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It's not a remotely good proxy

Seriously, you don't think there's a connection between visceral fat and abdominal fat even though there's plenty of evidence that there is along with just common sense?

It's just a particular type of abdominal fat so obviously the more abdominal fat that you can see it means you also have more of the type that can't see as well... It's not that complicated

The amount of body fat and ways the body stores fat are highly uncorrelated for people who are not severely obese, and severe obesity itself might be made worse over time by high levels of visceral fat.

Yes visceral fat is metabolically active so it can make you more fat

But I'm not sure why you think you can have a lot of visceral fat without any obvious abdominal fat

“In this meta-analysis, BMI and WC, but not WHR, were very strongly correlated with imaging-derived total and subcutaneous abdominal fat. By comparison, all three measures were moderately or strongly correlated with imaging-based visceral abdominal fat, with WC showing the greatest correlation.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10503139/

Seems decent to me.

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