eli5 when do we put on the body fat?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.