Hospitals

What really happens to fat when we “burn” it?

Many people will be planning to hit the gym and drop some extra weight as […]

Many people will be planning to hit the gym and drop some extra weight as a New Year’s resolution come January. Surprisingly, even health professionals aren’t always sure where fat goes when people lose weight, according to a University of New South Wales study in Australia.

Your doctor, dietitian or personal trainer might believe that pounds lost turn into energy or heat, but they’d be wrong.

“There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss,” says Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences.

What really happens might surprise you:

Most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. It seriously just goes into thin air.

Ruben Meerman, a physicist, and Brown write in the British Medical Journal that losing 10 kilograms of fat requires 29kg of oxygen to be inhaled. This metabolic process produces 28kg of carbon dioxide and 11kg of water.

Meerman became intrigued by this when he was on a weight-loss mission himself.

“I lost 15kg in 2013 and simply wanted to know where those kilogrammes were going. After a self-directed, crash course in biochemistry, I stumbled onto this amazing result. With a worldwide obesity crisis occurring, we should all know the answer to the simple question of where the fat goes. The fact that almost nobody could answer it took me by surprise, but it was only when I showed Andrew my calculations that we both realised how poorly this topic is being taught.”

This impressive new contribution to the research about weight loss could bring up some random questions, though.

Like could breathing more help you lose weight? Nope. That would be the most breakthrough diet fad ever. But breathing more than necessary can cause hyperventilation, dizziness, palpitations and loss of consciousness.

According to the report, some people have even asked if weight loss has an affect on global warming (one of the best excuses for skipping the gym and eating a burger – “I’m saving the planet”).

“This reveals troubling misconceptions about global warming, which is caused by unlocking the ancient carbon atoms trapped underground in fossilized organisms,” Meerman says. “The carbon atoms human beings exhale are returning to the atmosphere after just a few months or years trapped in food that was made by a plant.”

[Photo from flickr user potamos.photography]

Shares0
Shares0