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Dr. Eric Berg DC — Your Waist Size Is IMPORTANT!. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
I have some pretty shocking wild information to share with you about waste circumference. The size of your waste can actually predict serious diseases even more than your actual weight. Well, for women, it's 35 inches. For men, it's 40 inches. If we just talk about longevity, for example, every additional inch increases the risk of premature death. And we're talking about visceral fat. That's the fat around the organs. That is a very different fat than the superficial fat that you have just underneath your skin. The visceral fat that you have actually gives off these little messages that increase inflammation, which then can lead all sorts of issues relating to insulin resistance, which is kind of like the thing that comes right before diabetes, which is that visceral fat, but it's very hard to detect unless you do some type of test, like a CAT scan or some other test. Visceral fat can double or triple your risk for getting heart disease.
It can increase the risk of cancer, especially for breast and colon cancer. Then you have metabolic syndrome, which is kind of a combination of several things, but out of all of those, the most significant increase risk is for high blood pressure. Now, if we look at the difference between visceral fat and subcutaneous fat, they're very different. Visceral fat is hormonal fat. It's caused by cortisol or insulin. And when we're talking about increasing insulin, we're mainly talking about carbohydrates. And we're also talking about frequency of eating, like all those snacks that people eat between the meals and not to mention the sugary drinks and the beer, et cetera. Now, another thing that's interesting about visceral fat is that after menopause, a female's body that once had like an hourglass shape now starts transforming into a completely different shape, which they will literally lose their waist. And this has to do with the shifting of the hormones. We have decreased estrogen, progesterone and testosterone and an increase in cortisol.
That hormone has a potential to eat up your muscle proteins in the glutamus maximus, which is your butt muscle. So you lose your butt and the leg muscles, especially the thigh muscles. And the problem with cortisol, which is a stress hormone, at the same time, it's affecting bone. It's actually can cause bone loss. And like I said, muscle loss, but it's also increasing your risk of getting heart disease. And there's another test that some people talk about called body mass index. The purpose of that test really had nothing to do with health because it doesn't really tell the difference between if someone has like more muscle or fat, but better than that and better than your weight is the waist circumference. But I do also want to mention there's another type of belly fat that is not necessarily visceral fat. Sometimes when the liver gets really, really sick and develops scar tissue, it's called cirrhosis. You start leaking fluid into a sac in your abdominal area. And so now it looks like visceral fat, but it's literally a sac filled with fluid.
Now I think the next most important thing to know is how to get rid of this visceral fat. You haven't seen this video right here. You should watch it right now.
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