I have been lifting weights, running, and biking. I lift just about every day. I have good muscle definition everywhere except my belly. I have about 10 pounds of fat around my belly and waist. How does a person get rid of that fat? It doesn’t seem to want to go away.
Cheers!
Visceral fat isn’t the fat around your waistline, it’s the fat around your internal organs (aka viscera).
Subcutaneous fat is different.
Both can be reduced with keto, but there’s no magic trick to burning fat from a particular part of your body. Just as it took time to put it on, it’ll take time to take it off.
Is it supposed to help with subcutaneous fat as well?
Short of having a DEXA scan, I’m not sure that the ordinary individual can distinguish between visceral fat and subcutaneous belly fat, at least without the help of a healthcare professional, or at least someone well-versed in anatomy.
Since going VLC/keto, I have certainly lost several inches around the middle, and it’s obvious even without the tape measure. But I still have far too much belly fat. I presume I must have lost some visceral fat, but I can’t be sure I don’t still have more to lose. (I’m at least 30 lbs away from “target weight”, so plenty of scope to lose).
Of course, I will keep calm and keto on, but seeing that wobbly belly each morning can be a bit dispiriting. 
I think it is easy to distinguish the difference. People just need to understand visceral is inside the trunk and subq is the marshmallow on top. You don’t need a degree to understand that…
Yes, I understand the concept, and I’ve seen diagrams and all
But I still can’t tell if my fat belly is all subcutaneous fat or results from a combination of residual visceral fat together with subcutaneous fat.
(Bear in mind that men’s and women’s belly areas are usually differently shaped, and what may be obvious to you about your body may not be so obvious to me about mine).
(But given that I still have at least 30 lbs to lose (being conservative), I fear that a lot of it is still visceral. Perhaps I should stump up for a scan).
THIS.
KCKO. My belly fat is the last to go, and still leaving after 3 years. I had a lot.
I know the ketogenic diet works though. I have COMPLETE faith. My body was likely deranged for over 25 years. I’ve been ketogenic for 3.
Patience grasshopper 
Also, @Mike_W_Ellwood
Time to “feel yourself up” VERY thoroughly. You’ve been lifting weights, so you should have no trouble tensing your abdominal muscles and feeling the difference between the fat under your skin(subcutaneous) lying on top of those tensed abdominal muscles, and any distention behind that tensed muscle wall.
Visceral fat is BEHIND that abdominal muscle wall. You cannot feel it with your hands. It is the fat that is literally attached to your organs
BUT
you can tell you still have it if your belly is still quite distended minus the subcutaneous fat you just identified. (unless you are dealing with some other issue that may cause intestinal bloat).
You will learn to recognize the difference between the two.
I did have my first DEXA scan this year. I HIGHLY recommend it. Mine from Dexafit was only $99 with a Groupon, normally $150.
I discovered that at this point I have more subcutaneous fat than visceral. For me this is a major victory, as I have been actively reversing my insulin resistance.
Also, as you lose weight, that skin above that subcutaneous fat will become soft and loose. It needs a lot of time to firm up at all, and depending on your personal genetics and where you started, it may never completely go away.
Good luck! You’re doing so well!
Fasting does affect both subcutaneous and visceral…just need to patient and let body decide how and where to autophagy next. I’m not aware of any spot-autophagy control strategies.
The “pinch test” gives you an idea of how much subcutaneous fat you have. For instance, if you can use calipers to measure the thickness of the skin-fat layer on your tummy, and if you record/track that data over time, then you will see if there is a change in subcutaneous fat or not. So, if you take both waist circumference readings and caliper “pinch test” readings, you will be able to detect if the fat loss comes from visceral area only or not. Of course a DEXA scan would give a more complete picture…but, this simple waist circumference and pinch test should provide a bit of indication of what is happening.
Thanks @Fiorella and @Brenda (and sorry Alan for hijacking your thread).
Alan is clearly a lot fitter and closer to “target” than I am.
Another clue for me would be my still too-high waist-to-height and waist-to-hip ratio.
Found lots of scary images re: visceral fat via google images, e.g.
Excellent graphic, yes.
You see how the belly is distended even without the subcutaneous fat? At one time, that was me and I had A LOT.
It is the visceral fat that causes insulin resistance. This is why TOFI’s exist. People who look slim, yet still develop T2DM.
See episode 54 with @matt and @Terri
Both are well now.
Love you guys!
Some of this can be inferred through shape. The classic “beer belly” which looks like a swollen abdomen, is more often than not visceral fat. “Love handles” on the other hand, are more likely subcutaneous fat at the waistline. That’s by no means a perfectly reliable technique, but it’s a reasonable way to estimate.
And yes, it’s frustrating to continue to see the spare tire. In my case, I take comfort in the knowledge that I am now wearing pants that are 4-6" smaller at the waist than what I was wearing at my heaviest.
To answer your first question, yes, both keto and IF will help with both visceral and subcutaneous fat, but the latter may take longer. And sadly, the waistline is probably the last to go for many of us.
[Edit] By “the latter” above, I mean subcutaneous fat, not IF. Realized the way I wrote that was unclear.
May I ask you how long it took to get rid of most of it?
I think some keto writers (I can’t remember if this includes The Dudes) say that visceral fat is the first to go (and/or is (relatively) quick to go. This has stuck in my mind (whether it’s right or wrong).
Therefore when it doesn’t go quite as quickly as I’d like, I tend to get a bit impatient.
(But I suppose “quickly” is all relative; I’ve only been doing this (this time around anyway) for about 4 months).
I’m in my third year.
Visceral did go first. Explains my markers for T2DM disappearing right away. Within first 6 months.
I think it was Robt Lustig that had a YouTube video where they reversed fatty liver in only 2 weeks using diet. So visceral fat can go pretty fast.
Agreed! Intermittent fasting truly does work on burning visceral fat but also improves brain power. I was recently inspired by a great documentary and TED Talk here are the links…
Eat, Fast and Live Longer on BBC (you’ll learn about the 5:2)
Why fasting bolsters brain power: Mark Mattson at TEDxJohnsHopkinsUniversity
I truly hope you watch both in their entirety they are life changing.
Watched the videos. Didn’t realize initially that the one doc that Mosely was talking to was Valter Longo, he of the Fasting-Mimicking Diet (FMD). Watched a linked video lecture by Longo going deeper on the FMD, and it struck me that one of the issues that I have with the progression in the BBC video is the attempt to find an easier way of achieving the benefits, and the assertion (which Longo seems to share) that water-only fasting is “too extreme”.
What’s strange is that Longo, in the same video I watched (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgo5-5f3Q-Q) acknowledges that the root of the problem with aging today stems from the fact that we eat constantly, and that that isn’t normal. That in our past (and fairly recent past, at that) most humans went through periods where food was not readily available, and the end result of this was periods where our bodies went into repair mode.
So if that was “normal” during most of human history, why does he assert that fasting is “extreme” and should only happen under supervision at a clinic? It’s a strange assertion, and one wonders whether it has to do with the fact that he’s working on FDA approval for his FMD as an intervention for aging. I don’t blame him for wanting to profit from his research and work, but I do think it’s reasonable to question whether that’s having an impact on his views of actual fasting.
I get that some people find fasting difficult. I have trouble getting motivated to start a fast. But once I’m fasting, it’s not terribly difficult to get through a multi-day fast, and knowing that it has some pretty profound metabolic benefits makes it that much easier.
@devhammer I watched part of an interview with Longo in which he described his efforts to start his study of the effects of fasting before chemo treatments. He said that after 5 or 6 years (!) of trying to get oncologists and patients to sign on, he came up with the fasting-mimicking diet and that’s when folks finally to agreed to do it. [The results are encouraging! Dramatically reduced side effects from treatments when the patients used a FMD before (and/or during? I don’t remember the details).]
Those of us who fast don’t actually find it difficult but I think it’s so foreign to most people that just the idea of it is… it just seems impossible. He spent a long time battling that particular block, which is probably why he referred to water-only fasting as extreme. He might not think it’s extreme from a medical or scientific perspective, but in his experience it definitely was from a clinical one.
@devhammer A large percentage of the population has insulin resistance and elevated insulin due to consuming a “healthy low fat diet”. For such people (including my former self) going without food for very long is very challenging and for them true fasting is too extreme.
Even though I’m healthier now on keto I can only comfortably sustain a water fast for a couple days. After the 3rd day I’m miserable. But I’ve done up to 2 weeks of near fasting and I’m hoping to go much longer on my current effort.