Okay this may sounds like a complete ignorant question but I am really wanting to know. When you lose weight, where does it go? Does it sweat out of us or what? LOL..sorry this is a serious question.

I Googled:

"The short answer is that our bodies convert molecules in fat cells to usable forms of energy, thus shrinking the cells. But getting this to happen isn't just about sweat bands and short shorts. Understanding how our bodies perform this tummy-trimming trick requires a little more detail.

We know that weight loss hinges on burning calories. Calories measure the potential energy in food you eat in the form of fats, proteins and carbohydrates.

If our bodies were cars, energy would be the gas to keep everything running. Lounging in front of the television is like cruising the strip, while sprinting around a track is more like drag racing at maximum speeds. In short, more work means more energy.

The body uses some of those calories to digest food. Once the food is broken down into its respective parts of carbohydrates, fats and proteins, it either uses the remaining energy or converts it to fat for storage in fat cells. Fat cells live in adipose tissue, which basically acts like an internal gas station, storing away fuel reserves.

To lose weight, you must burn more calories, or energy, than you consume to start using up that fuel reserve. Essentially, you're not ingesting enough calories to fuel your additional exercise, so your body must pull from fat stores."

My completely unscientific answer, as a near-medical-illiterate: I always imagine myself peeing it out. Like, I use up some molecules of fat through exercise, but also through daily life. A little bit gets sweated out or breathed out into the ether, but mostly, it gets circulated through my body & ultimately peed out. Like all the other things that you use for fuel & running the body.

I Like thinking that my extra weigh is picked up by the poor, starving children in third-world countries. As if my extra pounds float across the world and attach themselves to a bone-thin child.

You burn it in your muscles and other tissues. You breathe in oxygen, and you breathe out carbon dioxide--you also lose water in sweat and urine.

Body cells are able to use carbs, proteins, and/or fats for fuel. The process of energy conversion is called oxidative phosphorylation, which is a fancy name for burning fuel in the body to produce energy.

Oxygen + fuel (fats, carbs, etc) ---> carbon dioxide + water

When you exercise at a level where your cells get plenty of oxygen, it's called aerobic exercise. If you exercise harder, at a level where the oxygen can't get in fast enough, it's anaerobic exercise. Fat burns best under aerobic conditions, but anaerobic exercise has its uses, too, for muscle and endurance building.

There you have it.

Jay

One of my favorite Doctor Who episodes has it happening kinda like that. An evil alien provides "diet pills" to overweight folks, who then lose a pound a day... which actually walks off their bodies in the form of baby "Adipose" aliens.

My husband and I both agreed that the aliens would have had all the fat they needed, if only they were up-front about what was going to happen (and they didn't have the nasty option of melting the whole body into little aliens, thus killing the human). If you could say "Okay, I'll give you 150 Adipose babies, and you can take 150 pounds of fat from my body, at the rate of 2-3 pounds a week", I think they'd be able to populate a whole planet!

All body fluids and wastes can contribute to the loss of mass, so essentially we can lose mass (to varying degrees) through pee, poo, sweat, hair growth, nail growth, skin cells sloughing off (I once read that 75% of household dust is human skin cells) and boogers/phlegm. Anything that removes matter from the body.

The vast majority, though goes down the toilet.


Oh, and Hubby and I saw the same Dr. Who episode and thought the same thing.

Into the air! Sorta. More like, into the toilet, haha.

Fat and muscle are converted into energy molecules. Waste produced includes water and some other stuff that eventually gets excreted in solid waste or urine. The energy molecules are used and parts of them are recycled, or broken down and excreted as water and solid waste.

So like, you are totally peeing the weight out.

Ever woken up one morning having to pee like the dickens, stepped on the scale, and found your had "whooshed" down a couple pounds? I think sometimes there is water retention involved just before a weight loss, and that is where the whole whoosh thing comes from. Usually, it happens for me if I've been "good" for a few weeks and then eat an extra-carb-heavy meal.

LOLOL! I have never thought about where it might go. As long as the answer is "away", I don't care who gets it. Too bad we can just donate it to someone we don't like...AWAY evil fat, AWAY!

BRB

ROFL!!! Too adorable. Getting healthy and doing good for the world as well.

I had the same thought. If they had stopped before the whole "we're going to turn ALL your tissue into our beings" then who cares if your fat gets up and walks away? Off topic, it wasn't my favorite episode, by far, though it was cute. That honor would go to The Shakespeare Code. But that's just the English geek in me coming out.

Back on topic, MY totally unscientific answer was that I used to think fat was what I now know is a discharge from ovulating. (Sorry, did that need a TMI warning? ) The true answer is that, other than some of the more scientific, in depth answers I've seen, it's really just converted to energy. It's not like weight loss is about fat being loosened from your body and comes out "as is" some where. Boy, that's a funny picture... I think we're back to the adipose alien babies.