If we look at what the liver does it will help to explain how you can get fatty liver disease?

Everybody’s blood supply flows through the liver where it is filtered by a number of highly specialised cells. The liver filters a large number of impurities from the blood including excess fat. It processes what we consume in the way of food and drink and turns it into nutrients and energy that we can then draw upon to go about our daily lives.

The liver will normally store a small amount of fat but if your diet and lifestyle constantly requires your liver to filter large amounts of fat it will deposit this excess fat around the body, which in turn means you put on weight.

The liver will continue to process and deposit this fat around the body but when it gets to a point where more fat is coming in than going out it has no option other than to store some of this fat itself which increases the fat content of your liver.

When this reaches levels of between 5 and 10% of the livers weight it is called steatosis. At this stage you have fatty liver disease.

This type of liver disease is called Non Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease and can also occur due to diabetes, high cholesterol and high triglycerides which are all linked in some way to being overweight. If this continues the liver will start to swell which is called steatohepatitis. At this stage the liver is starting to become scarred as the fat replaces healthy liver tissue commonly known as cirrhosis which you will have probably heard of.

Left untreated this could mean that a liver transplant is required.

In most cases there are no symptoms of fatty liver disease so you could have it without realising it. This is one reason why fatty liver disease has been described as a “silent killer”.

If you are overweight there is a strong possibility that your liver will start to store more fat than it should be doing and it should be time to take a look at perhaps losing some weight.

Now that you know how you can get fatty liver disease you may be thinking how do I get rid of fatty liver disease? Well, the obvious thing would be to lose some weight, makes sense right?

You need to be aware that trying to lose weight very quickly may actually work against you. Some of these quick weight loss diets will cause additional problems so you need to lose weight slowly so that it’s easier to keep that weight off.

Also some sort of exercise would work in helping burn excess fatty calories.

There are hundreds of diets and exercise programs that you could choose and I’m not in a position to recommend any one in particular. Personally I would choose a diet that has been specifically designed to work with fatty liver patients and one that obviously works in reversing fatty liver disease.

You can always choose a different route and include some liver cleansing foods into your diet. These types of foods can give your liver a well-deserved boost. There are also a number of natural liver supplements like Chai Hu Shu Gan Wan, which can assist your livers functionality.

Certain green teas help with liver disease in particular matcha green tea. If you suspect that you may have fatty liver disease then rather than just continue with your eating habits, change something.

All of our internal organs work in conjunction with each other and if one is struggling it is quite possible that this can cause other problems.