Our director, practice manager and Registered Nurse, Nicole, has helped many patients to live a healthier life after a diagnosis of fatty liver disease. Here, she shares her top tips on a sustainable fatty liver diet and the best type of exercise to do if you’re over 40.
What is fatty liver disease?
Fatty liver disease is a common condition that happens when too much fat builds up inside your liver. Over time, this can lead to scarring in your liver, known as fibrosis or cirrhosis depending on the degree. These are serious conditions that can compromise your liver function.
How do you lose weight with fatty liver disease?
Fatty liver disease is usually managed through lifestyle changes to help you improve your diet and lose weight. The trouble is that much of the advice you find online proves unsuccessful.
Here’s where Nicole shares her 5 best tips for managing fatty liver through diet and exercise.
Understand age-related changes in your body
Once you’re past 30, your body starts to change in countless ways. Changes relevant to fatty liver disease include a loss of muscle mass and lean tissue and an increase in body fat, particularly around your internal organs. You may gain weight until your mid-50s-mid-60s but then notice the kilos dropping. This weight loss is often because your body replaces lean muscle tissue with fat, which weighs less.
Those age-related changes are worth remembering. Our approach to fatty liver disease lifestyle changes focuses on helping to reduce your body fat and increase your lean muscle mass.
Get some metabolic scales
Traditional scales tell you your weight – often a demoralising number that proves difficult to change.
Metabolic scales provide a deeper level of information about your muscle mass and body fat percentage. This helps calculate your basal metabolic rate – the amount of calories your body requires for essential functions like your:
- Heartbeat
- Breathing
- Blood flow
- Cell growth and repair
- Metabolism (digesting and absorbing nutrients).
As you improve your diet and exercise, your muscle mass goes up and your fat mass goes down. That increases your basal metabolic rate, meaning you start to burn more calories even when you’re just sitting on the sofa watching TV.
Your weight might not change (muscle weighs more than fat, after all) but your body composition is changing for the better. Metabolic scales provide that information, which can be tremendously encouraging.
Focus on weights, not cardio
Cardiovascular exercise like running, swimming or cycling makes your heart beat faster and your lungs work harder. It’s certainly good for you – but it might not change your weight.
That’s why Nicole recommends focusing on resistance training (e.g. weights) rather than cardio.
Resistance training makes your muscles work against a weight or another force (like water). You can use your own body weight, free weights, resistance bands, medicine balls and many other types of weight.
There are many health benefits to resistance training as you get older. It can improve your balance, bone density, joint mobility and sleep, to name just a few. Crucially, it also increases your muscle-to-fat ratio, which (as noted above) improves your basal metabolic rate so you burn more calories when resting.
Enjoy a sauna and ice bath
Spending 20 minutes in an infrared sauna can aid muscle recovery by heating up your muscles from the inside out. A little cooler and more pleasant than a traditional hot sauna, an infrared one can help to:
- Increase your metabolism
- Boost your heart rate (it’s a form of passive cardio exercise)
- Allow you to rest.
- Increase muscle recovery and decrease pain and recovery time (incareses blood flow to muscles with thermogenic-heating up- of the muscles)
Many people follow the heat of the sauna with an ice-cold contrast. Research on rats has shown that cold-water immersion may reduce or change fat tissue. We don’t yet have conclusive human studies, however, several respected health practitioners, including the late Dr Michael Mosley, have recommended cold-water showers, dips or swims to improve health and wellbeing.
A healthy diet for fatty liver
Most of us don’t get the nutrition we need to be healthy. Only about 5% of Australian adults eat the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables each day, for example.
Nicole recommends avoiding restrictive diets that can’t be maintained. Instead, you need a sustainable, tasty meal plan that fills you up with healthy food and allows you to indulge with an occasional treat.
When you avoid eating or leave it too long between meals, you’ll slow your metabolism, making weight harder to shift. Nicole recommends eating every 2-3 hours and not leaving it longer than 5. You should also aim to eat some carbs and glucose within 30 minutes of exercising as it promotes muscle recovery.
So, what should you eat? For breakfast, Nicole recommends avoiding toast and instead filling up on overnight oats with yogurt, 1 egg and 2 egg whites. That gives you plenty of protein (for lean muscle mass) and slow-acting carbohydrates (to keep you feeling full).
Another tip is to swap white rice for brown. There’s more fibre in brown rice, which keeps you full for longer.
You also need to be realistic about how much you eat. Choose a smaller portion size and eat slowly and mindfully, savouring the flavours and enjoying your food. Too often we ‘grab a quick bite’ while dashing about or watching TV and this tends to lead to overeating.
A note in here about misconceptions on servings sizes and a link to eat for health serving sizes page please.
Learn more about healthy eating at Eat for Health.
Along with increasing your fibre intake, try to cut back on:
- Saturated fats like butter, lard, ghee, coconut oil, full-fat dairy and deep-fried foods
- Sugars – look for diet or no-added-sugar soft drinks, cut out sugar in hot drinks and save sweet treats for special occasions. And especially in the evening as this can impact sleep and hold on to the fat as we are not moving.
Coming in 2025!
Can we add in here first about nutrition coaching and we will be taking bookings from early 2025, and the gym as a last part. That’s a ways off.
As Nicole knows, it’s not easy to start eating differently and exercising, especially when you’re out of the habit and feel awkward and self-conscious in the gym.
That’s why we’re creating our own private space to support patients. Moonee Valley Specialist Centre will soon boast its own gym with a qualified trainer who can take you through a 6-week tailored program where you start to improve your muscle-to-fat ratio and gain confidence in exercising, one on one without the overwhelming feeling of being looked at in mainstream gyms. Studio gym. .
Nicole herself will soon be a qualified nutrition coach able to help you develop a healthy diet to manage fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome as well as weight loss and dietary ad lifestyle changes that work. .
Book a liver scan
In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that 1 in 3 Australians has fatty liver disease and many are unaware of it.
We offer a non-invasive comprehensive liver scan that inspects your liver for signs of fat build-up or scarring. You’ll also receive a metabolic scan on our metabolic scales. It is important to keep a track of visceral fat (fibroscan) and metabolic changes (metabolic scales) to aid your journey and track the changes.
This information helps us direct your care to protect your liver.
Please book an appointment today.
Disclaimer
All information is general and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice. Moonee Valley Specialist Centre can consult with you to confirm if a particular treatment or procedure is right for you. Any surgical or invasive procedure carries risks. A second opinion may help you decide if a particular treatment is right for you.
References
- Medline Plus, Aging changes in body shape, https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003998.htm#, [Accessed 19 November 2024]
- Healthline, How to calculate your basal metabolic rate, https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-calculate-your-basal-metabolic-rate, [Accessed 19 November 2024]
- Better Health Channel, Resistance training – health benefits, https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/resistance-training-health-benefits, [Accessed 19 November 2024]
- Cleveland Clinic, Infrared saunas: What they do and 6 health benefits, https://health.clevelandclinic.org/infrared-sauna-benefits, [Accessed 19 November 2024]
- Ravussin Y, Xiao C, Gavrilova O, Reitman ML. Effect of intermittent cold exposure on brown fat activation, obesity, and energy homeostasis in mice. PLoS One. 2014 Jan 17;9(1):e85876. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0085876. PMID: 24465761; PMCID: PMC3895006. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3895006/, [Accessed 19 November 2024]
- The Guardian, From cold showers to hot tomatoes: Michael Mosley’s top health tips, https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/jun/15/from-cold-showers-to-hot-tomatoes-michael-mosley-top-health-tips, [Accessed 19 November 2024]
- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Fruit and vegetable intake, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-health/australias-health-2018/contents/indicators-of-australias-health/fruit-vegetable-intake, [Accessed 19 November 2024]
