Fat Burning
As the New Year commences, I wanted to talk about weight loss, specifically the concept of fat burning. This idea permeates a large portion of the health and wellness sphere in everything from exercise programs to supplements and everything in between. I wanted to discuss some of the physiology around fat and how it is utilized as fuel in the body.
We are going to start at the beginning and ask what happens when fat is burned or used as fuel. Well, first there is a difference between using dietary fat and using adipose or stored fat. Most of the time when we are doing the kinds of low intensity exercise that are good at “burning fat” we are mostly using dietary fat. This is fat in your bloodstream from the food that you eat, meaning it's not coming off of your body. When people talk about burning fat they often point to some data done with metabolic carts showing that someone is burning fat. There are a couple issues with that. First, a metabolic cart only measures what is being used as fuel. It does not measure where that fuel is coming from. This means that you can be doing a bunch of activities that burn fat as a fuel but if your energy balance is off, you won’t lose fat. Second issue is the efficiency issue. We use fat as a fuel source at low intensity exercise. As intensity ramps up, we slowly switch to using more carbohydrates as fuel, which is a good thing. The issue lies in the amount used. When doing low intensity exercise, it takes a very, very, very long time to burn the amount of fat needed to make the composition changes most people who are focused on fat burning are looking for.
A better strategy is looking at overall calories burned. Now yes, measuring calories is not perfect. There are some estimations that take place. You can not count calories, employ other strategies and still lose weight. There are few things we know for weight loss. The strategy you employ must have accountability or counting in it. This target gives very specific goals or rules to follow and you say either yes I did or no I didn’t meet them. It takes away the grey area which is where personal negations take place. This is where counting calories is nice because everyday you either are under or over the number you have determined. I personally like the counting style because when done correctly it has the highest success rate because of the laws of thermodynamics.
The last thing I wanted to quickly address is spot reduction. A quick google search will return you hours and hours of content of people talking about this or that secret or hidden or ancient technique that the “fitness industry” or “healthcare industry” doesn’t want you to know that will quickly reduce belly or thigh or arm or neck or wherever fat. I hate to say it, but spot reduction is not real. When we lose or gain weight, it is a whole body process, there is no nonsurgical way to reduce fat in specific spots. Different spots in your body will gain and lose fat at different rates, and it is highly variable based on a person’s genetic makeup. Growing more muscle in an area can make it appear to have lost fat because the composition is different, however the actual fat mass would stay the same.
Hopefully this helped debunk some myths!
