Bizarre But True: This Is Where Your Body Fat Ends Up When You Lose Weight

Image © Kaspars Grinvalds – fotolia.com

You won’t believe what actually happens to the fat when you lose weight! This is amazing and might help you.

With various weight loss diets being all the rage all over the world, one important question is begging to be asked (if it hasn’t been already) – where does the weight go when you lose weight? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 80 million American adults are obese, which poses a problem because obesity has been linked to a variety heart and metabolic diseases – including cancer. ^[1] Of course, losing weight is the healthiest option but the fat lost has to go somewhere, right?

Everyone Was Baffled

In a press release from the University of New South Wales Australia, Professor Brown who is the head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology talked about the process of losing weight on a biomechemical level. He became interested in the topic after conducting a survey among health professionals – e.g. doctors, dieticians, personal trainers – and realizing more than half of respondents believed fat turned into energy. ^[2]

Meerman and Brown (2014) conducted a study researching where fat goes when weight is lost. It turns out most people have the misconception that fat turns into energy or heat – which isn’t entirely incorrect. When you look at any chemical reaction, heat or energy is a byproduct of the process, not the end result. So technically speaking, fat doesn’t turn into energy; it turns into something else entirely – which, according to the Law of Conservation of Mass, should be a substance. ^[3]

You Don’t “Lose Fat”

To get even more technical, fat isn’t really lost. When a person exercises, the activity doesn’t target the fat cells themselves. Rather, the exercise targets the triglycerides in the fat cells. Where do triglycerides come from? When a person’s carbohydrate or protein intake is in excess of what his or her body needs for the day, they are converted into triglycerides which are stored in fat cells. Excessive triglyceride storage causes weight gain.

It All Boils Down to Chemistry

Meerman and Brown’s study looked deep into biochemistry – analyzing how triglycerides were broken down and what the process produced aside from energy. Stoichiometry (a method used in chemistry to analyze chemical equations) revealed that triglycerides actually turned into…… carbon dioxide. You read that right – fat turns into CO₂, which is expelled by the lungs! The study’s calculations revealed that for every 10 kilograms of fat lost, 94 percent (9.4 kilograms) is exhaled as carbon dioxide (the total process actually requires 29 kilograms of oxygen and produces 28 kilograms of carbon dioxide and 11 kilograms of water). This implies that the lungs are “the primary excretory organ for weight loss”.

An average person who weighs 70kg, exhales 0.74kg of carbon dioxide per day with light activity (which is double the resting metabolic rate). When this person exercises, the metabolic rate multiplies by seven. The chemical equation used took into consideration the need for inhaled oxygen as a component in causing the reaction (from fat to carbon dioxide) – but of course, simply breathing in or out won’t be able to cause weight loss, you’ve got to do the work too….