Where does the fat go? I found out on Oprah!
 

I'm sure some, if not a lot of you ladies watch the Oprah show. I think it was last week she had a guy on there who read the whole encyclopedia Britannica. Someone asked him "where does the fat go when you lose weight?" This is a thread we had a while back where we theorized a lot of things (I don't remember if we got a final answer), but now we have a real answer. For those who didn't see it, the answer was: when we are losing weight the fat turns in to carbon dioxide which we breathe out and the rest we excrete through our urine.

Just thought I would share because I was excited to finally know! So we are losing weight as we breathe and go to the bathroom...YAY!:carrot:

Wow.... I never knew that! That's very cool!!! The crazy things you find out on Oprah!

Wow!! Never would have thought that.. I need to pee more often!! LOL

LOL---that's just crazy!

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:hug:

and lets not forget the other two major ways....Pooping & Sweating

I'm a nursing student...you can also lose it breast feeding and vomiting, but didn't mention those as major...

There is a diet called keotosines or something like that, and it is all about monitoring the levels of something in your urine to determine if you are loosing weight. You pee on a little paper thing.... So I suspected that it is pee'd out. That is so interesting. The shows that she does on the body parts and lungs etc is freaky... That is enough to make me want to eat well!

so with the excess carbon dioxide, your body would breathe more to compensate and balance your ph in your blood as excess co2 makes your body more acidic.

SO

i wonder if you did a study, if people who are losing weight quickly have a slightly higher respiratory rate than they did before losing their weight....

/geek

Originally Posted by Aussie_Chick:
There is a diet called keotosines or something like that, and it is all about monitoring the levels of something in your urine to determine if you are loosing weight. You pee on a little paper thing.... So I suspected that it is pee'd out. That is so interesting. The shows that she does on the body parts and lungs etc is freaky... That is enough to make me want to eat well!

What you are monitoring is ketones in your urine. When you eat a really high protein diet you go into ketosis & it is supposed to mean you are in a high fat burning zone.

It's great to know where the weight goes - I always kind of wondered.

Fat, in the chemical sense, is composed of lipid molecules used to store energy. Lipids come in many forms, usually as glycerides, glycerol molecules with fatty acid chains attached. While mono- and di-glycerides (containing one or two fatty acid chains, respectively) are used for cell signalling and to build cell membranes, tri-glycerides (with three fatty acid chains) are used solely for storage. In the body, specialized fat cells (adipocytes) store triglycerides is huge vesicles that take up most of the cell's volume. As the adipocytes in an area fill up on triglycerides, they grow in size, leading to a visible increase in the size of that part of the body along with an increase in weight.


Weight is lost through the break down of triglycerides in the adipocytes into fatty acid, which are in turn broken down through a complex biochemical pathway, called Fatty Acid Oxidation, to produce acetyl CoA (a common fatty acid like oleic acid, 18 carbons long, could be used to acetylate 9 molecules of Coenzyme A). Acetyl CoA is shunted into the Krebs cycle (TCA cycle) in the mitochondria where it is used to generate energy, releasing carbon dioxide (two molecules of CO2 per molecule of acetyl CoA). So the end product of fat catabolism is CO2 , which is exhaled from the lungs during exercise.

(Ref. - Helena Curtis' introductory textbook, Biology provides an easy-to-read introduction, and further material concerning the biochemical processes mentioned above.)


.... the emphasis on the word energy is mine. A calorie is a unit of heat, not a little something that actually appears and disappears. That's why we say that we burn calories or burn off the pounds. If you think about it kinda like gas in your car ... food is gas that makes your machine get warm and run ... co2 or carbon dioxide (that you breath out) is like a car's exhaust.

Thanks Susan. I remember discussing this in our old thread, and although we knew that fat is an alternative fuel to the food that we eat used for ENERGY; we still wondered, there must be something to it, just like a car exhaust after gas is burnt. That's mainly why I posted, since that was what was mentioned on Oprah.

It's funny, I remember all that you said from my test in my nutrition class last semester! Guess I am retaining some of it.

So.....that means as we lose weight and exhale CO2, we are contributing to global warming, like cows tooting in the fields :moo:!!

Now there is a positive thought while I'm sitting there peeing for the millionth time of the day! LOL

Interesting info, thanks LockItUp