What is Blood Pressure?
As your heart beats, it pushes your blood through your arteries which pushes against the sides of these blood vessels. The strength of this pushing is called your blood pressure. Your heart squeezes and pushes your blood through your arteries, making your blood pressure go up.
A blood pressure of 130/80 or higher on a regular basis is considered to be placing too much pressure on the blood vessels. Having consistently high blood pressure can eventually cause damage to the heart and blood vessels, leading to cardiovascular disease.
How Is Excess Body Fat Associated with High Blood Pressure?
Being overweight or obese can cause high blood pressure. When there is increased weight it can take more pressure to move the blood around the body so your heart must work much harder than it would at a healthy body weight.
The Location of Your Body Fat Matters!
People with fat around their abdominal area are at greater risk of developing high blood pressure than those who have fat concentrations elsewhere on the body. Not all belly fat is created equal. The deep fat mass surrounding our organs is far more dangerous than the fat lying just beneath the skin and may increase risk for high blood pressure, among other health conditions. And the more belly fat you have, the more likely you are to have visceral fat around your organs.
How to Lower Your Blood Pressure By Focusing on Body Composition
The good news is that when you lose weight (even a small amount), your blood pressure can go down and your blood vessels can loosen up, making it easier for your heart to pump blood throughout your body. Losing body fat, especially around the belly, can lower the risk of developing blood pressure and, potentially, completely eliminate high blood pressure.
How do I Find out my Body Composition?
At our clinic, we use a Bio-impedance Analyzer (BIA) which measures and tracks changes in the amounts of body fluids, fat, and lean body mass, which includes your muscles and organs. The test results will breakdown the % fat and % muscle mass in each part of your body.
Recommendations
Improve Nutrition and Get Exercise
It’s not just whether you’re overweight but how you carry that extra weight that impacts your risk for high blood pressure. The good news is that all types of belly fat, including visceral fat, disappear with weight loss. Through healthy lifestyle choices like maintaining a healthy diet and getting active, belly fat can be reduced, improving cardiovascular health and body composition.
Get your Body Composition Tested Regularly
Successful, long-term weight loss is the key to sustained cardiovascular health. You should get your body composition tested regularly to make sure you’re losing fat mass (and not muscle) – especially the deep, visceral fat that contributes heavily to hypertension.
By focusing on improving your body composition (and monitoring your progress closely), you’ll shed body fat and improve your blood pressure, among other health benefits of losing fat.
Need Additional Help?
Patients under our Nutrition Response Testing Program get tremendous results in not only lowering their blood pressure and losing body fat but also experience many other health benefits.
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