Are you motivated to finally lose weight and unleash a thinner, healthier version of yourself? You’re in good company.

Research shows that 45% of individuals throughout the world are currently attempting to shed extra pounds, mostly by exercising and eating healthier foods.

The problem? Losing weight is not for the faint of heart. To maintain a healthy weight, you need a balance between muscle and the three main types of body fat: brown, beige, and white fat.

Here’s a rundown of these three types of fat in the body and how to manage your weight with each type of fat.

Let’s dig in!

Three Main Types of Body Fat Cells Include Brown Fat

Brown fat is a good type of fat. This type of fat is responsible for burning energy and fatty acids while maintaining your core temperature to keep you feeling warm.

Although brown fat cells are primarily present in babies, adults do retain small amounts of this type of fat, usually in their shoulders and necks.

Note that brown body fat cells are not fat storage cells. Fortunately, this makes them easier to burn, particularly in colder climates.

Wondering how to manage brown fat? You don’t have to do much aside from keeping your fat levels healthy to support the proper production of brown fat.

However, researchers are currently trying to uncover methods of stimulating brown fat’s activity to aid in preventing obesity.

White Fat

White fat — the kind of fat most individuals instantly think of — can be good like brown fat is, but it can also be bad.

White body fat cells make up your body’s biggest system for storing energy. It produces a hormone called adiponectin, which is important for managing insulin. This means white fat plays a critical role in helping you to maintain appropriate blood sugar levels.

White fat also produces leptin, a hormone that helps with managing hunger. This type of fat also helps with managing the stress hormone cortisol and growth hormones.

White fat additionally plays a significant role in estrogen’s function in the body.

Still, even though white fat can certainly be good, excessive amounts of white fat can be unhealthy. That’s because too much white fat may lead to insulin resistance. This will increase your chance of gaining weight and experiencing the health concerns that come with it.

Where White Fat Is Found

If you have high amounts of fat on your abdomen, hips, or thighs, this is a sign that you have high levels of white fat. White fat cells are also stored beneath your skin in your arms and buttocks, as well as around your organs.

You can reduce your levels of white body fat cells by targeting workouts designed to build your muscle tissue. That’s because muscle tissue is better at burning calories compared with fat. This will help you to decrease your body’s levels of white fat.

You can also encourage your white fat’s transition to healthier brown fat by focusing more on your hunger cues. For instance, you should eat more consistently throughout the day. In addition, you should stop eating whenever you feel satiated to lose weight.

Healthy White Fat Levels

What is a healthy percentage of white body fat? The answer to this depends on your physical activity or fitness level.

However, as a general rule of thumb, a healthy percentage of body fat is between 14% and 24% in men who aren’t athletes. This percentage is between 21% and 31% in women who aren’t athletes.

If your fat percentage is higher than this range, you increase your risk of developing the following types of medical issues:

A higher percentage of body fat may also increase your risk of experiencing hormone imbalances and atherosclerosis, where plaque accumulates inside the arteries.

Beige Fat

Like brown fat, beige fat is a good type of fat. It can help your body to burn fat instead of storing it.

Beige fat cells form in your body when you undergo stress. This stress may stem from exercising, feeling cold, or simply feeling stressed. That’s because the stress causes your white fat to turn beige.

Beige fat is important because it enables your body to transform and burn your body’s bad fat (white fat) to maintain your core temperature. Put another way, beige fat supports the production of thermal energy from bad fat.

Maintaining high beige fat levels will help you to more easily maintain a healthy level of brown fat — the other good fat — and get rid of bad fat.

So, how do you do this? By exercising vigorously for 75 minutes or more each day.

You should specifically try to engage in high-intensity interval training, or HIIT. That’s because this level of intensity will increase the level of irisin, a hormone, in your body. This hormone is what prompts white fat to become beige.

How We Can Help

The three main types of body fat include brown, beige, and white fat. Brown fat and beige fat are both good types of fat. Meanwhile, white fat can be good but can also be bad if you have too much of it.

At Divine Weight Loss, we take pride in helping individuals in Brandon, Florida, to lose weight through our two weight loss programs: optimum energy and growth hormone therapy.

Get in touch with us to learn more about our programs for weight loss, and let’s get you on the path to a healthier you today!

SIGN UP FOR
OUR NEWSLETTER