By Richard Knox
A couple of years ago, Ruben Meerman took off 40 pounds. And that got him wondering: What exactly happened to all that fat?
Conventional wisdom was that he “burned” it off. Or sweated it off. Or excreted it. None of that satisfied Meerman, who has a physics degree and makes his living explaining science to schoolkids and for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
So Meerman tackled the problem and eventually came up with a surprising answer: Most of the lost fat disappears into thin air.
More specifically, 84 percent of those fat molecules get exhaled as colorless, odorless carbon dioxide. The other 16 percent departs the body as H-2-O — plain old water.
Meerman says the discovery “got me really excited because I’d stumbled onto a gap in the knowledge. It struck me as remarkable that no one had thought this was interesting enough to pursue.”
The British Medical Journal thought so too. It has published a paper, co-authored by biochemist Andrew Brown of the University of South Wales, in its annual Christmas issue, which features off-beat (but peer-reviewed) research.
Weight Loss Realism
Meerman hopes the work will dispel misconceptions held by health professionals as well as the general public. And, he hopes it will provide a helpful dose of realism to counter the impossible expectations millions have about weight loss.
If people understand where the fat goes (and how), they’ll get “why there’s a limit to how quickly you can lose weight,” Meerman said in a Skype interview from Sydney. “And if you understand the limit, you won’t be so quickly depressed if you don’t lose 20 pounds in the first two weeks.”
First, the misconceptions. Meerman and Brown surveyed 150 professionals — split equally among family doctors, dietitians and personal trainers — about where they think the fat goes during weight loss.
By far the most common answer was that the fat was transformed into energy or heat — that is, “burned off.” About two-thirds of doctors thought so. A slightly higher proportion of dietitians did too, and about 55 percent of personal trainers.
But that would violate the Law of Conservation of Mass. It’s a basic precept of chemistry, formulated in 1789 by the French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, which holds that mass is neither created nor destroyed in chemical reactions. The total mass at the end must equal the mass at the starting point — even if matter is quite transformed in the process, from solid to liquid or gas.
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