When You Lose Body Fat, It Becomes Carbon Dioxide

If you’ve ever gone on a daily exercise regiment and lost weight you must know it feels great to see those scales tip in the right direction. It comes as a sense of accomplishment and relief that the flab that you once had is slowly becoming history, but like history it just doesn’t evaporate in to thin air…or does it?

Physicist Ruben Meerman had dropped 15 kilos and became interested in the science so he consulted around 150 doctors, dietitians and personal trainers on where the mass of the fat goes when we “lose” it. He was surprised to find out that none had a satisfactory answer, more plainly speaking they didn’t have a clue. Most of them that had an answer said that the fat was converted in to heat energy. But according to the law of conservation of mass this is impossible. So Meerman studied this phenomenon at the University of New South Wales Science in Sydney.

Their study, which was published in the British Medical Journal yielded results that may prove revolutionary, yet like all great truths the results hit you in the face as common sense. It turns out that we lose the fat through excretion.

carbon dioxide. We lose the carbon dioxide through exhalation and the water through urination and sweating. The equation is given below (for all you chemistry buffs).

Of course this process requires exercise to make a significant dent in your weight. Otherwise at the normal breathing rate (17280 times a day), you’ll lose about 10 milligrams per breath (about 17 grams in a day).