By Andy Kay, Training Manager at British Military Fitness 

If you’ve been watching your scales to see if your exercise regime is paying off, you might be wasting your time. New research has found that doing between two and four months of endurance training can cause either no, or very minimal, reduction in body weight, with participants in a study losing only between zero and 4kg of weight.[1]

Does this mean you should throw in the towel and swap evenings working up a sweat for nights on the couch? No! The same researchers studied the reduction in visceral fat, and found that after two to six months it was markedly reduced, with participants who had lost no weight, having reducing their visceral fat by 6%.

So, what is visceral fat?

Visceral body fat is what is created when the body stores excess calories as fat cells around your organs. You might not always be able to see it on the outside but excess visceral fat is bad news, being known as a risk factor for coronary heart disease and diabetes, as well as being linked to a number of different cancers and even Alzheimer’s disease.

This is because an excess of visceral body fat can interfere with liver function and can disrupt your organs’ normal function. This can lead to an increase in cholesterol, particularly bad cholesterol, as well as increased insulin resistance, which can lead to type 2 diabetes.

How much is too much?

It can be hard to identify if you have too much visceral body fat, but the World Health Organization recommends that a waist to hip ratio higher than 0.9 for men and 0.85 for women is high risk. Divide the circumference of your waist by the circumference of your hips to work this out.

What can you do about it?

As the researchers found, exercise is highly effective in reducing this type of fat, even if it has little effect on weight, with every 1% reduction in body weight associated with a 3% reduction in visceral body fat. Steady state cardio such as running, cycling and swimming, as well as exercise classes based on high intensity interval training such as BMF, are highly effective in reducing fat and helping people to get fitter. Exercise two to four times a week to gain the benefits, and ensure you are leading an active lifestyle the rest of the time, with more time spent walking and less spent sitting down.

What are the first steps to reducing visceral fat?

If you have a high waist to hip ratio and want to reduce your visceral body fat the first step is to get active and start exercising. From there, the focus should be on limiting portion sizes and making sensible choices when it comes to nutrition. Swap sugary and salty snacks in favour of complex carbohydrates, protein and vegetables and try to prepare as much of your own food as possible.

For more information, please visit: www.britishmilitaryfitness.com or to sign up to a free British Military Fitness trial go to: https://www.britmilfit.com/try-bmf-for-free/

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.12406/abstract