Why waist size matters
Your waist size is one of the best, and easiest, ways to assess your metabolic health and risk of diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
Being lumpy or rotund around your middle arises from too much visceral fat and indicates the body’s hormonal system has gone awry. It is one of the biggest clues we have about our underlying health and waist circumference correlates with risk of death better than any other health metric.
Reducing your waist size is probably one of the best things you can do to improve your health in the future.
Ideally your waist should be no more than half your height – use a tape measure or try the string test where you take a piece of string as long as your height, fold it in half and see if it fits comfortably around your waist.
It is a more sensitive measure than weight or BMI (Body Mass Index) as people with a normal weight or BMI can still be metabolically unhealthy. If we want a long and healthy life we should be paying more attention to our waist size.
Visceral fat is more metabolically active than the subcutaneous fat spread around our bodies, under our skin, and it drives inflammation and insulin resistance which can lead to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia and premature ageing. There is no doubt that visceral fat is dangerous for our health.
If your waist is out of proportion then it is likely you are carbohydrate intolerant and are eating more refined carbs than your body can deal with. You would benefit from reducing your sugar and carbohydrate intake to get your hormones back in balance and help prevent health problems in the future.
“Prevention is not just better than cure. Prevention is the cure”
Professor Robert Lustig.
Lustig is a paediatric neuroendocrinologist, specialising in childhood obesity, who’s YouTube film ‘Sugar: The Bitter Truth’ has been viewed over 14 million times. Which is up a million since the last time I looked in the summer! I am a big fan and his film is well worth a watch: https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM
Being metabolically healthy also enhances resilience to infectious diseases such as Covid. We have seen during the pandemic that the risk of death from Covid is 12x higher for those with underlying health conditions.
I am really saddened that we as a nation aren’t doing more to encourage people to cut their sugar and carb intake to reduce their insulin resistance, visceral fat and waistlines which would help counter the threat from Covid.
Making changes to your diet and ways of eating, including reducing carbohydrate intake, can result in your waist reducing pretty quickly and noticeably.
I went from a generous size 14 to a trim size 10 waist, in just a couple of months, once I reduced my carb intake and got my blood sugars and insulin levels under control. Without feeling starving or needing a massive amount of will power. I am still wearing the same clothes (I don’t shop much!) and that first pair of size 10 skinny jeans I bought 10 years ago when I changed my diet.
As we head into the festive season it is really easy to indulge in foods we don’t need that aren’t good for us. Take it easy with these, try not to feel pressurised into eating when you don’t feel like it and remember that social occasions are actually just that. A chance to be social and connect with others, rather than an opportunity to eat foods many of us are not biologically well equipped to deal with.