How does our body store fat? What is the most optimal way to shed said fat from the body and how is metabolism related to this?
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Metabolism refers to your body doing things, essentially just being alive.
Fat is high in energy, and very stable. Our bodies store fat as an energy source to power body functions, aka being alive/metabolic processes.
Fat is stored in body cells, called adipose cells, and can be processed, or *metabolized*, to release energy. Many foods we eat contain fat or carbohydrates. These are broken down for energy, and if not soon used our bodies reform them into fat for later use.
If our bodies don’t get enough energy from the food we eat our bodies will use fat instead.
In general, losing and gaining fat is mostly due to what we eat. The amount of energy we use in a day doesn’t change much. Most normal workouts only use up a few hundred calories, which would be the equivalent to a few servings of sweet drinks, snacks, or side dishes. Most people find it much easier to just drink 2 less sodas, eat 5 less cookies, or 1 less serving of fries than run 3 miles. This is not to say you shouldn’t exercise! Exercise is great for overall health, but it isn’t the biggest factor in losing fat. Reducing caloric intake is.
Ive read that when you lose weight, its more through the carbon you exhale than other waste.
Your body takes in food calories and the cells burn calories. Much of what is left over (you ate it, but the cells didn’t burn it) is stored in the body, let’s say for later use, as fat. The fat builds up all over the place – torso, arms, legs, face, etc. Many Americans day to day have leftover calories which get added up as excess fat and can cause lots of health problems. The way to access that fat to burn it off is to either burn more or to take in less, or a combination of both.
Burning more than what you take in is sometimes called a calorie deficit. Eat more vegetables, and less carbohydrates for sure. Protein and certain kinds of fats are usually fine in not too large amounts. But the sugars and carbs – pasta and pizza and soda for example, can really put people over the top.
So eat less and exercise more. There are phrases like you can’t outrun a bad diet, which are true. The body will sense less coming in and will start to access the stored fat and burn that for fuel.
This lifestyle that we have – excess food and little need to move around, is not something the human body is accustomed to doing and a brand new phenomenon en masse in human existence. The body is more accustomed to storing the excess “not knowing when we’ll eat again” and keeping a reserve around for times of want. Food is fuel, the body is a machine. The purpose of a machine is to move around and/or do work. The purpose of a machine is not to consume the fuel. We sometimes forget that and get mad that our bodies are more efficient. We call a high metabolism a good thing while it’s really like a car that gets 3 miles to the gallon.
Fat can only be removed from cells when the body has depleted energy stores from the blood and liver. Fasting and exercise help this happen.
Once that happens, energy is pulled from fat cells and used to power the cells in the body until someone eats again.
The waste products are then removed in several ways, and surprisingly most of it is breathed out through the lungs.
Fat gain or loss is all about what is known as “fat flux”
If you burn more fat than you add, you lose fat mass. If you burn less fat than you add, you gain fat mass.
That seems simple, but there are two significant complications.
The first is that the fat you add is composed of both the fat and you eat and the excess carbs you eat that are converted to fat.
The second is that fat burning requires a situation where your insulin is low enough to allow fat burning.
If you are metabolically normal – insulin sensitive – then the body’s fat regulation system works pretty well.
If you are insulin resistant, you have elevated insulin all the time. That both makes it harder to burn fat – because elevated insulin tells the body to burn carbs instead of fat – and it keeps the glucose storage topped off, which means its more likely for glucose spikes to be stored as fat.
That’s why most people who have extra weight are insulin resistant and find it hard to lose weight.
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