Visceral fat isn’t visible, so we don’t always know it’s there, making it that much more dangerous. Fortunately, it’s preventable. By maintaining a healthy, active, low-stress lifestyle, we can prevent visceral fat from building up in excess in our abdominal cavity.
If your waist size is 40 inches or more as a woman or 35 inches or more as a man, you should make an appointment to see your doctor and discuss health risks and lifestyle changes.
Your doctor can check for health risks associated with high incidence of visceral fat with tests like blood work or ECG scans, and they may refer you to a nutritionist.
The only way to definitively diagnose visceral fat is with a CT or MRI scan. However, these are expensive and time-consuming procedures.
Instead, general guidelines are typically used to evaluate your visceral fat and its risk on your body. Harvard Health, for example, says that about 10 percent of all body fat is visceral fat. If you calculate your total body fat and then take 10 percent of it, you can estimate your amount of visceral fat.
Most importantly, carrying excess visceral fat increases your risk for developing several very serious long-term, life-threatening medical conditions. These include:
heart attacks and heart disease
type 2 diabetes
stroke
breast cancer
correctional cancer
Alzheimer’s disease
