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The Skinny on Fat
Get the facts on fat!
By Linda Formichelli
If you’re like most women, you probably think that fat is just a mass of jiggly goo that sits on your tummy, butt and thighs. Its only purpose is to make your clothes fit funny, and the only way to get rid of it is to spot reduce.
It’s funny how we can be wrong about something so common. We spoke with an obesity researcher, an exercise expert and a nutritionist to debunk these myths and to answer all your questions about the only four-letter word with three letters: fat. .
Fat facts
Allan Green,Ph.D., an obesity researcher and director of Bassett Research Institute in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Energy: What is fat?
GREEN: We call it adipose tissue. It’s a kind of connective tissue that’s made up of a number of different cell types. The main cell type is the fat cell itself, or adipocytes. Fat cells consist mostly of fat, as you might imagine.
For a long time, fat was thought of as just a storage site for excess calories, and that’s still true, but over the last five to 10 years it’s become apparent that it’s also a very important endocrine organ, just like the ovaries, pancreas or pituitary gland. Adipose tissue itself makes a lot of different hormones, some of which are involved in appetite regulation. There’s an important one called leptin, which was discovered in mid 1990. If you’re in a period when you’re eating too much, and the amount of fat tissue grows, it makes more leptin, which tells you to eat less. This is a simplified version—there are dozens of these satiety factors, and leptin is just one.
Energy: Can overweight people have a deficiency of leptin?
GREEN: Leptin deficiency is very rare in humans. Most obese people make plenty of leptin, but they eat anyway. If you’re overweight, and your body’s used to having a certain amount of leptin, and then you lose fat, your leptin will go down. That may be why you put weight back on again.
Energy: Why do we gain fat?
GREEN: Basically, it’s because we’re eating too much. People don’t want to believe this, but you gain weight because you eat more calories than you’re burning. If you want to lose fat, you need to eat fewer calories than you’re burning. If you consume just 50 calories a day more than you burn—that’s one Oreo cookie—over a year you’ll gain about five pounds.
Energy: Can we blame a slow metabolism?
GREEN: It’s true that people’s metabolic rates vary, but there’s not that much correlation between metabolic rates and body weight.
Energy: When you gain fat, do you gain more fat cells, or do the ones you already have get bigger?
GREEN: Both. That’s actually been a harder question to answer than you think, and people are still arguing about it. But the consensus is that when you gain weight, even as an adult, you can make new fat cells. You have cells called preadipocytes—they’re like the stem cells of adipose tissue. These are very small cells, and if you’re eating too much, they can transform into fat cells. The cells you already have will also get bigger.
Energy: Can you get rid of fat cells once you have them?
GREEN: That’s also been very controversial, but most people now agree that you can. If you go on a crash diet, and you lose 10 pounds over six weeks, most of that will be the size of the fat cells. But if you keep it off or if you lose the fat slowly over six months or a year, the number of fat cells will decrease. Some will actually die, and some will go back to their preadipocyte form.
Energy: Are some people more likely to gain fat than others?
GREEN: Oh, definitely. It’s very genetically determined. If both your parents are overweight, there’s a strong chance you will be, too. But if you think about it, you can’t inherit obesity. What you inherit is the tendency to become obese if there’s plenty of food around.
Energy: When we exercise, does muscle actually replace fat?
GREEN: Not really. Your fat will decrease if you’re burning more calories than you’re eating, and you will build muscle. But it’s not like one is converted into the other.
Energy: Why does having extra fat increase your heart disease risk?
GREEN: There are several possible reasons. Fat produces free fatty acids as it breaks down. The free fatty acids make you insulin resistant and can also be converted into circulating fat, which predisposes you to heart disease.
The fat that’s inside the abdomen drains into the hepatic portal vein that goes straight to the liver. The liver can convert that into triglycerides that are bad for your heart.
Fat and food
Molly Kimball, R.D., a sports and lifestyle nutritionist for Elmwood Fitness Center in Harahan, L.A.
Energy: What’s the relationship between fat in food and body fat?
KIMBALL: Excess calories from any source can be stored as fat—not necessarily just fat calories. Fat has to go through very little change in the body, so fat in food is easiest for our bodies to store as fat. But carbs and proteins in excess can also be stored as fat.
Energy: If you eat excess calories as fat, are you more likely to gain body fat than if you eat the same amount of calories from carbs or proteins?
KIMBALL: Because carbs and protein have to go through many changes in the body before they’re stored as fat, some of the excess calories you’re taking in from them are actually burned off in the process of converting them into body fat.
Energy: What’s the connection between insulin and body fat?
KIMBALL: When the insulin levels in your body are elevated, your body is not going to be burning body fat at a significant rate. When your insulin levels are lower, that’s when your body will choose to burn body fat rather than store it. That’s because when insulin is up, that’s when your body is called anabolic, which means adding to or growing—and when insulin levels are down, you’re catabolic, which means breaking down fat.
Energy: Should you avoid carbs to keep your insulin levels low so you burn fat instead of storing it?
KIMBALL: No, but I do recommend that people choose low-glycemic carbs, which means whole grains versus the refined form. This can be tricky. For example, crackers that are called ’wheat crackers’ are really just made from refined wheat, and they still have a high glycemic index.
Energy: How much body fat is healthy?
KIMBALL: For most women, if you have less than 10 or 12 percent, that’s going to be dangerous. An average woman, who’s not an athlete, will be between 25 and 30 percent. Most acceptable is between 21 and 24 percent. For women athletes, it’s anywhere between 14 and 20 percent.
Energy: How can you find out your body fat percentage?
KIMBALL: The most common way is calipers because they’re easy and inexpensive. All gyms and fat-loss centers will pretty much have someone doing body fat calipers. It’s called a skin fold measurement. The only thing is, the accuracy depends on the person’s technique. If you have three different people doing skin fold calipers, you’ll probably get three different results. If you use that as your standard, make sure you have the same person check it each time.
There are also body fat scales called bioelectrical impedence scales. They send a current through the body to measure how much body fat a person has. The current goes faster through things that are mainly water, like blood and muscle. Your fat and your bones actually slow the current. These scales are somewhat accurate, but your hydration status matters a lot. Once I used the scale, went out and peed, and then used it again, and it said I had less body fat! These scales can also overestimate the amount of body fat in athletes because of their higher muscle mass.
Energy: What happens if you have too little body fat?
KIMBALL: Body fat cushions your organs and protects against the cold. In women, fat in the hip, thigh and breast area is there to nourish a baby if they were to become pregnant. Body fat also provides energy to our bodies.
Fat is also part of our nervous systems—our spinal cord, our brain and our cell membranes all have fat in them. I had one client who was anorexic and bulimic for 22 years. She didn’t receive any fats for years. Now, she can’t walk. She has a degenerative neurological problem that doctors can figure out. I’m convinced that it’s because she has no fat to protect the nervous system, and the messages from her brain are not making it to her muscles.
Fat is also necessary for producing hormones such as estrogen. Women who don’t make enough estrogen are at increased risk for osteoporosis and heart disease.
Energy: How can you get rid of cellulite?
KIMBALL: Basically, there’s nothing you can do to get rid of cellulite. It’s the connective tissue separating around the fat cells that gives that dimply appearance. There are a couple of things that can hide the appearance of cellulite, though. One is being well-hydrated. If your cells are dehydrated they’re kind of shrunken, which increases the appearance of cellulite. Also, keep your skin moisturized, which makes it look smooth and shiny. This is only cosmetic—it doesn’t get rid of the cellulite, but it reduces its appearance. This is also purely cosmetic, but tan skin has a less cottage cheese-like appearance than pale skin. So use a self-tanner and keep the area moisturized.
Fit vs. Fat
Liz Neporent, M.A., a certified strength conditioning specialist and a personal trainer for MyFitnessExpert.com.
Energy: Can you loe body fat through diet alone?
NEPORENT: Study after study shows that the number one marker for who succeeds in losing weight and keeping it off long term is exercise. We don’t know why that is because though exercise burns off calories, it doesn’t burn as many calories as you’d think. And it speeds up the metabolism, but not as much as we once thought. All we know is that it works.
Energy: Is it true that to burn fat you have to do long, slow, easy workouts?
NEPORENT: People mistakenly think that there’s a fat-burning zone, where if you work out for a long time at a slow pace, you burn more fat. In fact, you do burn a higher percentage of fat during those long, slow workouts; you don’t burn as many total calories and as much total fat as you would doing something more high intensity. I think the best approach is mix-and-match, where you do some days high intensity and some days low intensity.
Energy: Is spot reduction a myth?
NEPORENT: It’s a complete myth. You can spot train, and you can spot change, and you can spot tone—but spot reduction of fat is a physiologic impossibility. It’s just not the way your body works. Where you’re genetically programmed to lose fat, that’s where you’re going to lose fat. You can do a thousand sit-ups and get strong stomach muscles, but actually lose fat in your arms. But you can spot tone because that’s building and shaping a muscle, and you can target muscles specifically.
Energy: What fat is the hardest for women to lose?
NEPORENT: Again, it’s genetic. For some women, the first place they lose fat is in their chest. For some it’s in their face, and some lose it proportionally.
Energy: What can you do if you lose a lot of fat and end up with loose skin?
NEPORENT: I have a bunch of people who have lost 100 pounds or more, so that’s a question I get all the time. If you’re young and your skin is in good condition, and you haven’t been heavy for that long, there’s a chance that the skin will stretch back into shape. That can take as long as a year. Weight training will help to a minimal extent because you’re going to firm up your muscles and improve your skin tone. But if the skin doesn’t snap back within a year, there’s really nothing you can do in terms of exercise, and you’re going to have to look at surgery.
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