Why can’t we ingest or inject some Pac-Man type thing that runs around eating our fat cells?
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For a good while storing fat was beneficial. It’s only relatively recently that humans have been able to have such an excess of food and lack of activity that storing fat has become an issue.
Starvation was a much bigger problem for our ancestors than excess fat. So being able to easily store, and then easily reuse the storage was beneficial.
Fat cells don’t really go away. They shrink. Once they’re created though they’re easier to “refill”. Great when trying to maximize how easy it is to store excess food while a hunter gatherer, bad when trying to show off abs.
As a direct answer to your question about the Pac-Man thing.
A level of fat is essential for bodily processes. Many vital structures like nerves and skin have fat as part of their structure.
So an indiscriminate fat remover would also remove a lot of important things. It would have to very targeted to remove excess fat, without also removing essential and healthy fat.
Part of this is what makes cancer so hard to treat. Cancer is made up of the same tissues as the body. It’s hard to selectively kill certain parts of the body, without killing the entire body.
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