Lost Weight? So Where Did it Go?

There are many misconceptions about weight loss. Weight loss implies that weight has in fact been misplaced, perhaps taken by a magical weight fairy and might just be hiding somewhere ready to be found again if you for instance ate a few pieces of chocolate after dinner. Alarmingly, most doctors and health professionals don’t actually know where body fat goes when you lose weight, most believing it is converted into energy or heat, which is scientifically impossible.

So what actually happens when we lose weight? Does it melt off? Sweat off? Do we wee it out? Does it turn into muscle?

The answer is that we actually breathe out our fat. Yes, we exhale it in the form of carbon dioxide. So if you were to lose 10 kilograms of fat, 84 percent of that is exhaled as carbon dioxide and the other 16 percent is excreted in urine and sweat.

So I know you’re thinking, the next big diet is the Breathing More Diet. Well no, breathing more than your metabolic processes need, will cause you to simply feel very dizzy, have palpitations and possibly lose consciousness. Breathing faster is definitely what needs to be done, however it must be because your body needs to breathe faster to eliminate the excess carbon dioxide because of exercise and fat mobilisation.

Fat is found in a form called triglyceride. If too many calories are consumed with minimal exercise, those triglycerides are stored as fat in fat cells. Reduce calories and exercise more and an enzyme called lipase starts to break down stored fat to use as fuel and we lose weight. This reaction creates metabolic by products; carbon dioxide and water.

Targeting where you lose or gain that fat however is impossible, we cannot pin point a particular body part for fat loss. We have control over our body size, but not our body shape. We lose and gain weight in the proportion that it is distributed throughout our body, if we’re genetically or hormonally a pear or apple shape, that’s the way we will stay, just a smaller or larger pear or apple.

So keep your calories slightly less than what you need, move most days so your body wants to breath faster and harder and you become a little sweaty and just know that that air you’re exhaling and that sweat you’re excreting is actually your fat, disappearing from your body.