Dr. Ben Bikman explains lipedema as a collagen disorder, not a fat disorder. The condition affects women and has been misunderstood in medical practice for years. He breaks down what actually happens in lipedema tissue and why standard weight loss approaches fail.
One of the more common fat disorders is a condition called lipedema. It's also one of the more painful. Now, actually, I've already made a mistake in how I describe this, because lipedema, I believe, is not a fat disorder as much as it is a collagen disorder. Now, before I go any further, let me just direct your attention to this full long conversation that I had all about lipedema on the insulin IQ YouTube channel. So make sure you go get more information there. But briefly, lipedema is a condition when a woman will have, typically a woman, this symmetrical fat pattern of excessive growth. Where symmetrical in that if it's happening on one limb, you see it happening on the other and then the fat growth is very uncomfortable, very painful. Typically, again, we've been calling this a fat problem, but it's probably more an issue of the collagen. You see, fat is actually surrounded by collagen, these little almost envelopes of collagen when estrogen levels start to go high. So this is something that particularly happens during puberty, but can also happen during pregnancy. The collagen can get thicker and harder, and this can not only start to pinch nerves, causing pain, but it can wrap around the fat, physically compressing the fat, making it very painful, particularly to the touch. So it's time for us to rethink lipedema. And it's not a fat problem, it's likely a collagen problem.
