How Your Body Really Burns Fat: Can We Control It?

almost everyone at some point in their life will probably think about losing fat so how do we go from this potentially inches or centimeters thick of fat all the way down to this only a few millimeters thick well in today's video we're going to talk about what really happens when your body burns fat we'll look at the fat getting pulled from the fat cells and potentially burned in other areas of the body we'll also discuss some myths or ideas about can we control where we actually pull the fat from and we'll even talk about is

there a best type of exercise to lose fat it's going to be a squishy one so let's do this when most people talk about losing fat they're talking about losing subcutaneous fat sub just means below and cutaneous means skin so it'd be this fat right here directly below the skin and as you can see it can be up to inches thick and this fat would cover up the rectus abdominis right here that six-pack muscle here's another example of some fat that would cover up the deltoid muscle and so the idea is partly Aesthetics people want

to have their muscles shine through and so if the fat can be thinned out on top of the muscles then those muscles could more clearly shine through in all their striated Glory now even though it might be nice to have thinner subcutaneous fat so that you could see those muscles more clearly that doesn't mean we shouldn't mention visceral fat visceral means pertaining to internal organs so this would be the fat surrounding the organs here's the abdominal cavity up here's the thoracic cavity where you'd find the heart and lungs now this particular body or this dissection

is actually a little bit more tricky to make out specific structures and organs and that's because it has such a buildup of this visceral fat like look how thick and fatty this greater momentum is you can see these thicker fatty appendages coming off the intestine and that buildup of visceral fat in between what's even more remarkable is the amount of visceral fat around the heart yes the heart is inside here and it's crazy to think about especially when you see what a normal amount of visceral fat around the heart looks like now the visceral fat

inside here is sometimes also referred to as deep belly fat because as it builds up inside it can kind of push on your abdominal wall and increase your waist circumference and the more we learn about this visceral fat the more we understand it's links to certain health conditions things like metabolic syndrome type 2 diabetes high blood pressure and other cardiovascular conditions to name a few but the nice thing about this visceral fat is we're going to actually lose it in a very similar way to how we'd actually lose the subcutaneous fat and with this discussion

about losing or burning fat we're going to approach it from two different perspectives one is what can we just simply do to stimulate the fat loss and two this is kind of the more fascinating thing to me is if we actually look at what's going on within the adipose tissue when we burn through it and thin it out like where does it all go so let's focus on that part first and then we'll talk about some strategies that we can do to stimulate the fat loss well to do this let's use an example like exercise

of course let's say we're going to focus on the quad muscles those big muscles on the anterior thigh and those quad muscles are exercising and they need some extra energy and so we can pull from the fat stores to get this energy we could pull from the fat over the abdomen we could even pull from the fat that's around the shoulder here but if we were to zoom into this fatty tissue we would see that it's primarily made up of these cells called adipocytes or adipose cells and probably not going to be too big of

a shocker that these adipose cells store fat and the fat is stored as triglycerides that is a glycerol bonded to Three fatty acid chains and we actually need to break down these triglycerides before we can actually pull the fat out of the cells and circulate it throughout the body and there's an important enzyme inside of your adipose cells called hormone sensitive lipase and this hormone sensitive lipase needs a little bit of help to get activated and when we're exercising we release certain chemicals like epinephrine and norepinephrine which you've maybe have heard of adrenaline or noradrenaline

and also we release cortisol and all three of these can help to activate this hormone-sensitive lipase to start the process called lipolysis which is a fancy pants way of saying breaking down the fats and once we can break down these fats those fatty acids can be released into the bloodstream and as an FYI these fatty acids don't like water kind of you know fat versus water they don't like each other so these fatty acids because our blood is primarily water need to be transported with a protein primarily this protein is albumin you can think of

albumin as kind of like the taxi cab for your fatty acids and now once they're in the taxi cab they can circulate to the blood and onto our working quadriceps so now that we're in the bloodstream some of those fatty acids could make it into the femoral artery and take some of those branches off of the femoral artery into the working quadriceps and once it's in the quadriceps those muscle fibers can take it in and funnel it into the mitochondria to make ATP so it's kind of cool to visualize that whole process of getting to

the quadriceps but once we're in that mitochondria and making ATP those of you who've taken Biology before might remember that if we're doing this in the mitochondria making ATP with fatty acids this is going to be done aerobically meaning there is enough oxygen present we only metabolize fats with oxygen aerobically whereas glucose or carbohydrates glucose can be metabolized anaerobically without oxygen but also with oxygen but to give you some numbers if we metabolize glucose with oxygen and funnel some of those products of glucose metabolism into the mitochondria we can get about 32 to 36 ATP

from that glucose whereas the fatty acid like a common fatty acid that's metab palmitic acid that name is not really important so I don't know why I really mentioned it but that common fatty acid can yield almost 113 atps so you might be thinking what's the catch why not just use fat for our energy all the time why would we ever use carbs well as we just learned there are some Logistics involved in utilizing fat for energy we have to pull it from the storage get it in the bloodstream and transport it to a muscle

or potentially another cell that might utilize those fatty acids and they could be in a different body region altogether so there are multiple steps involved and there's this distance concern and yes fats make a lot of ATP per molecule but it just takes more time and from an exercise perspective takes about 10 to 20 minutes to really ramp up your fat metabolism during exercise and our muscles can't actually store a lot of fat so again we're mostly relying on that fat storage if we're going to utilize fat for energy in the muscle tissue whereas our

muscles are great at storing glucose in the form of glycogen glucose doesn't make as much ATP per molecule but it's right within the muscle ready and available and it's much faster to actually metabolize it and break it down so bringing this full circle with what is actually happening inside our bodies when we lose fat as we consistently pull those fatty acids out of the adipose cells those cells will get smaller and smaller and smaller which will cause the overall tissue to get thinner and thinner contributing to that overall loss of body fat and of course

making it easier to see those wonderful skeletal muscles now keep in mind we can apply these same principles that we've discussed to the visceral fat we can pull fatty acids from the visceral fat which will reduce the overall amount within those body cavities and a question that people will often have with fat loss is can you control where you pull the fat from based on exercise choices like for example if you were to do a whole bunch of crunches to work out the rectus abdominis could you get your body to preferentially pull from the fat

above the belly to make this muscle more visible and unfortunately there's no consistent evidence that I've ever seen to support that it's not like you could go do all these glued exercises and clinch your butt cheeks all day long in between to try to tell your body hey just pull fat from around my glutes so you can see that a little bit better not really going to happen now that doesn't mean that you couldn't make a muscle be a little bit more visible by getting it bigger like for example if you did a whole bunch

of crunches and these muscle fibers under hypertrophy or they just literally got bigger they might be a little bit more visible just because the muscle was literally larger underneath but that wasn't because you told your body exactly where it could pull the fat from the key is consistent overall fat loss and the muscles will become more visible as body fat percentage continues to decrease and the last thing we need to discuss is this idea of a possible best type of exercise for burning fat does that actually exist like is there a true fat burning Zone

that people should stay in if their main goal is Fat Loss well it depends what you mean by a fat burning Zone yes there is a zone or level of exercise intensity where you burn a higher percentage or proportion of fats compared to carbohydrates and so you might initially think yes let's exercise in that zone if the goal is fat burning well proportions are one thing but we also have to look at the total overall number or amount of fat burned and let me give you an example to help illustrate this let's say we work

in that fat burning Zone and burn a higher proportion of fats compared to carbohydrates and we've earned a total of 100 calories during this light exercise session and 70 percent of those came from fats and only 30 percent came from carbs and since we're using nice round numbers that means 70 calories from fats 30 calories from carbohydrates and again you might think that's where we want to be well if we did another session on another day that was have higher intensity we would have to start shifting our utilization from fats to carbohydrates as intensity increases

we just don't have enough time to mobilize and utilize those fats so again we have to start shifting to carbohydrates but in that session we burn a total of 500 calories and 70 came from carbohydrates and only 30 percent from fat and so again you're right well I just burned less fat well no because 30 percent of 500 is 150 calories from fat whereas our previous example we only burned 70 calories now don't quote me on those exact numbers in those previous examples I was mostly using nice round numbers to help illustrate the point but

if you like some more details and Nitty Gritty numbers I actually made a chart in a previous video where I made exact calculations of the proportions of fats burned compared to carbohydrates in the fat burning Zone as well as that other exercise intensities so if you're interested in that I'll link that here but the last thing I want to mention about this idea of some perfect or best type of exercise for fat loss is if we were to look at multiple different types of athletes looking at like Runners and cyclists basketball players soccer players tennis

players weight lifters and even like a wide receiver in football because yes there are certain positions in football and other sports where some extra fat or weight might be beneficial but for the most part if we looked at these different types of athletes yes we would see some differences in muscular development certain Sports and training modalities would stimulate more like muscular endurance type adaptations and the muscles wouldn't get very large where other types of sports and training the muscles would get stimulated to increase in size and everywhere in between so I would see that difference

in muscular development but one thing that these athletes would share in common is that they don't carry a lot of extra fat around so what we can glean from this is that there is not one best way to do this there are multiple ways to be successful in burning and losing fat and so one of the beautiful things that I think is about exercise is the amount of choices that we have and we are more likely to consistently participate in exercise and therefore have successful fat loss if we do exercise that we actually like doing

and enjoy so if you are the ones that like to do long distance running you could lose fat doing that if you like higher intensity training and intervals you could lose weight and fat doing that if you like weight training or a combination of weight training and cardio you can be successful and obviously participating in your sports could help with this what most of the data is suggesting is that it's not about focusing so much on this proportion of how much fat compared to carbs I burned it's still more about the overall caloric expenditure and

yes losing weight and fat is easier said than done in certain situations there are things we can't control like genetics age even hormones and other things but I always say to patients let's do try to focus on what we can control and we can control how many calories we burn and how many calories we bring in so if we can be successful at Burning more calories than we bring in or ingest then we can have some potential success in losing fat and losing weight and then once we get to a place where we're happy with

then we can adjust and those inputs can equal outputs so hopefully you learn something new and useful about how the body burns fat and although we typically think about how we can get rid of fat sometimes I think it might be beneficial for us to metaphorically fatten up our brains with brilliant brilliant.org is an amazing interactive online learning platform for stem subjects and I really do believe it's one of the best ways to learn math science and computer science these lessons from brilliant are extremely fun and engaging yet challenging enough to push you to the

next level I recently started one of their new lessons called analyzing data visually which is all about analyzing data in chart form and then learning how to apply that information to real world situations and this has really helped me to polish up old skills as well as develop new ones and that is one of the many great things about brilliant that they're constantly adding new lessons each and every month so you will definitely find a course or a lesson that is applicable to you no matter where you are on your educational Journey so if you're

interested in becoming a little bit more brilliant go to brilliant.org Iha to start a free 30-day trial plus the first 200 people will get 20 off their annual subscription we'll also include that link and the info in the description below and with my typical sign off thanks for watching everyone like And subscribe if you feel the need burn some extra calories by frantically writing some comments below and we'll see you next time good foreign [Music]