What is Body Fat?

Nobody wants to be fat. Everybody wants to look good naked, and that means getting rid of the fat that encircles your belly, arms, legs, that’s packed into your butt and lower back. Everybody wants to look sleek and lean and ready for the beach, and so everybody wants to lose fat. But instead of learning more about this substance they want to get rid of, they jump right into diets and exercise programs, and consequently aren’t able to gauge the best ways to lose fat. You have to understand what you’re trying to lose in order to lose it. So it’s time to do a little homework, learn what fat is and what it does, so that you can then get to work on losing it.

So what is fat? The technical name is adipose tissue, with each individual cell being called an adipocyte (adipo = fat, cyte = cell). We have billions of fat cells in our body, because they’re incredibly tiny (think in terms of 100,000th of a meter). Each cell is composed primarily of lipid, which are stored triglycerides (TG) which is in turn simply a glycerol molecule bound to three fatty acid chains. The rest of the cell is made up of water and the mechanical parts of the cell responsible for producing enzymes, proteins, etc. These mechanical parts have been discovered to be incredibly important to the role fat plays in our bodies, as I’ll explain in a bit.

So why do we have fat? Why do humans bulge around the waist and hips in the first place? The main reason is because fat is a place where we store energy. Go back 10,000 years (just a blink in terms of our evolutionary history) and imagine us humans running around in the forests, trying to get enough food to last the winter. We’d gorge in summer, get as fat as possible, and then lean out over winter as we burned our fat resources while food was scarce. It turns out that fat is incredibly efficient at storing energy and being used as a source of energy, much more efficient that protein or carbs. A single pound of fat has about 3,600 calories worth of energy stored inside. Assuming you only burnt fat, that’s enough energy in 1 lb of fat for a 150 lb person to walk 35 miles. If that person had a standard 15% body fat, that would be 22.5 lbs of fat, and about 80,000 calories of stored energy, enough for him to walk for almost 800 miles. Incredible!

But fat does more than simply store energy. It also works as an endocrine organ in its own right, affecting the levels of hormones that control appetite, fat burning, muscle loss, blood pressure regulation, cell death and inflammation. Testosterone is converted in men and women into estrogen in fat cells, and cortisol is metabolized there too.

Beyond that, fat is important on a number of more obvious levels; it helps keep us warm when it gets cold (not as important today as it used to be), it helps cushion our interior organs from impact and damage (important to only full contact athletes like football players today), and are critical in their roll in immune and anti-inflammatory response.

So there you go-fat cells are a necessary part of our organisms, helping not only sustain us with energy reserves, but also providing us with vital hormones and keeping us healthy when it’s cold or we’re hit. Is fat all bad? Guess not!

Get your max results by shedding weight and doing the craziest cardio/plyometrics workout out there: the Insanity Workout will destroy you and leave you shredded like never before. Make sure to drink your Shakeology supplement while you’re at it, and get every nutrient you need in this meal replacement shake.

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