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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

> Studies have shown that visceral fat, which is fat that surrounds the internal organs in the abdominal area, is associated with chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes, while subcutaneous fat, which is located directly under the skin, is not as strongly associated.

How does one determine if one has an excess of visceral fat?

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There are scans for like $50 that will tell you. Google Dexa scan or something like that.

$50? Are you talking about US Healthcare where $50 just gets you a call to the receptionist?

Calls to the receptionist are universally free. Your hate on the US healthcare model (not without flaws) is detached from reality.

(I took the OP's comment to be somewhat sarcastic—exaggerated for effect.)

A DXA (DEXA) scan will quantify visceral fat for you. This is a non-invasive scan which uses a low-dose x-ray. Most cities have some sort of sports medicine facility where you can get one. It's typically not covered by health insurance but fairly cheap to pay out of pocket.

https://health.ucdavis.edu/sports-medicine/resources/dxa-inf...

whats wild is there are people who look very fat - who have lots of subcutaneous fat, who don't have visceral fat. The excessive subcutaneous fat can be hard on your joints but doesn't seem to correlate to other health issues.

A waist measurement is the cheapest and simplest way other than just looking.

You want to make sure you measure under similar conditions, like in the morning after relieving yourself (for example).

If it's too high, losing a ~0.5-1 lbs per week while strength and endurance training with progressive overload will get it down sustainably.

https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/visceral-fat-waist-vs-w...

That is a proxy estimate. You can’t actually measure visceral fat at home.

Yes, obviously.

But it's a cheap and effective one.

If you've lost 5 inches from your waist as measured from your bellybutton, it's unlikely you've lost zero visceral body fat.

I agree it’s a great starting point for the daily check. But it’s not a good answer to a specific explicit request to measure visceral fat imo. And there’s a lot of confusion in these comments about how much they actually correlate.

If you use the waist measurement to compute your waist to height ratio and it's above 0.5, then you know you almost certainly have too much, and losing weight is the next action.

This was all explained in the link I shared.

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