Have you ever wondered where all your fat goes when you start losing weight? Does it leave with the sweat when you exercise? Do you lose them through your bowel movements? Or some sort of magic takes them away?
Most believe that fats turn into muscles in the long run. Well, that's a misconception.
Here's what Andrew Brown from the University of New South Wales and Australian TV personality (slash former physicist) Ruben Meerman said about weight loss: when you lose weight, you exhale your fat. Their new calculations, based on existing knowledge about biochemistry, were published in the British Medical Journal this week.
The excess carbohydrates and proteins from your body will then be converted into chemical compounds called triglycerides (which consist of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) and then stored in the lipid droplets of fat cells.
Losing weight will be the attempt to metabolize those triglycerides, which lead to the unlocking of carbon that's been stored inside your fat cells.
This is how they see it: "Losing 10 kilograms of human fat requires the inhalation of 29 kilograms of oxygen, producing 28 kilograms of carbon dioxide and 11 kilograms of water. That’s the metabolic fate of fat."
Brown and Meeraman made calculations of the proportion of the mass stored in those 10 kilograms of fat that exits as carbon dioxide and as water when we lose weight. It showed that 8.4 of those kilograms are exhaled as carbon dioxide. Turns out, our lungs are the primary excretory organ for weight loss. The remaining 1.6 kilograms becomes water, which is excreted in urine, feces, sweat, breath, tears, and other bodily fluids.
With Christmas just around the corner, let's prepare to exhale those piles of holiday fats!