When you lose weight, where does the fat go?

To a museum? Noooo. 


This (below) was a really good article from CNN Health, talking about one of the crazy myths we have about our weight and health. 


People think that they can burn fat from certain places in their body — like from their beer bellies, saddlebag hips, or turkey neck “back of the arm”.  

• For example, my brother in law once told me that I had a smaller belly since the last time he saw me, THUS … I must have been doing a lot of sit ups. 
• You see ads for stupid fitness products that show cartoons of HIPPY women who do some HIP exercise and their HIP FAT melts off.  
• And “everyone knows” that women with that swinging fat basket that they can get on their triceps is fixed by doing some kind of tricep exercises … right?  

You can’t change your shape, just your size


You can’t cherry-pick where you shed fat; weight loss doesn’t work like a point-and-shoot. 


“Basically, when we lose weight, we lose weight all over in exactly the proportion that’s distributed throughout our body,” said Susan Fried, director of the Boston Obesity and Nutrition Research Center at the Boston University School of Medicine. 


A pear-shaped woman who loses weight will remain a pear, just a daintier one, say researchers who specialize in body fat. So, when you start to lose fat, it’s proportionate throughout your body, whether it’s your neck, waist, ankle circumference. You’ll come out smaller but have the same body shape.”


So where does the fat go?
Fat cells expand when you’re storing fat in them, and shrink during weight loss. But the cells themselves don’t actually go away. GREAT, right? In fact, you carry about 10 billion to 30 billion fat cells. People who are obese can have up to 100 billion.


“If anyone of us overeats long and hard enough, we can increase the number of fat cells in our body,” Fried said. “When we lose weight, we don’t lose the number of fat cells.” The size of the cells shrinks, but the capacity to expand is always there.




When you’re losing weight, where does the fat go? – CNN.com