Additionally, visceral fat inhibits a very important hormone called adiponectin, which regulates metabolism in your body. This fat, called visceral fat, is metabolically active, and it secretes biochemicals that increase your risk of heart attack, stroke, liver failure, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Worse, while most fat resides under your skin, the more dangerous fat actually accumulates around your internal organs (this is why belly fat is more medically problematic than fat in other areas). Because fat and muscle are enemies (we’ll get to that in a minute), your fat cells are trying to erode your muscle cells. More bad news: Fat loves to hang out with more fat. You can shrink them until they’re practically empty, but they will always be there-waiting to be refilled. Remember how we said fat cells were like balloons? When you lose weight, you are letting some of the stuff out of the inflated balloons, thus shrinking the fat cells. So that’s where the weight actually goes when you lose it. Water: Fat typically feels kinda wet to the touch, right? That’s because there’s some water in it. The carbon dioxide will travel through your bloodstream until it returns to your lungs to be exhaled out. It’s true with fuel, and it’s true with body fat. It carries fuel to your muscles.Ĭarbon Dioxide: Whenever you burn anything (see heat, above), it gives off carbon dioxide. Then it becomes ADP, and it can’t be used again until it picks up another phosphate molecule. It makes a little explosion of available power in your muscles. Our primary source of immediate energy is produced when we break a phosphate molecule off the ATP. When you’re cold, you burn more calories to keep yourself warm.ĪTP: We need ATP for muscle function. Heat: You know how you, being a warm-blooded mammal, keep your body temperature right around 36.5 degrees Celsius pretty much all the time? Your body does this by burning calories. This converts the fat into heat, carbon dioxide, water, and ATP (adenosine triphosphate). The mitochondria (cellular energy centers) in your muscle or liver cells pull some of the fat (stored as triglycerides) from within your fat cells and put it through a metabolic process. Just like your car’s engine turns fuel into heat and exhaust, your body utilizes a similar process. So, when you lose fat, where does it go? Most people don’t really know.
When it’s time to pull some energy out of the cells, another chemical conversion takes place to turn it back into usable energy.
ZIP file it makes the energy more compact and storable, but makes the content itself harder to access. It undergoes a chemical conversion so that it stores the energy more efficiently. They expand as they collect more fuel, and they shrink when you use some of the fuel. So, if calories are car fuel, think of fat cells as rubber balloons filled with car fuel.
Your body then takes these free calories and packages them into cells of fat. I’d better save it, in case I need it later.” And so the miracle of fat begins. When that happens our bodies say, “I don’t need all this energy right now. Now, sometimes we consume more calories than our bodies are prepared to burn. Your muscles, digestion, breathing, brain function, growing hair, etc.
Once these calories make it into your bloodstream, your body burns the calories. Think of body fat as “potential energy.” Calories, which you consume through the food you eat, are fuel.