Fat Cells in the body: the harsh truth

People are born with a genetically-predetermined number of fat cells. Some are born with more fat cells than the others. The person who was born with more fat cells is certainly at a disadvantage when compared to someone with less number of fat cells. It does sound unfair, but it is true.

The number of fat cells in the body can increase throughout life but it cannot ever decrease – the number will never go below the beginning mark! (Except through liposuction, which is unnatural). However, we are lucky to the extent that we can change the size of the fat cells. A person born with a large number of fat cells can shrink all of them, with the right nutrition and exercise and thereby become dramatically thinner and leaner.

Some of us are given more fat cells by heredity, and some fewer. But the final fat level is the result of environment, behavior as well as heredity. You can vary your final fat level a lot by what and how you eat, as well as what kind and how much exercise you do. No matter where you start from, you can transform your body totally. The most critical body part is your own mind. If you have the know-how and the will, you can perform miracles with your body.

Understanding the Basal Metabolic Rate : BMR

The basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the amount of energy, in terms of the number of calories that the body burns at rest just to maintain normal body functions such as breathing, circulation, digestion, etc.

This is the minimum number of calories that you require to go through your day. If you consume the BMR amount of calories, be idle throughout the day, you will not be dipping into your fat reserves for energy. If you eat less than the BMR and be idle, some fat from your body will be used to meet the shortfall. Now, if you throw in some light exercise for more than 45 minutes, like walking for an hour (around 175-200 calories expense), and eat less than your BMR, a higher amount of fat will be burnt.

Total calorie requirement = BMR + Activity Induced Requirement (walking, physically working etc. Each activity burns a specific amount of calories per hour)

Therefore if total calorie intake from food is less that total calorie requirement, you lose fat. If the intake exceeds the requirement, you put on.

Calculating your BMR:

There are two formulas you can use to calculate your BMR. The Harris-Benedict formula is the one you will use if you don’t know your Lean Body Mass. If you know your LBM, through an accurate test like DEXA whole body scan, you can use the Katch McArdle formula for getting the most accurate calorie estimate.

Harris-Benedict formula

Men: BMR = 66 + (13.7 X wt in kg) + (5 X ht in cm) - (6.8 X age in years)
Women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 X wt in kg) + (1.8 X ht in cm) - (4.7 X age in years)
Note: 1 inch = 2.54 centimeters
1 kilogram = 2.2 lbs.

Katch-McArdle formula

BMR (men and women) = 370 + (21.6 X lean mass in kg)

Some people are genetically gifted, like cars that burn lot of fuel even while idling. When they become active, they zoom fast and burn off fuel at an enormous rate. For the normal people, knowing the BMR, and keeping control of the calories eaten and spent, is the only way to avoid or losing body fat.

The type, pace, duration and the timing of exercise plays a crucial role in proper fat loss, and I shall be writing about them in my subsequent posts…

How much fat to lose per week: The safe limit

“Lose 40 kgs in 40 days” – I am sure you would have seen ads with such claims, and perhaps with even higher numbers. It may be possible but then you would be confusing weight loss with fat loss.

The human body contains 70% water and any diet that dehydrates can very quickly cause weight loss. Or the weight loss could come from muscles degradation. Both are technically undesirable and instead of dehydrating yourself or losing valuable muscle, you should aim to lose body fat and not body weight.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) is generally considered to be the largest and most respected health, medical and exercise organization in the world. ACSM has a position statement on "Proper and improper weight loss programs" which recommends a weight loss goal of one to two pounds per week. In terms of body fat, that works out to about a half a percent per week.

It may appear to be infuriatingly slow, but it is the safest and most intelligent guidance on the amount of ideal fat loss.

Any weight loss caused by losing water will be gained back immediately when the body gets re-hydrated. As for the muscle loss, it leads to a slowing down of basal metabolism rate and makes the body go into a “survival mode” or a “starvation mode”. This can be real bad, since when you come out of a very low calorie diet, chances are you will certainly put back the weight you lost and at times even more.

There are physiological limitations to how quickly AND safely the body can lose fat - Do not strive for more than two pounds of fat loss per week.

The ideal time to burn the fat

The amount of glucose that is stored in the body is limited and can get depleted quickly. It is not possible for the body to meet the energy demands of the brain, the nervous system and other body parts for a sustained period of time, using only the stored glucose. After eating, when all the glucose the food has been stored away, and no more glucose is being absorbed from the intestine, the body begins rationing the use of now precious glucose.

The brain and nervous systems are vital and therefore they get small, requisite amounts to keep functioning. The use of glucose by other body organs is decreased. Nevertheless, the other organs of the body still need to work and therefore the body starts looking for an alternate source of energy.

At the end of a three-hour period after a meal, both glucose and insulin levels are low in the body. The amount of insulin present is not sufficient to prevent fats from being released into the bloodstream. This is the time when fat becomes the dominant source of energy for the body. This energy generating system is also known as ‘glucose sparring’ and it works with the assistance of a hormone called Glucagon. Glucagon sends out two signals – one to the liver to release glucose and the other to the adipose tissues to release fats into the blood. Therefore three hours after a meal is the ideal time to exercise for fat burning.

Fat burning: The crucial stage

Before you read this post, I recommend you read two of my earlier posts – “Fat loss: The stages involved” and “The first step: Separating fat from the fat cells”. This will put you in the right perspective and help you understand the big picture.

Fat oxidation is the technical term for burning of fat. Once fats are released into the blood as FFAs by the process of lipolysis, they are transported to the site where they can be burnt as a source of energy. These sites are called mitochondria and they are found in the muscle cells.

To get the fat into the muscle cells is a difficult and slow process. Fat moves slowly into the cell, as it must cross the cell membrane and then transported into the furnace of mitochondria. Fat is burnt in the mitochondria, just like a piece of wood, to provide energy for the muscle. The substance that helps in carrying the fat into the furnace is called Carnitine.

The rate of fat oxidation depends on the rate of lipolysis. When there is an abundance of fat being released into the bloodstream, a correspondingly higher amount of fat can be taken up for burning. However, when lipolysis is hindered due to factors such as the presence of high levels of insulin in the body etc., fat available for oxidation also becomes less.

In simple terms, larger amount of fat can be burnt about three hours after a meal, and through low-intensity exercises such as walking, for a period of at least 60 minutes. The 60 minutes mark is on the higher side, but remember that lipolysis is not only difficult but also slow. The rate of lipolysis and oxidation would vary from individual to individual and for some even 45 minutes would suffice. Besides, any form of burning requires oxygen and aerobic exercises enhance oxygen availability, apart from improving cardiovascular fitness.

The first step: Separating fat from the fat cells

To get the right perspective to this part, you should be reading this post immediately after my earlier one – “Fat loss: The stages involved”.

It is easy for the body to store fat but it is very difficult to remove it from the fat cells. When you eat fat, only 3% of it is used in digesting, breaking it down, transporting and storing. It has been shown in research that if you ate 50 grams cheese containing 12 grams fat, you would end up storing almost 11 grams of fat.

The first step in burning fat is its removal from the fat cells. This is perhaps the most difficult of the three steps involved in fat reduction. The technical term used for removing fat from the fat storage cells is lipolysis.

Exercises can provide the jump-start by activating a hormone called epinephrine(a catecholamine). Epinephrine binds to the fat cells to activate fat-breaking enzymes that allow the fat to move out from the fat cells and ooze into the blood. This process normally takes place two to three hours after a meal. Catecholamines (epinephrine and norepinephrine) and insulin are the major plasma hormones that regulate lipolysis in humans.

The fats are released into the blood in the form of Free Fatty Acids (FFAs). At this stage, another hormone, Glucagon, not only stimulates the release of FFAs into the blood stream but also inhibits release of glucose into the blood. (This is important since fat is the least preferred sourced of energy; fat is burnt only when there are no other energy sources available).

This is the underlying reason why fat-burning exercises should be done at least two to three hours after a meal. Also fat-burning exercises need to be of longer duration (60 minutes is ideal) since it takes about 15 minutes for the body to move the fat out of the storage area and transport it into the fat-burning sites in the muscles. This process works best during moderate to low intensity exercises when adrenaline levels are increased.

Make your choice: losing fat or building muscle

When you come across advertising or product promotions that scream, “Lose fat and build muscle in 30 days”, don’t ever fall for that. It is just a gimmick to fool the gullible. There has been, is or will be, no miracle that can actually live up to this claim. If at all, a big fat loss and huge muscle building ever happen simultaneously, it is only possible with a potent combination of drugs and steroids, and we are not going into that.

Losing fat and adding muscles are two opposing things, in terms of simple physiology. Fat loss is a catabolic process and building muscles is anabolic. To aid fat loss, there has to be a calorie deficit. Whereas, additional calories are needed to help the body build muscle. The kind of nutritional programs required to meet these contrasting goals are radically different.

So, if you are high in fat and wish to build a muscle-bound physique, get rid of the fat first. Then, making sure you stay lean, get on with a bodybuilding regime. If you try to achieve results in both departments, you would end up disappointed.

However, once you have built a good physique, with a high lean mass and low body fat percentage, it is quite possible to refine it further – you can see gains in lean mass and losses in body fat, at the same time. But this state is usually seen only in people with highly trained bodies.

Fiber: A good weapon in the battle of the bulge

High-fiber foods can play an important role in fat control and fat loss. Many high-fiber, carbohydrate foods do not contain fat. Replacing fatty foods with high fiber foods helps in decreasing the amount of fat eaten. Less fat eaten equals less far storage and an higher amount of energy is required to be spent by the body in breaking down high-fiber, carbohydrate foods.

Moreover, fibrous foods absorb more water than non-fibrous foods and create a sense of ‘full stomach’ after being eaten. So you end up eating less often after a high-fiber meal.This indirectly contributes to your efforts towards fat loss. A high fiber diet also reduces the risk of colon cancer, by decreasing the transit time of food in the intestine and thereby the exposure time of potential carcinogens in the food.

Some fibers bind to the bile acids in the gut and pull along the Cholesterol out of the guts along with the bile acids. This can decrease the amount of LDL (bad cholesterol) in the blood.

Oats, beans, lentils, legumes, peas, bananas and pears are all good sources of fiber.

On a rough count, about 30 grams of fiber per day should be the minimum requirement in your diet. However, be cautious of ingesting too much fiber for fat loss than the recommended amount – after all, too much of even a good thing is bad.

How much fat in diet per day is ideal ?

As you must have realized from my previous posts, ‘Know your body fat: The different types’ and ‘Different types of fat in your food: the good and the bad’, fat is a very crucial part of the human body. We cannot function without fat, since the body uses it as the source of energy during the day – while sitting, standing, doing light tasks, working at the desk or even sleeping.

The amount of fat thus used up by the body is too insignificant to promote fat loss. So the answer to a fit and lean body lies in controlling the intake of fat through the food.

An average human body can easily burn around 41 grams of fat for women and 60 grams for men, each day – doing nothing.

When you eat more than these amounts needed by the body for daily processes, it becomes surplus fat and gets stored. Either you burn it off through exercises or let it build up on and on. It’s that simple.

PS: The figures of 41 grams and 60 grams may slightly vary, depending on the individual’s physique and fitness levels. But I feel that it is better to err on the lower side, if you are looking for results.

Body fat storage: lucky men, unlucky women

When it comes to burning of stored fat in the body, men have it easier than women. It is primarily due to location of body fat storage dictated by genetic codes evolved over millions of years and the gender-different hormones.

Men tend to store the body fat in their abdominal region, whereas the women store it around their hips and thighs.

When the primitive men were hunters-gatherers, they often had to go out on long journeys in search of food. The abdominal fat was the source of energy during those arduous, hungry days. Men with abdominal fat survived better than their thinner counterparts.

During times of famine, the survival rate of women who had larger amounts of fat in their hips and thighs were higher than the skinny ones. Besides, the fat was also essential and proved protective during pregnancy, as a long-term supply of energy.

Both these advantageous genetic traits got passed down the generations – evolution always favors the genetic traits that enhance survival.

The second deciding factor is the hormones. Men’s bodies produce Testosterone, which predisposes the fat to get stored on the stomach or central trunk region. Female bodies produce Estrogen, which promotes fat storage on hips, thighs and buttocks.

Abdominal body fat can be removed quite easily, through a comparatively easier regime of diet and exercise. However, the fat on hips and thighs is really hard to burn off for the women.

However, men need to realize that fat in the stomach region, accompanied by a diet high in fat can increase the risk of lower back pain, joint pain, shortness of breath, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and cancer of the colon…

Fat Management: Similar to managing a bank account

Managing your fat for Fat Loss is not much different from managing your bank account – except in this case, you wouldn’t want to do any savings.

If you earn more than you spend, you save; you start spending more than what you earn, you end up using your savings. It’s that simple - now, the calories that you consume in a day are your earning. The calories that your body burns as fuel is the spending. The fat accumulated in your body down the years is the savings.

So, to wipe out the savings, you can either earn less (consume less calories), spend more (burn more calories) or do both.

The next step is to understand your ‘spending’ and your ‘earning’. Just exactly how much is your expense, in terms of calories, per day? Unless you know what you are spending now, you wouldn’t be able to make the adjustments necessary to wipe out your savings.

Your ‘earning’ can easily be found by keeping a track of all that you eat and converting them into calories. Several calorie tables are available freely on the net to give you the calorie count of every imaginable food.

Just make sure that you record everything you eat in a typical day – morning coffee/tea, breakfast, lunch, sweets, evening snacks, tea/coffee, soft drinks, dinner, desserts, chocolates - list all of them down, find out the calorie count for each, and total them up. You can take an average day scenario for this calculation, but make sure you take the higher side – like Sunday, when you would tend to consume more.

Your ‘spending’ or your daily calorie requirement consists of three components.

1. Basal Metabolism Rate (BMR) – the calories required for powering your body’s various functions to remain alive.
2. Non-activity daily requirement – the calories required to just to go through the motions of the day, including the calories required to digest the food that you eat. (This is roughly 10% of the total calories you eat in a day).
3. Activity induced daily requirement – the calories used up by your body for various activities performed by you – this would include exercises, sports etc. You will need to figure out how many calories you burn while doing various activities.

In my next posts, I will be talking in depth about BMR, Non-activity and Activity induced requirements and also telling you how to measure them…

Different types of fat in food: the good and bad

Now that you know the different types of fat in your body (My earlier post - Know your body fat: The different types), let us look at the different types of fat in your food – where the saga of fat begins.

The three main types of fats commonly found in our food are Essential Fatty Acids (EFA), Cholesterol and saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat (PUFA) and mono-unsaturated fat (MUFA).

Let us take up saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat (PUFA) and mono-unsaturated fat (MUFA) first.

The classic examples of each would be butter, Sunflower oil and olive oil.

Saturated fats increase the LDL (the bad guy) and decrease the HDL (the good guy). To know more about LDL and HDL, see my earlier post - Know your body fat: The different types.

These go into the fat cell first but get removed from the fat cell last. Coconut oil, Palm Oil, regular Cheese and full-cream milk are a few representative examples of saturated fat.

Polyunsaturated fats are ‘good fats’ in small amounts since they can lower LDL levels. Sunflower oil and Soybean oil are examples of polyunsaturated fat. Apart from containing PUFA, green leafy vegetables also contain Essential Fatty Acids

Essential Fatty Acids

EFAs are not stored as fats but are used to provide energy for the body metabolism and hence the ‘essential’ tag. A deficiency of EFA can lead to rupturing of cells, and allowing of small molecules and water into the cell. This loss of cell function compromises the ability of the cell to produce and function optimally.

EFAs are also involved in muscle contraction, blood clotting, blood pressure control, hormone production and nervous tissue functions of the eye and brain. Do not, therefore, cut out the Essential Fatty Acids from your diet.

Cholesterol

Cholesterol is perhaps the most misunderstood and feared member of the fat family. It is essential for good health and is internally produced in the body, in the liver and most cells. Cholesterol is involved in the production of sex hormones and bile. Bile helps dissolve fats much in the same way as a detergent helps dissolve oil in a greasy plate.

Humans internally produce approximately 1 gm of Cholesterol daily and that is all the body needs. Thus specific Cholesterol particles called Lipoproteins (LDL & HDL) are found in human blood. Any extra Cholesterol in the diet can become harmful.

The levels of LDL (bad) and HDL (good) can increase or decrease according to the food you consume. Plant foods such as vegetables and fruits contain no Cholesterol. Regular exercise can increase the HDL levels.

In the end, remember that all oils, good or bad, when eaten in excess can be fattening.

Fat loss: The stages involved

Now that you know about the difference between weight loss and fat loss, as well as the different types of fats in your body, let us explore the process a bit deeper.

Losing fat means burning fat as a source of energy by the body. But before we can get to the burning stage, there are a lot of other things to consider. Imagine a huge sticker that has been pasted onto your living room wall by a naughty kid. Now, to get rid of the sticker once and for all, you would do the following steps. First, get the sticker off the wall – this might require wetting, scraping, peeling etc. Now the second step would be to take this sticker to the bathroom, balcony or any suitable place where you can burn it. Finally, you would need an incinerator, bin, container or any such thing in which the sticker can be burnt.

Fat loss works pretty much the same way. Firstly, the fat that has been ‘stuck’ onto the tissues needs to be separated from them. Then it has to be transported to the burning site. And finally, the fat has to reach the ‘incinerator’ in which it can be burnt.

Essentially, fat loss or fat burn is a three-stage process. We will look at each stage in detail in my upcoming posts…

Know your body fat: The different types

There are five different types of fat found in the body: Structural fat, Metabolic fat,Fat-soluble vitamins, Transport fat and storage fat.

Other than the storage fat – that is what we need to control and reduce - all others are very much essential to life.

Structural fats surround almost every living cell in the body, protecting and reinforcing the cell membrane.

Metabolic fat is the fat, which once digested, is converted to hormones and enzymes. These fats maintain the body’s metabolism.

Fat-soluble vitamins are contained in our fat intake. These essential vitamins – A, D, E & K may be stored in the liver or the fat tissue.

Transport Fats, as the name suggests, transport absorbed fat from intestine to the storage sites through the bloodstream. These are a specific type of fat called Lipoprotein, which is a special form of Cholesterol. There are two of them – LDL and HDL. The LDL is the ‘bad’ guy, delivering Cholesterol to the storage sites in the body and HDL is the ‘good’ guy who collects this deposited Cholesterol and takes it back to the Liver, where it is broken down to produce bile.

Last comes the culprit, the storage fat. This fat is meant to supply the body with an abundant source of fuel. It also provides the body with insulation. The specific storage site for fat is in a specific tissue called the adipose tissue, found throughout the body. When there is too much of fat in the diet, it gets stored. This is the type of fat that any fitness program or fat loss program should aim to reduce, since we don’t need an excess of storage fat.

Now you know that indiscreet cutting out of fat from your food may not be a good idea at all! Aim for a sensible fat loss and more of it in my next post...

Scuba diving: Fitness required

Life on earth, and even the embryological development of individual life, has its origins in water. Even the mineral composition of seawater is remarkably similar to that of human blood. And over millions of years, everything on the earth returns to the sea through erosion and other geological phenomena. 37 phyla of life forms have been identified so far on earth and 34 of them can be found in the sea – that’s 92%.

Water is 775 times denser than air; a few feet of descent in water is equivalent to descending several hundreds of feet in atmosphere. The pressure increases by 1 ATM for every 33 feet descent into the water – which means, the pressure exerted on the body is twice as much at 33 feet as it is on the surface, thrice at 66 feet and so on…

As the specific heat of water is 1000 times that of air, it takes 1000 times more heat energy to warm up a given volume of water than the same volume of air – by one degree. Moreover, water takes away heat from a body 25 times faster than air does. Therefore the number of hours an individual can survive in cold air is approximately equivalent to the same number of minutes he would survive in water of the same temperature.

Sound conduction is 25 times greater in water than in air; it becomes almost impossible in water to tell where the sound is coming from. With depth, illumination and colors are lost. At 33 feet, red disappears and at 75 feet, yellow is lost. Things appear uniformly blue-grey, which might lead to disorientation – even way up or way down might get confusing beyond such depths.

Nitrogen in the compressed air that is breathed by divers is capable of setting off nitrogen narcosis. Every 50 feet of descent into the sea, breathing compressed air from the cylinder, the narcotic effect of nitrogen becomes equivalent to consuming one large peg of whiskey. At 200 feet, it becomes equivalent to having had four drinks. The effect varies according to the diver's constitution.

So if you intend to venture into scuba diving, do ensure that you are at a reasonable level of fitness to enjoy the underwater adventure...

Weight Loss versus Fat Loss

Fitness Center, Slimming Center, Health Club, Gymnasium, Bodysculpting Studio, Bodycraft Spa, or whatever they are called, NONE of them ever offer Fat Loss...All the money-back guarantee, 100% refund if no results, list of satisfied customers with telephone numbers, before and after pictures etc.etc. all have do with Weight Loss. Did you ever notice ?

Try walking in to any of these outfits, with a DEXA bodyfat analysis report, and tell them that you would very much like to signup for a 30-day reduction/loss package, cost no problem. Watch their eyes light up and then tell them that the reduction/loss should be in your body fat percentage, NOT body weight. What you are looking for is not to lose healthy weight from muscle and water in your body, but only the fat. Tell them that you are willing to sign up for any program that they have, follow all their instructions about exercises and eating to the letter, even when you are asleep, but you would like to have the same 'money-back guarantee' that they offer for Weight Loss.

There would be hushed internal discussions, 'senior' staff would be consulted and either apologetic smiles or downright Jack shit on how it would be 'medically impossible' will follow. Probably from serious looking characters in white coats. You stay put - Fat Loss, not Weight Loss, please. Here is the pre-sign up DEXA bodyfat report, you shall compare it with a post-payment i.e post-package report, and if results are not seen, can you have the 100% refund or the moneyback guarantee please?

Soon you would be walking out of the place, with your credit card/cheque book untouched. If you were to pass by a mirror, do have a long look at the smug look on your face. And thank me with a Swiss Cheese Fondue (if you are a PYT, just a hug would do fine).

Now its time for you to understand the difference between Fat Loss and Weight Loss. The best way is to begin by understanding Fat itself...