Body Fat Posted on 30 Mar 23:00 , 0 comments

[caption id="attachment_514" align="alignleft" width="192"]For once the guy who writes the article looks the part. Why? Because I have developed brown fat and I know how to control it! For once the guy who writes the article looks the part. Why? Because I have developed brown fat and I know how to control it![/caption]



Who am I? Click here for my Bio!


By Todd Lee M.D.Instagram

What? No moderately abusive rant? No. If you're reading this you know what you have to destroy and I'm going to teach you how to do it.  Know thine enemy. If it bleeds, I can kill it. Time to begin your slash and burn campaign with some strategic divide and conquer. Sun Tzu and Niccolo Machiavelli would be proud of you for reading this and of course I am too.

Types of Fat

Adipocytes (Fat cells) store triglycerides. A Triglyceride is a glycerol backbone and 3 fatty acid tails of varying length. These tails can be unsaturated or saturated.  Saturated tails are a long string of carbons without double bonds because of this saturation they stack tightly and are stable at room temperature. Bacon grease, butter, shortening and coconut oil are all examples of fats that are solid at room temperature and thus are saturated fats.  Unsaturated means there are double bonds between carbon atoms.  1 double bond is MONOunsaturated as in olive oil or peanut oil.   POLYunsaturated means multiple double bonds.  Omega-3 are the most important type.  The Omega-3 term means the double bond is  3 carbons in from the terminal (omega) carbon and the Omega 6 is 6 carbons in.

White Fat

[caption id="attachment_551" align="alignleft" width="446"]Notice white fat cells are pretty much 100% lipid droplets Notice white fat cells are pretty much 100% lipid droplets[/caption]

This is the most abundant type of fat.  It is called “white” because that is what it looks like.  It is the marbling in steak and the mush under your skin.  When your fat cells are small, these white cells produce a hormone called adiponectin,  This directs insulin to bind to your muscle and liver and not fat cells. Insulin’s job is to shuttle carbs and amino acids into muscle cells and carbs and fat into fat cells.  By keeping your fat cells small, it makes your body more efficient at building muscle and less efficient at storing fat. The fatter you get, the easier it is for you to get fatter and the harder it is to build muscle.  For competitors, this means NEVER GET FAT IN THE OFF SEASON!

[caption id="attachment_552" align="alignleft" width="350"]If you're obese this is what your If you're obese this is what your "muscle" looks like. I laugh when guys say " I lost all my size (muscle) dieting" yeah your "muscle" was just lard. Want dense striated muscle? Lose fat to get detail.[/caption]

Leptin is released by full happy fat cells small or not. Leptin does many things and one of these things is it inhibits ghrelin activity in the brain. Thus, if fat cells are full, ghrelin activity is low. If fat cells are depleted from burning fat ghrelin activity is high. Ghrelin is what makes someone crave high calorie food. Ever notice that when you're a little hungry you want chicken and rice but if you miss a meal by a couple of hours you talk yourself into thin crust pizza to prevent yourself from “losing your gainz”? That’s ghrelin tricking you. It makes you rationalize giving into your hunger.

Like chocolate, cocaine and sex, ghrelin acts on the reward/addictive part of the brain.  This is why women are so emotionally attached to fattening foods. These foods work like drugs and ghrelin is a larger problem for women than men. The ghrelin/leptin balance is altered by the testosterone to estrogen ratio.  This means addictive foods are more addictive for women than men.

Ghrelin binds to the hippocampus which is the part of the brain that regulates memory. Addiction is a learned behavior and learning is based on memory.. (When you’re hungry, your stomach is empty which releases ghrelin and now you’re in a state to remember more and learn quicker.)

Most women undereat throughout the day and then binge on high calorie foods when they can't take the hunger (Ghrelin) anymore. By eating addictive foods, the high ghrelin state  amplifies their addiction as they learn that if they eat that food when hungry, they get a huge emotional rush (dopamine).  Leptin is not released when emotionally stressed and that is why many people cope by eating “comfort” (toxic) foods; ghrelin runs amok in the absence of leptin.


As you can see you want to keep your fat cells small and as you diet a hormonal cascade begins that tricks you into thinking your body “needs” a certain food like a woman on her period or a pregnant woman thinks they need chocolate.  Truth is you DO NOT! It’s your body tricking you into getting fat because a fat body is a baby making body and all your good for, as far as mother nature is concerned, is to make more humans. As you’ve noticed driving home from work there are more than enough humans.  So fight overpopulation: Don't eat when your body tells you you’re hungry, eat what and when I tell you.

Brown Fat

Birds-Dinosaurs-and-Brown-Fat-2This is a functional type of fat that creates energy from triglycerides.  The reason it is brown in color is because it has a large number of mitochondria.  Mitochondria are organelles which, with the use of oxygen, convert fat into energy in the form of heat and ATP.  Normally 9 calories of energy come from the burning of one gram of fat, but with uncoupling proteins found in brown fat, some of these calories are lost as heat. It was originally believed only hibernating animals and babies had brown fat. When we are cold, we shiver and our muscles generate heat by burning energy.  More muscle, more heat. That’s why bodybuilders are hot to the touch and why many wear shorts in winter or tanks in the Fall.  Babies and hibernating creatures don’t shiver so the brown fat converts triglycerides from the white fat into heat.  Brown fat cells have more capillaries carrying oxygen rich blood to the mitochondria, again, making them darker than white cells.

[caption id="attachment_549" align="alignleft" width="275"]Brown fat Notice how much more cell there is to a brown fat cell? it's barely lipid droplets at all![/caption]

Interesting tidbit: Brown fat and muscle cells have the same original stem cell. When that stem cell is exposed to the transcription factor PRDM16 it turns into brown fat and when it is not exposed, it turns into a muscle cell. White fat cells have a separate origin.

It has recently been discovered that exercise activates brown fat to burn white fat and the more intense the exercise, the more brown fat activation.  Additionally, the body adapts to frequent bouts of high intensity exercise to transform more of the white fat to brown fat. This is one reason men can lose fat so much faster than women; weight training is intense, cardio and Zumba is not.  Thus repeated weight training shifts the metabolism to being more efficient at burning fat.

[caption id="attachment_550" align="alignleft" width="502"]Left: hard workers fat Right: Social time gym rat fat Left: Hard workers fat
Right: Social time gym rat fat[/caption]

I know those who do Zumba may think it is intense and I know they sweat more than when they lift weights.  But that’s because in Zumba, you move your body weight through space for 30 minutes to an hour and  can burn at most 700 calories in that time.  If you’re only squatting 10 pounds for 20 reps you're doing 1/20 the work of a man squatting 200 pounds for 20 reps is doing.  Thus men of equal weight can burn more calories per hour lifting weight than they can doing cardio but women who don't lift lack the strength and can’t burn as many calories per hour doing weights as they can performing cardio.

Women: learn how to lift so you can build muscle and increase your brown fat at the same time. Cardio accomplishes little save burning calories at that moment.

Beta agonists like clenbuterol and ephedra up regulate brown fat activity. They make your body give off heat by activating the brown fat cells. DNP is an uncoupler and can cause more heat and less energy per gram of fat burned. L-carnitine facilitates transport of fat into the mitochondria.  Yohimbine targets fat in hard to burn places for liberation while Synephrine and caffeine liberate fat from white fat cells. There is the sequential chain of getting the fat from where you don't want it to the place that burns it but only works in the absence of insulin. So if you’re taking 5 different drugs to burn fat, they will only work if your diet is right. Cytomel or T3 will upregulate your total metabolism and also protect your muscles when combined with Clenbuterol.

Subcutaneous Fat

visceral fatThis is a fancy way of saying the fat under the skin.  It is usually just white fat and has no negative health consequences. It is not necessary in men and covers our muscles up, but can be found sexy on women in the right amount and in the right places.  The term “supple” means toned muscles with a thin layer of fat, just like “curves” are fat covered muscles.  This is not to imply that a body made exclusively of fat is attractive but a healthy balance of fat and muscle is what men are physically attracted to at an instinctive level. Breasts are mostly fat.

Once a woman has a 6 pack this is when they start to get too lean and is evidenced by the loss of a period. If you can't get pregnant then men will instinctively not want to have sex with you. Why plant seeds in a sallow field?  It’s the fertile field which gets plowed.  Neither Playboy bunnies, pornstars, nor Victoria’s Secret models have ripped abs and this is the reason.

Men the same is true for us. Women don’t like the stage ready bodybuilder typically. I have met one woman ever who does and she admits she has a fetish. This is why the Dad Bod is all the rage.  Once your bodyfat gets too low your less sexualy attractive and likely less sexually functional. Testosterone has a positive correlation with body fat to a point.

Visceral Fat

visceral fatThis is the fat inside your abdomen. It is why you see older bodybuilders with ripped abs but huge midsections.  It wraps around your organs and slowly kills you, increases the risk of diabetes and causes dementia.  Mechanisms for dementia are not known but is believed to be related to leptin, as that has some role in memory.  It is formed when someone’s insulin resistance goes up.  As a person eats a lot of carbs their insulin goes up. As with any hormone, as the concentration in the blood rises the receptors down regulate. The muscles become less sensitive to the insulin and it directs the carbs and fat to fat cells. Remember adiponectin? As the fat cells get fuller they hypertrophy just like muscle cells. Now your fat cells are larger and there is both high insulin and low adiponectin. This directs the fat and carbs to the visceral fat cells. Like a vice, they crush your vital organs over time and make insulin sensitivity of the muscle even worse. In the end it’s a downward spiral. When a bodybuilder injects GH subcutaneously he targets and burns subcutaneous fat, but not visceral fat. By the end of his prep, he will have shredded abs and glutes but keep most of his visceral fat he put on during the offseason. If this happens, year after year his midsection will get bigger and bigger.  Nicotine has been proven to decrease not only fat accumulation when in a calorie surplus (while bulking), but decreases the percentage of visceral fat that is gained. For example, instead of gaining 8 pounds of subcutaneous fat and 8 pounds of visceral fat you gain 6 pounds and 4 pounds respectively.

Diet and Exercise

To burn your unnecessary body fat using the methods I found most effective can be accomplished using  a simple integrative system which I have used on hundreds of people.  Check out my Dr. Lee's 9 Steps to Building a Better Body.

It has is everything you need for the diet,  a basic weights routine and links to advanced cardio and weights theory. Additionaly there is a list of the supplements you can safely use and most importantly, section 9 describes the simple ways you can adjust your calories to continue to shed the fat, or build muscle.  Read and memorize every nuance and do everything exactly how I say.

