What Happens to Your Body Fat When You Lose Weight?

One of the biggest challenges facing many Americans today is winning the weight loss battle and dropping that fat. But how exactly is fat dropped? Do you actually lose body fat when you lose weight?

Shrinking Your Reserves

First, it’s important to understand that fat is a component of muscle. And like muscle, fat doesn’t come and go, so much as grow or shrink. If you exercise your muscles, they become bigger, but if you don’t exercise, you don’t lose the muscles themselves, so much as the mass, the muscles have taken on. It’s the same with fat. Fat cells grow as people eat and don’t exercise, and they shrink with proper dieting and a more active lifestyle.

So, the trick with dieting and exercise is not to physically remove the fat, a technique that exists as an expensive surgical procedure. Instead, the goal is to burn up the energy that fat has stored in reserve for a day when food is in short supply, but people may still need the energy to keep going.

So, with weight loss, what people are doing is managing the proportion or percentage of fat in their body, otherwise known as their body mass index.

Expelling Body Fat As Waste

The principles of weight loss are well understood. Fat is designed as an energy reserve when there aren’t enough calories to sustain activity. A change in eating habits and a more active lifestyle burn more calories than the body needs to get through the day, so fat is used up. However, fat doesn’t disappear. Instead, the calories are used up, and the waste by-products are shed.

When the body uses fat, the two primary forms of waste are H2O, or water, and CO2, or carbon dioxide. In other words, when fat cells shrink, the waste the body no longer needs is disposed of either as sweat or urine, in liquid form, or exhaled every time a person breathes out. This is one of the reasons why exercise causes people to breathe faster and more deeply, as energy reserves create CO2 that needs to be expelled.

When combined with another exercise technique, such as anaerobic, high-intensity interval training, this creates a situation where a lot of fat is burned, and weight loss is rapid.  However, if you’re serious about losing weight and keeping it off permanently, try a weight loss program focusing on permanent lifestyle and dietary changes. If it works, share the news with a friend so more people can lead healthier and happier lives.