Anyone who has made a goal to lose weight knows that eating better, burning off fat through exercise and cutting back on bad habits will help the numbers on the scale go down.
But who knows where the fat goes once it’s lost?
These guys.
An Australian physicist, Ruben Meerman, was troubled by his own weight loss and pursued the lost fat with fellow researcher, Andrew Brown in results recently published in The BMJ (formerly called the British Medical Journal).
The research team breaks down what happens when your body burns fat through a chemical formula. For those of us who are not physicists nor currently enrolled in high school chemistry, NPR helps to break it down further.
Oxygen goes in, then fat becomes metabolized and your body is left with carbon dioxide, water and energy. So literally (not figuratively), you breathe out fat when you burn it off.
If you are still skeptical (or confused) or just interested in learning more about the science behind burning off fat, be sure to read the full article and check out the research results.
And as you continue to work on those New Year’s resolutions, remember that breathing our carbon dioxide also “helps plants photosynthesize,” so by losing weight, you’re also helping to make the world a better place! Good luck!
