I understand at a very basic level that when we lose weight, our bodies burn fat stores for energy. But since we don’t have a little fire actually going on in our bodies, where does this fat go? How do we ‘excrete’ these pounds and pounds of fat and not ever see where it goes? Same thing with atrophied or “lost” muscle – where does it go?
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Our body converts them into water and carbon dioxide that enters the blood stream. We pee out the excess water, and the carbon dioxide ends up in our lungs and gets exhaled out of our body. It seems weird, but we breathe and sweat and pee out what is left of the fat after it gets turned into energy.
The body breaks it down and uses its nutrients for creating cells, creating fuel for cells, etc
Human bodies are pretty efficient machines. With muscle atrophy, the body goes “huh, not using this system anymore” so it starts to break the muscles down into base proteins, which it then uses to create cells in other systems that are being used.
The rest that isnt used up by the body is expelled in waste, generally urine
Think of it like taking apart a lego set, so you can use those legos for other creations
for fat, when you lose weight/gain weight, the cells expand or shrink. you don’t grow more fat cells and you don’t lose fat cells when you gain/lose weight. your fat cells are distributed among your body based on your genetics. so if you do liposuction or something to remove fat cells, then if you gain weight again, you’ll gain weight at a different place. so this is why spot reduction is a myth. you can’t target an area to lose fat, you can only target an area to build muscle. if you want to lose that stomach fat, you have to lose fat overall (depending on your genetics, most of the fat will be lost from the stomach area, but other areas will also lose fat).
in the case of fat, you breathe it out. it gets converted into carbon dioxide, and it gets breathed out into the air.
And you produce some water too, so that just gets added to the rest of the water in your body. eventually it is lost in sweat or urine.
It’s converted into energy in a similar but far less noisy and violent way your car turns gasoline into energy to move the car and CO2.
The compounds that can’t be burned for energy are either urinated, defeated or exhaled.
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