Measuring Abdominal Fat: What’s Your Health Risk?
Shrinking an expanding waistline is not not a matter of beauty. Excess belly fat can significantly up your risk of heart disease as satisfactory as other dangerous medical conditions.
We’re all familiar with subcutaneous fat by now. It’s the front fat that you see in the mirror and makes it hard to zip up your jeans. But it’s the visceral fat which is the inner fat that resides fervent inside your belly that is so dangerous. This compact fat, sometimes called “veiled” belly fat, builds up between and around your internal organs.
How can you measure your abdominal fat?
The most on target method is to use computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure the amount of visceral fat. These imaging techniques are the first research tools for evaluating abdominal obesity, but because they’re expensive and require complex equipment, they are not seemly for research studies or patient care.
Well, I guess you and me are screwed then? Not so fast!
We can can even so measure our abdominal fat with a seamstress measuring tape (not the stiff metal tape from Domicile Depot) that helps us determine our waist-to-hip ratio.
Here’s how it works:
With your abdomen calm, measure your waist at the navel. Next, measure your hips at their widest in the matter of. Finally, divide your waist size by your hip size:
Waist (in inches) divided by Hips (in inches) = Correlation
Great, my ratio is 0.88; what the hell does that mean?
This figuring can be translated into a general health risk. The chance of suffering a heart attack or motion increases steadily as a man’s ratio rises above 0.95; for women, risk begins to prosper above 0.85. This waist-to-hip ratio stuff is pretty cool, right?
...
