Exercise! - Where exactly does the fat go?

Ok we exercise then how exactly is the fat going away? Is it literally melting during exercise? and then what, we pee/sweat it out? Just curious, thought someone around here might know.

I've always heard that fat cells don't go away, they just shrink.:shrug:

That's a pretty good dagum question! Do they really just shrink? So all these little anorexic chic's walking around have little molecule sized fat cells someplace? LOL!

Great question !!!!

From the Mayo Clinic: (google "where does fat go when you lose weight")

Site: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/body-fat/AN01327

Quote:

Answer

When you consume fewer calories than your body needs, your body turns to fat for energy. Body fat is broken down through a series of complex metabolic processes. Your body uses the energy produced by these processes. The waste products from these processes are water and carbon dioxide. You excrete water primarily through urine and sweat, and carbon dioxide by exhaling.

Soooo.... *technically* ALL the weight we lose is "water weight"? ;)

By taking in less cals your body will burn stored fat, one of the best things you can do while excersing is to drink heaps of water to help flush the wastes out. If for one minute I thought I would lose weight by just losing water, and keep it off, I would sit in a sauna all day LOL
MaryL

Great question !!!!

From the Mayo Clinic: (google "where does fat go when you lose weight")

Site: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/body-fat/AN01327

Quote:

Answer

When you consume fewer calories than your body needs, your body turns to fat for energy. Body fat is broken down through a series of complex metabolic processes. Your body uses the energy produced by these processes. The waste products from these processes are water and carbon dioxide. You excrete water primarily through urine and sweat, and carbon dioxide by exhaling.

Thanks for the answer I've long wondered that myself. I had concluded that the times I have to visit the bathroom more fequently is when I lose most. I have to get up once or twice during the night now whereas when not dieting I sleep through.

Kitty

The answer makes perfect sense, given that our bodies are designed to store fat in case of a famine. If famine did strike, our fat would keep our body going until we found more food.

who cares where it goes - as long as it never finds its way back!!! :-)

Thanks for the answers, I was just curious, makes me wanna drink water even more.

:lol: @ Finn!!!

I always said I lost weight just from walking back and forth to the bathroom all day long! Makes sense to me...

Thanks for the link! The other piece to keep in mind is that these "complex metabolic processes" can take time... one reason that eating less than you burn on day 1 doesn't equal immediate weight loss on day 2.

And I'm not sure how much extra water is excreted from fat. Most of the time we're losing slowly, it's excreted from urine, sweat and carbon dioxide... it may not be enough of a difference for us to notice...

While i'm sure that water and co2 are waste products of fat being metabolised, when some thing is used as energy, that is where it goes isn't it? It becomes energy?
I really sound like a knowitall don't I? Im not trying too. I'm just thinking back to all the bio classes i took in college.
there is the whole Krebs cycle that explains the breakdown of sugar into ATP (adenosine tri-phophate) which is used by the body as energy.

I could look it up if anyone is really interested in a whole science lesson. ...In fact, now I am curious, maybe i will look it up.

Kaebea - thats where the extra energy goes. Energy, though, is stored in the bonds between atoms, which have a VERY small amount of weight (almost negligible). So the WEIGHT lost is actually the water and CO2, which are released because the ENERGY, stored in the chemical bonds in your cells, is used up.

Mass is ALWAYS conserved...no weight can be "burned up" and gone forever. It has to be exhaled or excreted.

Mandalinn-- Maybe you know the answer to my question: is the water weight lost through fat excretion is enough to be noticable?? we're always excreting water for all kinds of reasons. But when we're losing weight (at a healthy weight) are we really going to notice a difference? Or is it just a little more here and a little more there?

It's time like these I really wish I'd taken more bio and chem courses...

Isn't this kind of like asking where does the gas in the tank go when I drive? It gets burned and any waste is vented off as exhaust. The weight of the gas is gone once it's burned. Same for the body. Some of us just happen to have bigger gas tanks to draw from. :lol:

The weight of the gas is gone once it's burned

Well, no. The weight of the gas is no longer IN THE TANK when its burned. It is, instead, in the weight of all of the waste products put off by the car. The air we breathe out, with all of those CO2 molecules, has weight. So does everything we excrete (including sweat). So the weight is never "gone" - it just goes into the waste products.

Heather - I don't know if you'd notice the difference or not, but I'd assume it'd be measurable, even if it wasn't really something you could pick up on yourself. If your body is actively metabolizing fat and you're losing weight, you'll be breathing out more weight (so you can get out the extra CO2 you're producing) and excreting more water (so you can get the extra H20 out), and if you were REALLY paying attention and carefully standardizing your water intake/activity levels/moisture intake from food/room humidity, you might be able to notice. But so many things go into the amounts of water we excrete that it would be really hard to tell where the effect was from.