Where has all the weight lost gone? Start singing that to “I need a heroâ€
Where has all the weight lost gone? Start singing that to “I need a heroâ€
In some of my posts I have mentioned not only that I am losing weight, but that I cannot account for where it is all going. I can only see the evidence that what I am doing is not losing helping me lose weight, but it is also helping me do it faster than I can account for.
My friend politely asked for an accounting. Which I did not mind at all. He is right. The body is part of system and systems must be balanced. There is no magic that makes fat just disappear contrary to what all the late night infomercials might say.
So let me share what I know, and what some possibilities might be.
The body has 3 primary systems for generating energy. Phosphagen (short burst sprints), Glycogen (0.5 to 20 minutes) and Aerobic (longer than 20 min). Each has it own purpose to helping the body function at its best.
The last two are where we lose weight during workouts so I will focus on those. In the first 20 minutes 95% of he energy expended is from glycogen – 5% from fat.. Then up to 4 hours of Aerobic exercise will burn up to 60% of the energy from fat (the rest from glycogen), and after 4 hours, if your even more insane than I am, your body will be burning 85+% of energy from fat.
The body can store 1-5 lbs of glycogen depending on how big you are. An average around 2 seems normal based on what I could find. And for each pound of glycogen there is 3-4 lbs of water.
Let’s take as an example a workout that I did the other day. I jumped on the elliptical machine and went for a solid 2 hours at a sustainable pace. I bumped up the resistance and just went a little slow than normal – about 130 revolutions per minute (for comparison on my sprint workouts I will alternate between 150 and 200 revolutions per minute). I burned off a little over 2500 calories. Let’s just say for this simple purpose that the calories were burned consistently through the workout. Here is how it works out
2500 calories divided by 120 minutes = approx 21 calories per minute.
At 20 minutes I burned off 420 calories – but 400 of those calories came from glycogen and only 20 from fat. At this rate, unless it was a really intense 20 minutes to boost the metabolism, I will not make much progress in weight loss.
But I still put in another 100 minutes. That was another 2100 calories and up to 60% of that came from my fat stores. That is 1260 calories directly out of my fat. If I do that 3x a week, then I will be losing a pound of fat every week. Even if I do nothing else over the course of a year just about anyone can lose all the weight that they need just adding a good long power walk to their workout.
Now, over all weight loss at the time of exercise is different. Calories from glycogen are not quite as dense as fat. So, there is not a 1 to 1 comparison in their calories. 400 calories of glycogen will give you about the same amount of weight as 1200 in fat. Plus you add to that the water loss of 3-4 times more weight than the glycogen itself and viola! I lost 5 lbs.
Only about 1/3 of that may be fat. So I will gain all of that back after eating. But that is still 1/3 of a lbs in fat. The point is to weight yourself under as close to the same conditions as possible each time. So you do not catch the swings, but the incremental process. You can also see that it would not help very much to constantly look at the scale and the mirror. That can just lead to disappointment as you see the weight go up and down.
This type of fluctuation is perfectly normal. It is not part of the yo-yo effect that you have to worry about.
Now, I have also mentioned that I cannot account for all of the weight loss that I have had over the last few months. Even taking into account all the variables that I can I still appear to be losing more weight than the energy expended. Granted, I have no proof of that, it very well could be a measuring error. I have to concede that point. But there does seem to be some evidence in my life to support an alternative medicine theory.
I’ll just give a brief overview here and will post more on it later.
The fat in your body stores energy and tries to contain free radicals (this is not disputed). Alternative medicine approaches claim that if you can beat back the free radicals then you can coax the weight to come off easier, and the body will just release the fat into the excretion systems to get rid of it without having to burn all the calories.
I’ll provide some more evidence of that in my other posts, but I’ll just conclude with my results that show that have lost about 2x as much weight as I can account for. So I either have some really serious accounting issues (just call me Enron), or there is something to be said for alternative theories.
Hope you enjoyed this.
Matthew Stearmer
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Comments
wow, thanks for the intellects on this! All I can say is that Isagenix rocks. I remember when I was training for a pageant and worked out 4 hours a day for 6 months- I lost 20 pounds. Years later I did the Isagenix 30 day program for 3 months and got smaller- I specifically lost 17 pounds and went from a tight, tight 12 to a 6. I was so amazed! And yes, I did not exercise but 3 times a week for an hour!
I'm not a real doctor – I don't even play one on TV – but I do enjoy
researching. And at the end of the day I have at least proven to myself that
Isagenix is a fantastic supplement. For as long as I have known you you've
been in fantastic shape, so it is hard to believe that you've ever not been
in the past. I hope to get there again soon. Right now my old friends have a
heard time believing that I weighed 270 to begin with! That is over 100 lbs
more than when any of them knew me. Congratulations on your weight loss
success as well! That is a great success story.
Matt Stearmer
the body have 3 primary systems, studying these are very interesting and the title is very interesting that is where has all the wait has gone
The information provided is very interesting. Weight losing is mostly useful for fat persons.The evidence provided are very good.
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAlternative medicine approaches claim that if you can beat back the free radicals then you can coax the weight to come off easier, and the body will just release the fat into the excretion systems to get rid of it without having to burn … [...]