The Body Fat That Can Help Against Diabetes?

When it comes to type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes, one of the first things doctors will typically advise most people is to lose weight.

There is logic to this—it is known that body fat can reduce insulin sensitivity (spoiler: there’s nuance to this, though—more on this later!).

However, in many cases of advising people to lose weight, the first and foremost reason is a more a matter of Fat’s Real Barriers To Health.

So what’s this fat that can help?

We’ll get to that shortly.

First, let’s talk about the fat that really doesn’t help: visceral fat

We wrote more about visceral fat, here: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It ← “visceral belly fat” is actually a redundant tautology repeated more than once unnecessarily (since the only place we get it is the viscera of the abdominal cavity), but including both terms makes the article easier to find when using our website’s search function 😉

Metabolically, it’s very different from subcutaneous fat. Now, we do need some! Those organs do need cushioning, after all. But it’s all-too-easy to have too much of a good thing, in which case, it becomes a very bad thing.

Researchers (Dr. Elsa Vasquez Arreola et al.) found that prediabetes can go into remission without weight loss, with about one in four people normalizing blood sugar despite no drop in body weight.

And, notably, remission without weight loss provides the same level of protection against future type 2 diabetes as remission achieved through losing weight.

This is a huge help, because focusing only on weight loss hasn’t worked well for many people, who become discouraged by being hounded to lose weight and then not being able to do so, and if they think their health is really going to be dependent on weight loss, they well just give up.

As it turns out, blood sugar improvements depend more on fat distribution than total body weight.

And why?

Let’s go back to those two types of fat we mentioned earlier:

• Visceral fat: fat stored around your internal organs increases inflammation and disrupts insulin function, raising blood sugar levels.
• Subcutaneous fat: fat stored under your skin (i.e. the fat you can reach to squish) can actively support healthy metabolism by releasing hormones that improve insulin sensitivity.

Now, with that in mind, guess what happened in the study? That’s right, people who reversed prediabetes without weight loss shifted fat away from abdominal organs towards subcutaneous stores, which explains why remission was associated with better insulin sensitivity and improved pancreatic beta-cell function.

You can read the paper in full, here: Prevention of type 2 diabetes through prediabetes remission without weight loss

What to do about it

Firstly, do see our previously-mentioned article: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It for the dos and don’ts of getting healthier (which for most people means: lower) visceral fat levels.

Next up, see also: Body Fat & Pelvic Floor Problems: What Matters Most Is Where The Fat Is for the science behind “apple or pear” distributions, and how to switch it up.

You may also be wondering: Can We Do Fat Redistribution? And the answer is yes, and we are doing it all the time whether we want to or not, so we might as well know what things affect our fat distribution in various body parts. The article we just linked there shows how.

While we’re at it, one other place you really don’t want excess fat, for metabolic reasons, is your liver. So: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

Want to learn more?

You might like this book that we reviewed a while ago:

Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman ← this is about insulin resistance, and, importantly, the invisible insulin resistance that precedes blood sugar imbalances by many years (it goes unnoticed because the pancreas will dutifully keep cranking out more and more insulin to keep the blood sugars stable, until one day it just can’t keep up anymore, and then and only then does prediabetes get diagnosed).

Enjoy!