Folks - get that DEXA scan today and find out your visceral fat levels.
I finally got mine done last week and it was an unpleasant surprise! I’m the same weight I was in high school - but my total percent fat is up from 10% to 24%, which is really bad news. I have 2.5lbs of VAT (Visceral Adipose Tissue) - which I’m highly motivated to lose now. That DEXA is the best $50 I’ve spent all year, in terms of motivation per $. A good place to get DEXA scans - BodySpec (LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Austin)
The more visceral fat you have, and the longer you have it for, the worse off you are. Visceral fat contributes to chronic inflammation and metabolic dysfunction, accelerating the onset and progression of age-related conditions. This is well understood in the case of obesity, but even lesser degrees of being overweight are harmful to long-term health, as the data here illustrates.
Visceral fat tissue, interspersed with resident immune cells, when activated, increases local or systemic inflammation, leading to the production of cytokines and other immune and pro-inflammatory mediators, promoting insulin resistance, oxidative stress, and altered cell metabolism. Abdominal fat accumulation is associated with changes in glucose metabolism and lipid metabolism, primarily due to insulin resistance, resulting in hyperlipidemia, hypertension, glucose intolerance, and mitochondrial abnormalities in skeletal muscle.
An individual’s leanness or corpulence is commonly assessed using the Body Mass Index (BMI), but this measure does not account for fat distribution or differentiate between fat and muscle mass. Therefore, clinicians have explored alternative anthropometric measurements that better reflect body composition and mortality risk, such as waist circumference (WC) and waist-to-hip and waist-to-height ratios. Most of these measures fail to reflect body composition effectively or are easily affected by variations in other body measurements. A new body shape index (A Body Shape Index, ABSI) has been introduced as an anthropometric measure unrelated to BMI, based on waist circumference adjusted for weight and height. ABSI offers a better explanation of how central abdominal adiposity is strongly associated with mortality than other anthropometric measurements, and it captures additional harmful effects not captured by BMI.
This prospective cohort study included 159 volunteers (94 women, aged 60-80 years), recruited in the frame of the “Physical Activity and Nutrition for Great Ageing” (PANGeA) Cross-border Cooperation Program Slovenia-Italy 2007-2013, and followed for 10 years. During the 10-year follow-up, 10 deaths (6.7%) were recorded. ABSI (adjusted for age, smoking, comorbidities, and therapy) was an independent predictor of mortality (hazard ratio = 4.65). Higher ABSI scores were linked to reduced VO2max (r = -0.190) and increased systolic blood pressure (r = 0.262). An ABSI-based predictive model showed strong discriminatory power, and thus ABSI is a reliable predictor of 10-year mortality in active, non-obese elderly individuals and may improve risk stratification in clinical practice.
Now you know why I was so motivated to start on a GLP med. Everyone who I tell that I’m on a weight loss med says “what? why do YOU need one of those?” I explain to them that I had a good deal of abdominal/visceral fat, which is where all of my extra weight goes, that I usually hide well by sucking in my gut constantly.
Now that I’ve lost 25 pounds, there’s nothing to suck in! And I’m confident I’m much healthier for it. Looking forward to my next DEXA in a few weeks.
BTW when people ask me how I lost the weight, it’s by following a whole foods plant-based diet with a bit of whey protein supplementation and lots of resistance training. The GLP med just allows me to stick with my diet plan because now I don’t have irresistable urges to pig out on sugary/fatty desserts and high calorie snacks.
Important topic. I intended to get a DEXA scan prior to going on rapa in January, just so I’d have a baseline comparison to see what all the interventions do for me when it comes to lean mass vs fat. I also intend to go on empagliflozin, and I’m hoping for some help with visceral fat loss there. I don’t happen to have an appetite issue, so for me it’s purely about getting rid of glucose before it gets sequestered in fat tissue. I may have to amp up weightlifting exercise to not lose lean mass, but I’m not sure how to dial that in exactly, perhaps more of what I already do, high rep, low weight for hypertrophy. Maybe add a bit more protein, cut other macros? I’m really not sure. All of this gets harder the older you get, trying to hang on to muscle mass.
If this doesn’t do the trick, I may look to GLP-1RA for assistance with fat loss, as at my age (66), it gets hard without the help from pharma, because I have no desire or time to spend all my days at the gym, as I don’t like exercise, and resent the time spent.
A number of members of the forum have reported very significant improvements in body composition, visceral fat levels, and weight. I experienced some of these myself, but in my case I’ve lost some of the improvement.
Yet Rapamycin shows promise in significantly reducing visceral fat as part of its potential healthspan and longevity benefits even as the effects appear to vary and may depend on factors such as dosage, duration of treatment, diet, and individual characteristics.
Can we identify factors that can support Rapamycin’s positive effects?
We all know the big things like sleep, exercise, sufficient protein, but I wonder if we can identify some small thing that acts as a catalyst to unleash the visceral fat reduction benefits of Rapamycin?
to put it in perspective 24% is well below the US male average for all the age groups except of 16-19 boys where it is 23%. 10% was impressive and in line with an athlete percentage body fat.
So one can get an upper bound on VAT from total fat & a reasonable guess (they claim) from one’s height & waist size.
The article says the scales aren’t very accurate, but it doesn’t say how much they tend to be off. My scale seems to be off from their calculation by about 25%.
Yes - you are correct there, but I still feel completely surprised and disappointed… for longevity I really don’t want to be above 15% and ideally down around 10% to 12%, with under 1/2 lb of VAT. I’m motivated now - and will be working much harder on this issue.
Here are the percentages, from the DEXA printout they gave me:
No - so I really had no idea what my Visceral fat was or even total body fat. The DEXA points it out very visually - which really helps to motivate me.
Absolutely - rapamycin should be helping, but since this is the first time I’ve done a DEXA, I don’t know by how much. I’m going to be testing higher doses over the coming months, at the same time I’m embarking on a major exercise and fat-loss program, so I’ll report on progress, but it will be hard to discern exactly what causes what, given I’ll be manipulating many factors at once.
It’s helpful to have a target. I understand that a lean young person will be predisposed to ectopic fat with lower overall body fat later in life due to smaller fat storage depots. The fat had to go somewhere. So, for ex-skinny kids, we have less margin for error.
On my Dexa I had almost 1 lbs visceral fat with 16% body fat. I’m still working on it but I think this is very important to my healthspan.
How much success have people had with reducing VAT?
Losing weight in general is famously difficult. Losing a specific kind of fat without losing weight doesn’t sound any easier. I’ll be interested to hear what works.
Exactly, I attribute a loss of 20 lb of visceral fat since starting rapamycin 4 years ago. And, it hasn’t returned.
I started losing visceral fat after 3 months of 6 mg rapamycin once a week and over a period of a month… I lost about 20 lb total. And yet my arm size, thighs, muscled chest and firm ass were the same size. Worried about where the fat was going from, I talk to my general practitioner. He said that I’d lost all the fat around my organs… you can’t see… the visceral fat but that it’s hard to exercise away. I did a DEXA scan to confirm and it proved there was no fat around my organs. my doctor and I agreed it had to be the rapamycin eating all the extra fat during my autophagy cycle while dosing rapamycin weekly.
I’m doing a new DEXA in December and bone density. Seeing if possibly the taurine, K2 vitamin and rapamycin have actually increased my bone density… which I was told is impossible you only get what you get and once you lose bone density …you never get it back.
I understand the issue with increased body fat, but aren’t you also concerned with 14% loss of lean mass if your overall weight has’t changed? Assumingbyou haven’t had limb removed, that’s a lot of muscle to lose. Are you doing any resistance training? I’d just caution that as you adopt measures to lose the fat, be cognizant that severe dieting can reduce muscle mass as we’ll as adipose tissue. Dr Attia reports (anecdotally) that GLP-1 also causes 50% muscle loss.
He updated that in a very recent members-only podcast and provided newer evidence that lean mass loss from GLP drugs isn’t any higher than losing weight via other means, and can be effectively counteracted by resistance training and adequate protein intake.
Pioglitazone is supposed to move fat from visceral to subQ. I believed it and used the high rate for most of a year. Nothing as near as I can tell so I quit. Having said that, my doc has a dexa machine but wouldn’t upgrade the software to do the VAT. Said it would never pay him. I’ll bug him again and find out who in town can do it.
