BBC journalist Dr Michael Mosley looked and was shocked by what he found.
His body was the ultimate Trojan horse. Three years ago, Dr Michael Mosley considered himself trim and healthy. But lurking inside him, around his vital organs, were layers of fat.
He now knows he was a TOFI: Thin on the Outside, Fat on the Inside. People identified as TOFIs often just think they are normal weight or have a bit of “middle-age spread”. Housed deep within their abdomens, however, are loads of fat around their organs, allowing their bodies to carry deadly illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease.
Most TOFIs are blissfully unaware of their status as human ticking time bombs, but if the fat is left idle, they face higher risks of diabetes and dementia, on top of cancer and metabolic disturbances.
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Mosley, a medical doctor, BBC journalist and documentary maker who is best known in Australia for popularising the 5:2 Diet, made his TOFI discovery when he climbed into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine in the name of work. He saw the fat on the MRI and thought about upping his exercise and tweaking his diet, but “didn’t really do anything about it” until a trip to his GP to check a suspicious mole made him face reality, 18 months later.
“I had some blood tests done [at the behest of the GP] and my doctor told me that at that point I was diabetic, with incredibly high cholesterol,” Mosley says.
Mosley, aged in his mid-50s, then had a second MRI and was astounded at how many extra tubes of fat lay around his organs. He is medically trained, his wife is a GP and he knows about the dangers of being overweight, but he says until his blood tests showed his diabetes and he had the second MRI, he hadn’t heeded the warning.
“I think I was really in a state of shock [when he learnt he was a TOFI] because I’d seen my father die of diabetes-related illnesses,” Mosley says. “I had assumed I was healthy and suddenly I was discovering I wasn’t, and had to take this visceral fat situation seriously.”
Mosley says he plainly wasn’t obese and had thought his diet and exercise patterns were reasonable. He quickly started investigating intermittent fasting, trying fasting for several days at a time, before settling on a regime of eating normally five days a week and cutting his kilojoule intake for two. He made a documentary about it and co-wrote the best-selling Fast Diet book. The diet suggests women eat 2100 kilojoules on each fast day, while men consume 2500.
Mosley says he is passionate about alerting people to the dangers of visceral fat and advises anyone who fears they may be a TOFI to measure their waists. He speaks about the TOFI phenomenon in his documentary The Truth About Exercise, which is showing on the BBC Knowledge channel as part of the What’s Your Body Hiding? series starting next month.
“The first thing people can obviously do is just get a tape measure and measure themselves and be honest about it,” he says. “And they can certainly go to their GP, to have their cholesterol measured and their blood glucose measured.”
Mosley combined diet with exercise to cut his abdominal fat in 10 weeks, losing about 0.9 kilograms each week, and says he now fasts one day per week to maintain his weight loss and keep the visceral fat at bay.
“The good thing about visceral fat,” he says, “is that when you get rid of it – and you can get rid of it relatively easily – then all the other markers [such as blood sugar and cholesterol levels] improve.”
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/the-devil-inside-20130910-2thyr.html
11:34 pm
21 Sep 13