Photo: Darren Hester, Flickr

For years, fat carried around the abdominal area has been regarded as the detrimental by-product of our fast-food consuming, activity-loathing society -- and not just because it looks awful hanging over the edge of your low-cut jeans. Belly fat is just plain bad for your health. In fact, it's the worst kind of fat to have. Or so we thought.

Recent findings from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are suggesting that our obsession with belly fat is misguided -- it's actually the fat that's collected in the liver that we should be concerned with. "Visceral (abdominal) fat tracks closely with liver fat," lead author Dr. Samuel Klein says in a press release. "We have found that excess fat in the liver, not visceral fat, is a key marker of metabolic dysfunction. Visceral fat might simply be an innocent bystander that is associated with liver fat."

The bad news? Unlike belly fat, you can't really tell if your liver is fatty (well, not in a mirror, anyway.) But there is good news. "Fatty liver disease is completely reversible," says Klein. "Even two days of calorie restriction can cause a large reduction in liver fat and improvement in liver insulin sensitivity." So what are you waiting for? Help that liver of yours slim down.

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Exercise might be just what you need if you wish to protect yourself from what approximately 14 million people living in the U.S. already have: Type 2 diabetes. Now, this number does not account for the people who have the disease but have yet to be diagnosed. And sadly, this figure continues to climb. That's why what follows is such very good news.

A new study from Johns Hopkins suggests that regular aerobic exercise and weightlifting may reduce levels of fat in the liver by as much as 40 percent. The role liver fat plays for people with type 2 is of particular importance, for it can contribute to heart attack risk when levels are high, which is oftentimes the case with people living with type 2.

For six months, one group of people with type 2 performed three 45-minute sessions of moderate aerobic exercise and three 20-minute sessions of weightlifting per week. The other group didn't perform any formal aerobic fitness or resistance training sessions.

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