There is energy from the food that we just ate, and then there is energy from the fat reserves. I was wondering, how much time would I have left to get rid of the calories of a meal I just ate, before it becomes fat. I’m guessing that this transition most probably isn’t as simple as that, but I believe I have made the idea clear. Also, how is this transformation done?
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I think you are thinking about this a little bit wrong. A better ELI5 description would be like this:
Think of all of the building blocks in your body like investing. Carbs are your money market account that you can spend freely from with a debit card. Fats are like stocks, where you can put more money in and take money out, but it takes a little bit longer to do both. This though is the preferred savings plan of the body as it’s the best balance for availability and investment potential. Finally protein is like real estate where money in and out need to be planned a bit more as it takes time and energy to both buy and sell.
When your body needs money in the money market for spending it (when you are exercising for example) it doesn’t really care if that energy is coming from your most recent paycheck (what you just ate that is currently digesting) or from a paycheck two weeks ago, it just wants to make sure your money market account has money. So it will start selling off stock if it senses a spending spree coming up. If you start exercising regularly, your body will make sure you are keeping more in your money market and less in stocks, just to make sure it has that cash available. Additionally depending on the type of exercise, it may start converting stocks to real estate for more long term investments as well (building muscle from your exercising and burning fat to do so). If you starting slowing down your level of activity then your body will go back to investing in stocks more and stop selling those stocks as much.
The digestion process will also be allocating funds to the money market, stocks and real estate regardless if you are actively spending or not. There’s other processes that worry about reallocating as needed, so digestion is just gonna keep doing what it does, but maybe some tweaks to where the allocation is based on spending history and cash flow coming in. If you started fasting for an extended time, your body is going to be doing more selling of stock to make sure you have enough in your money market. It will also slowly start to sell real estate. The longer the fast goes on, the more stocks and real estate you will be selling. It will also be adjusting the algorithms for the next paycheck and how to divvy that up based on what it has been selling.
Tl;dr your body is always going to be converting carbs to fat and fat to carbs regardless of what you just ate and doesn’t really care if the energy is coming from the bag of chips you just ate or the bag of chips you ate a week ago that’s been stored as fat or the bag of chips you ate when you were 6 that it stored as fat back then.
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