It's not the fat you see that'll kill ya, it's the fat you don't see...

People trying to lose weight often find exercise to be a pain in the butt. It's hard work, it's not as fast as just starving yourself and if you undereat, you run into things like starvation mode, where the body holds onto fat.

Isn't it just easier to skip the workouts and stop eating? Frankly, yeah, it kind of is, but remember that there are two parts to your body: The outside, the part you want to shove into that micro bikini or tiny Speedo (if you roll that way), and the inside, or as I like to call it, your guts.

Both parts have their own kind of fat. The outside has subcutaneous fat -- the stuff you see flapping around when you look in the mirror. Your guts have visceral fat, which surrounds your internal organs. Too much subcutaneous fat can lead to ripping the seat of your 501s at your high school barn dance. Too much visceral fat can lead to slightly less embarrassing things like death via type II diabetes and heart disease.

So what's with all the edumacatin' from The Fitness Nerd today? Well, there's a new study showing that you can get as skinny as you want, but if you don't maintain that weight loss with exercise, that visceral fat will come a' knockin'.

In the study, UAB exercise physiologist Gary Hunter, Ph.D., and his team randomly assigned 45 European-American and 52 African-American women to three groups: aerobic training, resistance training or no exercise. All of the participants were placed on an 800 calorie-a-day diet and lost an average 24 pounds. Researchers then measured total fat, abdominal subcutaneous fat and visceral fat for each participant.

Afterward, participants in the two exercise groups were asked to continue exercising 40 minutes twice a week for one year. After a year, the study's participants were divided into five groups: those who maintained aerobic exercise training, those who stopped aerobic training, those who maintained their resistance training, those who stopped resistance training and those who were never placed on an exercise regimen.

"What we found was that those who continued exercising, despite modest weight regains, regained zero percent visceral fat a year after they lost the weight," Hunter said. "But those who stopped exercising, and those who weren't put on any exercise regimen at all, averaged about a 33 percent increase in visceral fat.

So next time you're out for your morning jog and you pass by your neighbor Velma, who stays bone skinny with her celery and prune juice diet, just remember that you got one up on her because you're skinny on the inside.

And she's probably going to die first, but that's kind of dark as far as motivational tools go.