Back To Basics: How We Get Fat

The human body is a wonderful and complex machine, composed of such an infinite variety of systems and checks and balances that it beggars the mind to consider. Everything exists in relation to everything else, yet somehow we have found many ways to push our bodies past what they can handle and make ourselves ill and sick. One such example of pushing our bodies past a healthy boundary is excessive fat gain, whereby we court diseases such as heart disease, increased blood pressure, diabetes, chronic low-level inflammation and numerous others. Being overweight is universally acknowledged as being bad for your health, yet somehow we still manage to slide into this territory, putting on the pounds while we're not looking, so that one day we wake up and realize we're now obese. How does this happen? How do the pounds creep up on us? What are the biological functions that need to take place for us to gain fat?

There are three different places that fat can be stored in your body. The first is subcutaneous fat, and that's the kind of fat most people think about when they think they look unshapely. The second is visceral fat, which cushions the organs, and the third is ectopic fat which happens under rare occasions in the kidney and liver. The fat under your skin is stored in fat cells, of which we are born with a limited amount. If you eat enough fat that these cells become overloaded, they recruit proto-fat cells to grow into fat cells and take the overflow. However, these new fat cells will never go away short of liposuction.

Yet how do we get so fat to begin with? It's a simple equation: caloric intake exceeds caloric burns. Now, most people will immediately claim that this doesn't apply to them, and that they eat the same amount of calories as they burn. Simply put, it has been well documented in dozens of reports that overweight people will overestimate how much they exercise by about 30%, while they will underestimate how much they are eating by about the same.

Does this mean they are lying? No. What it means is that people are simply no good at guessing how many calories they are burning and consuming. The same goes for skinny people who claim they can't add muscle no matter how much they eat. They are overestimating their intake and underestimating their activity level.