You exhale the carbon dioxide and the water mixes into your circulation until it's lost as urine or sweat. If you lose 10 pounds of fat, precisely 8.4 pounds comes out through your lungs and the remaining 1.6 pounds turns into water. In other words, nearly all the weight we lose is exhaled.
Mostly, losing weight is an internal process. You will first lose hard fat that surrounds your organs like liver, kidneys and then you will start to lose soft fat like waistline and thigh fat. The fat loss from around the organs makes you leaner and stronger.
Research shows that 84% of fat loss is exhaled as carbon dioxide. The remaining 16% of fat is excreted as water. During the conversion of energy, carbon dioxide, and water are byproducts of waste. They are excreted via urine, perspiration, and exhalation.
Byproducts of fat loss
When body fat is broken down for energy through complex processes within your cells, two major byproducts are released — carbon dioxide and water. The carbon dioxide is exhaled during breathing, and the water is disposed of through either urine, sweat, or exhaled air.
Instead of nutrients fueling your body, some of them, including fat, can be passed in your stools. If you have a condition that makes it difficult to digest fat, you may also develop fatty stools or fecal fat. When this happens, you may experience digestive issues such as pain, gas, or diarrhea.
In addition to an oily appearance, your urine might also have a milky white color. This is due to the presence of fat and protein in lymph fluid.
Insulin tells muscle, organ and even fat cells to take up the glucose and use it for fuel. It also tells fat cells to store fat—including fat from the meal—for later use. As long as insulin levels remain high, fat cells retain fat, and the other cells preferentially burn glucose (and not fat) for energy.
The bottom line
When your body uses fat for fuel, the byproducts of fat metabolism are often excreted through urine. While peeing more frequently is unlikely to lead to weight loss, increasing your intake of water may support your weight loss goals.
As against areas such as legs, face and arms, our stomach and abdominal regions possess beta cells that makes it difficult to reduce the fats easily and lose weight in these areas. However, as per research, belly fat is the most difficult to lose as the fat there is so much harder to break down.
While everyone loses weight differently, dropping as little as 3 to 5 pounds can show up on your face first, Eboli says.
Most fat is stored underneath the skin and is known as subcutaneous fat. That is the fat that is visible and that you can feel. The rest of the fat in the body is hidden. That is visceral fat.
Fat burning typically begins after approximately 12 hours of fasting and escalates between 16 and 24 hours of fasting.
Excess visceral fat can pose serious health risks, but when you embark on a healthy diet and exercise plan, this fat is often the first to disappear. This means you're likely to notice weight loss in your abdominal area first. Too much visceral fat can make your belly protrude.
Cardio work, strength training and counting calories and macronutrients (protein, carbs and fat) are the three big components of weight loss. You should be doing all three, but each of these is not created equally when you're trying to lose weight.
The first and most important reason why you are not burning fat is because you are eating too many calories. Plain and simple the only way to lose body fat is to be in a caloric deficit. You need to be expending more calories than you take in. A lot of this has to do with calories that you don't notice.
Drinking Water Can Make You Burn More Calories
Drinking water increases the amount of calories you burn, which is known as resting energy expenditure ( 4 ). In adults, resting energy expenditure has been shown to increase by 24–30% within 10 minutes of drinking water.
The color of your urine can indeed signal that fat-burning processes are underway. A good indicator of weight loss is the presence of ketones and a urine color of bright or dark yellow.
People do lose weight during sleep. However, this is mostly due to water loss through breathing and sweating. While individuals do not burn much fat during sleep, sleep is a fundamental component of well-being, and a lack of it can make maintaining a moderate weight more difficult.
For some people, the first noticeable change may be at the waistline. For others, the breasts or face are the first to show change. Where you gain or lose weight first is likely to change as you get older. Both middle-aged men and postmenopausal women tend to store weight around their midsections.
You can only lose back fat by losing fat all-over on your bod. You can also tone the area by targeting back muscles. Creating a calorie deficit, eating healthy, and exercising regularly are the keys to the weight loss needed to target back fat. Remember that some degree of back fat is healthy and totally normal!
Do More Aerobic Exercise. Regular aerobic exercise is a great way to shed visceral fat. It's commonly known as cardio, and it burns a lot of calories. In fact, many studies have shown that aerobic exercise can help you lose visceral fat, even without dieting ( 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ).
Hunger indicates that you are running low on nutrients and energy, not that your body is starting to burn fat storage. Furthermore, long-lasting hunger induced by the drastic calorie restriction is an indicator of starvation, which will only slow down your metabolism and weight loss.