Forget muffin tops and thunder thighs — weight gain starts somewhere you wouldn’t expect.
“When you have too many calories and you overflow your fuel tank, the first fat that grows is inside your body, you can’t see it,” Dr. William Li, a physician and food scientist, said on a recent episode of “The Mel Robbins Podcast.”
Where it starts to build up first might surprise you — and for some, it’s enough to cause trouble in the bedroom.
“When you gain weight and start to grow extra body fat, one of the first places that it grows is in the back of your tongue,” Li said.
Unlike the flexible tip or the strong, muscular middle, the base of the tongue acts like a “big fat pillow,” he explained, helping chewed food slide down into the stomach.
But this area is also a prime target for visceral fat — the hidden kind that builds deep inside the body. Unlike subcutaneous fat, which sits just under the skin, this tongue fat is nearly impossible to spot with the naked eye.
Still, Li said there’s a major red flag that could signal your tongue is packing on fat.
“The telltale sign is snoring or being startled when you’re sleeping,” he said.
As you sleep, your tongue naturally relaxes — and if it’s carrying extra fat, it can start to block your airway.
“You wake up and you snort or you start to store,” Li said. “This is what your bed partner notices.”
Science backs it up. Studies have found obese people with obstructive sleep apnea — a dangerous disorder that disrupts breathing during sleep — have significantly more tongue fat than those without it, especially at the back of the tongue.
That could help explain why obesity is considered a top risk factor for obstructive sleep apnea, which affects about 30 million Americans, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
And while it might sound harmless, the condition is no joke. Left untreated, it can lead to serious health consequences, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, cognitive decline and even death.
But there’s hope. In a 2020 study, researchers used MRI scans to examine how weight loss affected the airways of 67 obese patients who dropped just 10% of their body weight through diet or surgery.
Their sleep apnea scores improved by 31%, and the images showed that their slimmer tongues were the primary reason.
“In fact, the more tongue fat you lost, the more your apnea improved,” Richard Schwab, co-director of the Penn Sleep Center at Penn Medicine and lead author of the study, told CNN.
Schwab and his colleagues believe that reducing tongue fat through weight loss could be a promising new way to treat sleep apnea.
“Most clinicians, and even experts in the sleep apnea world, have not typically focused on fat in the tongue for treating sleep apnea,” he said in a statement.
“Now that we know tongue fat is a risk factor and that sleep apnea improves when tongue fat is reduced, we have established a unique therapeutic target that we’ve never had before,” Schwab added.
Even if you don’t have full-blown sleep apnea, Li says new snoring or snorting during sleep can be an early warning sign of dangerous fat buildup — long before it shows on the scale or in the mirror.
Catching it early is crucial, since research suggests that preventing obesity is often easier and more effective than trying to reverse it later.
That’s a big deal, because America’s obesity epidemic is only expected to get worse. Right now, more than 2 in 5 US adults are obese, along with roughly 1 in 5 kids and teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
