Your body stores fat in two main locations: just beneath your skin (subcutaneous fat) and deep inside your abdomen around your organs (visceral fat). These aren’t the only storage sites, though. Fat also accumulates in smaller deposits around your neck and collarbone, inside organs like your liver and heart, and in specialized heat-generating tissue scattered throughout your torso. Where your body prioritizes storage depends on your sex, your hormones, and how much excess energy it needs to handle.
Subcutaneous Fat: The Layer You Can Pinch
Subcutaneous fat sits directly under your skin, spread across your entire body. It’s the soft, squishy fat you can grab on your belly, arms, legs, and buttocks. This is your body’s largest fat depot, and it serves as your primary long-term energy reserve. When you eat more calories than you burn, your body converts the excess into a storage molecule called triglyceride and packs it into fat cells in this layer.
Subcutaneous fat does more than store energy. It insulates you against cold, cushions your muscles and bones, and releases hormones that help regulate appetite and metabolism. Of all the places your body stores fat, this layer is generally the least harmful to your health, though carrying a large excess anywhere raises your overall risk of metabolic problems.
Visceral Fat: The Hidden Belly Fat
Visceral fat sits deeper, packed around your abdominal organs including your liver, stomach, and intestines. Unlike the soft subcutaneous layer, visceral fat makes your belly feel firm to the touch. It’s responsible for the “beer belly” or “apple shape” some people develop, where the midsection protrudes but doesn’t feel particularly squishy.
This type of fat is far more metabolically active than subcutaneous fat, and that’s not a good thing. It releases inflammatory signals and fatty acids directly into your portal vein, which feeds straight to the liver. Excess visceral fat is linked to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and a significantly increased risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. You can get a rough estimate of your visceral fat level with a tape measure: a waist circumference above 35 inches for women or 40 inches for men signals elevated risk. A waist-to-hip ratio above 0.85 for women or 0.90 for men indicates abdominal obesity.
Brown Fat: The Heat Generator
Not all fat stores energy. Brown fat burns it. This specialized tissue generates heat to help maintain your body temperature, a process called non-shivering thermogenesis. Brown fat cells look completely different from regular white fat cells. Instead of one large oil droplet, they contain many small droplets and are packed with energy-burning structures called mitochondria, which give the tissue its brownish color.
In adults, brown fat deposits are small, averaging about 34 grams in lean individuals. The largest deposit sits in the supraclavicular region, just above your collarbone and along the sides of your neck. Smaller pockets exist along your spine, around the aorta and other major blood vessels, near your adrenal glands and kidneys, in your armpits, and in the chest cavity near the heart. Cold exposure activates these deposits, which is why researchers have been interested in brown fat as a potential tool for weight management.
There’s also a third type called beige fat, which normally looks and acts like white fat but can switch on heat-generating activity during cold exposure. These cells are scattered within white fat deposits and essentially function as recruitable brown fat when your body needs extra warmth.
How Fat Cells Grow to Store More
When you consistently take in more energy than you use, your fat tissue needs to expand. It does this in two ways: existing fat cells swell larger (hypertrophy), or new fat cells form from precursor cells (hyperplasia). The number of fat cells in a given area is largely set early in life and tends to stay stable through adulthood. That means most fat gain in adults happens through cells ballooning in size, not multiplying. Individual fat cells can expand by several hundred micrometers in diameter, growing many times their original volume.
The expansion method varies by location. Visceral fat in the abdominal cavity grows almost exclusively through cell enlargement. Fat around the hips and thighs, by contrast, can expand through both larger cells and new cell formation. This difference partly explains why visceral fat tends to become more dysfunctional as it grows: existing cells get stretched to their limits without reinforcements, which triggers inflammation and metabolic problems.
Why Men and Women Store Fat Differently
Men and women store fat in distinctly different patterns, driven primarily by sex hormones. Men tend to accumulate fat around the trunk and abdomen, creating the “apple” shape where the waist is wider than the hips. Women tend to store fat around the buttocks, hips, thighs, and chest, producing a “pear” shape where the hips are wider than the waist. Fat stored in this lower-body pattern in women is thought to serve partly as a nutrient reserve for pregnancy and breastfeeding.
Estrogen is the key driver of this difference. Higher estrogen levels promote subcutaneous fat expansion, particularly in the hips and thighs, while blunting visceral fat growth. This gives premenopausal women a degree of metabolic protection compared to men of the same age. After menopause, when estrogen levels drop sharply, women often shift toward the male pattern, accumulating more visceral belly fat and losing subcutaneous fat in the hips and thighs. This hormonal shift is one reason cardiovascular and metabolic disease risk rises for women after menopause. The effect of estrogen on fat distribution is powerful enough that transgender women receiving estrogen therapy develop a more feminine fat distribution pattern with a lower waist-to-hip ratio.
Estrogen also influences fat storage indirectly by reducing the activity of cortisol, a stress hormone that promotes fat cell growth, particularly in the abdomen. When estrogen is low, cortisol’s effects on abdominal fat accumulation go less opposed.
Ectopic Fat: When Fat Ends Up in the Wrong Places
When your regular fat storage sites are overwhelmed, excess fat spills into organs that aren’t designed to hold much of it. This is called ectopic fat storage, and it happens in the liver, skeletal muscles, heart, and pancreas. These organs normally contain only small amounts of fat, and the buildup disrupts their normal function.
Fatty liver is the most common and well-known example. When triglycerides accumulate in liver cells, they interfere with the liver’s ability to manage blood sugar and process fats, promoting insulin resistance. Fat accumulation in skeletal muscle similarly impairs how those cells respond to insulin. In the heart, ectopic fat can affect cardiac function and is associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease. In the pancreas, it can impair the insulin-producing cells themselves. Ectopic fat storage is strongly linked to type 2 diabetes and tends to develop in people who already carry significant visceral fat.
Healthy Body Fat Ranges
A typical body fat percentage for nonathletic adults is 25% to 31% for women and 18% to 24% for men. A 2025 study of nearly 17,000 people attempted to define clinically meaningful thresholds based on body fat rather than BMI, concluding that overweight begins at 25% body fat in men and 36% in women, while obesity starts at 30% in men and 42% in women.
Body fat naturally increases with age. CDC data shows that average body fat in men rises from about 23% in the late teens to around 31% by ages 60 to 79. In women, it rises from about 35% in the late teens to roughly 42% in the same age range. Children carry relatively high body fat percentages that decrease during adolescence, particularly in boys, before gradually climbing again through adulthood. Where that fat sits matters as much as how much you carry: two people with the same body fat percentage can have very different health profiles depending on whether the fat is stored subcutaneously or packed around their organs.