Your ancestors didn’t have it, and yet there’s a good chance you do. Most of your organs work in your favor, but this one is your enemy.
Much like some disconnected appendage transplanted in place of your severed hand that came from a serial killer, your abdominal fat is trying to kill you. I have written about abdominal fat as a renegade organ in a previous blog article that can be read by clicking here. Before we get into the “guts” of this blog post, we need a little review of adipose hormones.
While the abdominal fat tissue produces a number of compounds, there are 3 main hormones that come from our abdominal fat cells that we are currently aware of. Here’s a brief summary:
- Leptin – helps to maintain an even body weight. Lose abdominal fat and lower leptin stimulates appetite, gain fat and higher leptin levels make you less hungry. Unfortunately, with abuse, our brains become resistant to leptin, and higher levels no longer shut down our appetite.
- Resistin – levels increase as the amount of abdominal fat increases and increases inflammation, insulin resistance and drives the progression to diabetes.
- Adiponectin – an anti-diabetic hormone that is produced less and less as we gather more abdominal fat.
When were are healthy, these adipokines help to keep your body weight in balance. However, as you start to collect more abdominal fat over time, these adipokines shift from a friendly distribution to a disease-causing one. This then produces more inflammation which, in turn, produces even more body fat. Quite the downhill spiral.
This particular study looks more closely at the actions of adiponectin in mice and how it relates to blood flow within the abdominal fat region. Here’s what researchers found:
- Higher levels of adiponectin led to a more blood flow within the fat tissue (which leads to “happier” fat cells with more blood flow and nutrients).
- Mice that produced more adiponectin had an almost complete shut down of inflammation measured by macrophage (WBC) infiltration and had no crown-like structures (these structures occur when dead fat cells clump together around macrophages that are trying to clean up the dying tissues).
- Mice that produced more adiponectin had a strong sensitivity to insulin and reduced likelihood of developing fatty liver.
You can see that, once you begin to accumulate abdominal fat your body begins to revolt against you, stacking the cards against you for losing and maintaining weight loss. Obviously, prevention is much easier than a cure, but for most of us, that train long ago left the station. We can, however, make sure that our children are not put into a similar situation by making sure they never tip over into a state of increased abdominal obesity.
I also have to put a plug in here for non-invasive laser liposuction, which we have had in our office for almost a year now. While the manufacturers and most clinics that own the units continue to promote that laser “opens pores in the fat cells,” there is strong evidence that laser applied to the abdominal region is doing what we know that cold laser does: increasing blood flow and lowering inflammation.
What a perfect combination for abdominal fat that is both starved for blood flow and inflamed. This explanation for the benefits of laser lipo makes sense.