The intramuscular fat is also hidden away. If you look at a cut of beef that has fat marbled through it - that's the intramuscular fat. I couldn't find very much information about this fat in relation to humans.

Measuring Body Fat

This new found knowledge has now given me a greater understanding of why different methods of body fat measurement can give such different results. When I first started out I used skin fold calipers. As these literally measure the size of a fold of skin they can only measure subcutaneous fat and so visceral fat is ignored.

When I started on my current plan I tried using a tape measure to estimate body fat and measurements were taken from the waist and the hips. I was shocked to find a difference of 8% in the two readings! My tape measurement put me at 40% body fat and the calipers at 32%. What does this tell me? That I carry more visceral fat than subcutaneous fat and the mirror tells the same story - my belly pokes out like a football. A year ago I could make myself look six months pregnant by pushing out my belly!

My recent results are also correlating the conclusions that I have reached about my body fat. About a month ago I lamented the fact that I had not yet seen any grand transformations; that I seemed to be just a smaller version of my former self. This is also indicative of the loss of visceral fat - my belly has got smaller but I have not lost much of the outer fat. I've lost some of course but not as much as I would have hoped for.

What Does This Mean?

First of all everybody is different. Two people who weigh the same and have the same levels of body fat can still look quite different if their fat is made up differently. The person with high visceral and low subcutaneous may look quite lean but still have a sticky-outy-belly. A person with the opposite ratio can have a slim figure but still look flabby and soft.

Armed with this knowledge I can see an obvious question - how do I lose a particular type of fat? Answer: you don't get to choose the type of fat you lose any more than you can choose where you lose it from, so you can banish those illusions of losing the subcutaneous fat from your right kneecap on Saturday's workout! Fat is lost all over the body and of course Sod's law says that the fat you most want to lose will come off last.

We need to lose the visceral fat for health reasons and we want to lose the subcutaneous fat for vanity but we have no control over the precise mechanics of it. The advice then is simple - no matter how your body is composed, if you want to be healthy and look good then you just need to keep working at lowering your body fat until you have achieved both of those aims.