Forget love handles or a muffin top when it comes to piling on a few pounds.
According to medical expert Dr William Li, the very first sign of weight gain shows up in a much more unlikely place: our tongue.
The world-renowned physician and scientist from the US shared the revelation during an eye-opening chat with motivational powerhouse Mel Robbins on The Mel Robbins Podcast.
A TikTok clip from the interview has since racked up more than 3.5 million views, and left viewers stunned.
When Mel asked him to share something about weight gain ‘that nobody would know,’ Dr Li happily divulged.
‘Weight gain does not start with your muffin top or your thighs; [it] starts in a very subtle way,’ he said.
‘It’s the visceral fat… that’s inside our body, that starts to grow early.’
He explained that while most people assume excess weight shows first around the belly, hips or thighs, the earliest internal changes occur in the mouth.
Forget love handles or a muffin tops, according to medical expert Dr William Li, the very first sign of weight gain shows up in a much more unlikely place – the tongue
The world-renowned physician and scientist (right) from the US shared the revelation during an eye-opening chat with motivational powerhouse Mel Robbins (left) on The Mel Robbins Podcast.
When Robbins suggested our ‘rear end,’ like so many others would assume when it came to where we gain weight first on our body’s, he quickly corrected her.
Dr Li broke down the science, explaining that the tongue is made of three distinct parts.
‘You’ve got the tip of the tongue, which is like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat,’ he said.
‘You’ve got the middle of the tongue, which is really strong and packed with muscle, and the back of the tongue is a big fat pillow (a third of it is all fat), to allow food that you’ve chewed up to slide all the way back down into your stomach.’
He continued to explain that the back of the tongue is mostly visceral fat, and when a person gains weight and starts to grow extra body fat, one of the first places it grows is that area on the back of the tongue.
The surprising side effect of this hidden fat? Snoring.
‘How you know it is if your bed partner starts to say “Hey, you’re starting to snore, you didn’t snore before,”‘ Dr Li explained.
‘When you’re sleeping… your fat tongue starts to relax, and now it’s blocking your airway, so you wake up and you snort and you snore.’
Dr Li He explained that the back of the tongue is mostly visceral fat, and when a person gains weight and starts to grow extra body fat, one of the first places it grows is the area on the back of the tongue
Research backs up Dr Li’s claims, with scientists finding that people who are obese and suffer from obstructive sleep apnea – a serious sleep disorder where breathing repeatedly stops and starts – tend to carry far more fat in their tongues than those without the condition, particularly at the back.
And while snoring might seem like a harmless quirk, experts warn it’s anything but.
Left untreated, sleep apnea can raise the risk of serious health problems including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, memory loss – and in severe cases, even death.
But there is good news. A 2020 study used MRI scans to track 67 obese patients who lost just 10 per cent of their body weight, either through diet changes or weight-loss 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 this particular study, said.
Dr Li also stressed that even without a diagnosis of sleep apnea, sudden snoring or snorting at night could be an early warning sign of fat accumulating in the tongue, long before it shows on the scales or in the mirror.
Spotting the problem early is key, since preventing obesity in the first place is often far easier than reversing it once it sets in.
