Eli5…. when do we put on the fat? Is it immediately after eating those extra calories? Once a week? When?
When do you lose the fat? Right when you start eating less calories? Sorry… just confused and wondering
Thanks for your responses
In: 116
You have fat cells that will store fat. Over time, all throughout the day, your body is breaking down fat, sugar, proteins from your muscles and calcium from your bones. Your body uses these body parts like bones and muscle as a nutrient dump. All day long the body makes a chemical that breaks the proteins in your muscle down and proteins are released. Theres another chemical that adds protein to the muscles and every twenty minutes or so your body is releasing one and then the other and so what this means is your body can take from its fat stores and add to them throughout the day as needed. Same with minerals in the bones and proteins in the muscles.
If you were eating more fats than your body could burn it would slowly begin storing more fatty acids in the fat or adipose cells. Then, you would notice yourself getting bigger at some point. Some people, the slim skinny ones, don’t store a lot of fat in their adipose cells and so it may go elsewhere like the organs or muscles.
If you were using more fats then you could store, over time the fat or adipose cells would release more fat then they take in. And over time every twenty minutes or so a tiny bit of fat is broken down and then a tiny amount is put back and if you burn fat over long periods of time more fat will be release from the cells than is put in and they will shrink in size.
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The total time it takes for the body to convert excess calories to body fat is roughly 3 to 8 hours after consumption. Factors that cause the speed to vary include the nature of the food (fats and proteins are digested more slowly than sugars and other carbohydrates) and the quantity consumed, as well as one’s metabolic rate, which is simply how quickly your body performs all these cellular functions in general.
When the body digests food, most of it’s broken down into the simple sugar glucose, and it passes into the bloodstream. The rising level of glucose trips the pancreas’s alarm, so to speak, and starts producing insulin to get shipped off to the liver. In the liver, the insulin is combined with the glucose to make glycogen, essentially the rations used to fuel the muscles and organs. All the excess glucose goes through a few chemical processes to make triglycerides (what makes fat cells fat), which are then shipped off throughout the body to be stored inside fat cells.
For weight loss, it’s essentially the process happening in reverse. When the body doesn’t have enough glycogen to fuel the muscles and organs (whether by eating less and producing less glycogen, or exercising and using it all up), it starts pulling triglycerides from the fat cells, breaking those down, converting them into glycogen, and sending them where they need to go. It takes a bit less time—still a few hours—because the body doesn’t have to do digestion all over again.
This all is also why type II diabetes, fatty liver disease, and heart disease from fat buildup are so commonly associated with obesity. With diabetes, there’s so much glucose entering the body so often that the pancreas can’t keep up and craps out. With fatty liver disease, having to constantly make so many triglycerides causes them to start to build up within the liver itself. With heart disease, it’s because there are so many triglycerides being moved through the bloodstream that some of them can start to build up on the walls of blood vessels causing a blockage or other damage.
There are two sources of body fat.
The first is dietary fat. You eat fat, it goes into the bloodstream and the excess goes into fat cells. When the body needs fat, it pulls it out of fat cells. That part is simple.
The second is excess carbs.
If you eat a chunk of glucose, it will raise blood glucose. The body can deal with that in three ways:
1. It can burn more glucose and less fat.
2. It can convert glucose to glycogen and store it in the liver or muscles.
3. It can convert glucose to fat – either in the liver or fat cells – and store it in the fat cells.
The first two are preferred by the body but can’t deal with very much glucose, so if there’s a big chunk it ends up as fat.
If there is fructose along with the glucose – and if you eat anything with sugar in it, that’s usually true – most of it ends up processed into fat by the liver.
The real question, however, isn’t how body fat is added, the real question is why doesn’t the body burn it. Gaining weight is more about problems burning fat rather than problems adding fat, though they are somewhat related.
You burn off a certian amount of calories a day and when you eat much more then that or eat certian foods they store as fat or energy for the body to lose later, when you regularly eat more then you burn you become overweight or obese
Imagine we are like buckets of water with a small hole at the bottom. The bucket is refilled every time we eat, and even if we eat just enough to maintain weight there is still stuff going in and stuff going out all the time.
Imagine a crew of people and they are munching apples, gnawing, gnawing, gnawing.
Apples (representing fat) keep arriving by truck and get put on these big trestle tables (your blood stream). People feed from the tables and put excess on barrels. If there are not enough you reach on the long-storage barrel to get another bunch until the truck arrives.
Apples represent fat here, remember.
When the truck instead brings a load of apple pie (representing sugar – rather glucose), the supervisor goes and clangs on the bell – people call it “insulin” – and screams like this:
“Good times boys! No raw apples today!”. (Because of course apple pie is better!) “You people clear the tables for those pies! Dump that stuff in the barrels.”
So as long as there’s pies, nobody eats raw apples. But these keep arriving, and so they don’t pile up on the tables they get stored on the barrels immediately because there’s no use for them now.
Note that pies MUST have priority, not only because people like them, but they spoil a lot faster (too much sugar in bloodstream will mess you up, starting with damaging your kidneys). So they gotta go first.
If there’s too much apple pie, these madmen will even take out the slices of apple, make an apple (don’t dive too deep into this, and yes there’s some waste there), and store it in the barrels (this represents sugar converted to fat and then stored)
In short, having insulin high in your blood tells your body to prioritise glucose, store fat and not remove it from storage.
Also – if they had a proper roasted chicken they’d care for neither. Just saying.
Or chocolate. Or… chocolate cake, the sort that dribles… with cream… moist and warm…
Read this book, it will explain it all, and *it’s a fun read*:
Gut:
The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ
by Giulia Enders
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