People usually has misunderstanding about the fats and they lose fats in an extreme or incorrect way that could destroy their bodies. What are the facts you should know about the fats or adipose tissues?
Introduction
People hates fats but they seldom know about the detailed facts of them. We cannot live without fats and everyone has fats in their bodies, even for an Olympic athletes who going on for extreme training.
Fats exist with purposes. It can protect our internal organs from hurting by strikes and provides energy during starvation. In fact, there are several types of fats grouping based on composition and location, and there is good fat can even help you to burn calories.
Types of fats based on composition
Adipose tissue consists of at least two types, white adipose tissue (WAT) and brown adipose tissue (BAT) in human body.
They have different gene expression, function, morphology and distribution in the body. Adipose tissue is built up from adipocyte, the fat cells.
White adipose tissue
Adipocytes in WAT is spherical in shape, with oil drop occupied up to 90% of its cell volume.
WAT is the one that you hate, as the energy reservoir to store extra energy in your body and secretes hormones to regulate metabolism and insulin resistance.
WAT can be classified into another two groups based on their location: visceral fat and subcutaneous fat.
Subcutaneous fat
It is directly underneath your skin, which exists obviously at your belly and thigh. But this fat can be found anywhere of your body, including your face, butt, breast, and arms.
Subcutaneous fat can keep your body warm, store energy and as the padding of your body. It has another function to secrete hormone adiponectin, which helps in regulating insulin level.
Since WAT is insulin resistant, the more fat you have, the harder your body in regulating insulin, which can increase the risk of heart diseases and diabetes.
As what you know, aerobic exercise is useful to get rid of this kind of fat. You can choose to start with the easy one first: walking, cycling, jogging and so on.
You have to increase your body movement to replace your habit on just sitting on your chair. Walking or commute to replace driving, take the stairs instead of elevators can help you increase your metabolic rate.
Just be active in your life, having some workouts is better and help you burning fats faster and fit your body.
Visceral fat
Visceral fat is the fat padded between your abdominal organs. Similarly, it is insulin resistant which will increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes. It will secrete the inflammatory proteins, cytokines, to increase inflammation of your body organ.
You should get rid of it. High percentage of visceral fat indicates your have lots of LDL, the bad cholesterol, together with high blood glucose level and triglyceride levels. These are all bad and related to the chronic diseases causing by obesity.
To get it off, you should start a regular aerobic exercise, avoid sedentary lifestyle. A healthy diet is also a must.
Canned food or fast food should be reduced, you should move towards green food, food comes from raw, and ensure all nutrients intake. Foods with high soluble fibers and proteins are suggested.
Brown adipose tissue
BAT is the good fat, and also known for fat burning. BAT is used for energy expenditure to affect body metabolism and alter insulin sensitivity and it is closely related to your body susceptibility to obesity.
BAT is located surrounding the neck and large blood vessel of the thorax. It was thought to appear at infants to keep their body warm and will gradually disappear at their childhood stage. But recent researches had found out BAT also appears in some adults.
BAT is metabolically active, when we are cold, to generate heat by using up the energy in our body. It helps to burn more fats at rest to maintain body temperature.
Since it is activated by cold, a study reported people who spent 10-15 minutes in temperatures below 65 degrees can produce a hormone, irisin, which react to make WAT act like brown fat; this is known as WAT browning (Rosenwald et al., 2013). This condition also appears when you do an hour of moderate exercise at warmer temperatures.
Some studies suggested that environmental factors such as diet and exercise can be an important mediator of WAT browning.
How to actually burn the bad fat off?
Resistance training and aerobic exercise are highly recommended. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is a great option to help you burn more fats with less time of exercise. Just do one set of HIIT with around 20 min per day is good to help you burn energy.
Other resistance trainings such as squat, plank or burpees are also suggested to add into your exercise plan every day. These exercises can build up your body muscle meanwhile muscles burn more energy as compared with fats which can help you lose more weight in compare.
Furthermore, you should have enough sleep. Avoid the habit of sleeping at the midnight clock, with just swiping your phone and wake up another day at afternoon. It is really bad for your health that affecting your metabolism and body function.
The time length of sleeping depends on your circadian cycle, 7-8 hours for most of the adults is enough. Sleep well can help you feel energetic at second day, to be more active to finish your weight-loss plan and daily work effectively.
Sedentary lifestyle should be avoided. Even though you are working in front of your computer, you should train yourself to have stand up for every one or two hours, and have some water, go to washroom, instead of sitting half day.
An adequate rest time can boost up your efficiency of working and help your blood circulation in body.
For your diet plan, foods with high protein should be included, such as eggs, dairy products, and fish. You can also take in foods containing good fats (unsaturated fats) such as avocado, nuts, fatty fish and seeds, can support your heart health.
Ironically, saturated fats and trans fats should be avoided. These fats can cause high risk to heart disease or other chronic diseases.
Apart from fats, you should also control your carbohydrates intake especially the fine-carb products and sugars. These foods can fluctuate your blood glucose level and increase your fat storage. Examples of the high-carb foods like white bread, rice, fast foods, and processed foods should be reduced.
Conclusion
In the journey of weight loss, people should be clever and smart in choosing their foods and lifestyle. How comfortable your life now, with all those prepared foods and couch potato’s life, how hard and the efforts you should put to get the fats off.
Fat gaining is not only the matter of body shape and appearance, it greatly affects your body health and life quality. We should keep our body health and live longer.
Citation
Rosenwald M, Perdikari A, Rülicke T, Wolfrum C (June 2013). “Bi-directional interconversion of brite and white adipocytes”. Nature Cell Biology. 15 (6): 659–67.
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