How Exercise Promotes Fat Loss

Among the very few problems I have is regularly needing to confront people about their misconceptions of fat, self worth, and what it really means to be healthy. I expect a level of ignorance for how the body really works given prevailing ideas on health and wellness, and many people are often surprised to learn that the fat they put on is actually their body taking care of them and not, in fact, trying to sabotage their happiness. But I never cease to be amazed by those who think they are awesome just because they have low body fat, even when failing to demonstrate any of the most basic of human niceties let alone traits which are actually admirable such as empathy, intelligence, integrity, or humor. Such people are desperately entrenched in ideas of self-worth which are stifling, and their outward protestations against fatness and disease is in truth a mind wrestling with the conflict that occurs when prejudice and fantasy conflict with reality, mortality, and fear. People who know absolutely nothing about biology talk about diabetes or heart disease as if they hold a doctorate, even though they’ve never once read an actual scientific study or spent time learning about human biology and are allowed and even encouraged to influence ideas and dialogue about health simply because they possess a set of well-defined abdominals (which will be gone in another decade or two btw). Nobody would be allowed in an operating room because they can bench 350, so why are these people allowed to disseminate narcissism and self-hatred parading as health advice?

There are a lot of reasons for prevailing attitudes and ideas on health and fitness based understandably from observational inferences. A person exercises and loses weight—therefore exercise promotes weight loss. This can be true but is not at all exclusively true, and also ignorantly and conveniently ignores any variables which can clearly influence this statement such as environment, sex, age, nutrition, and pathogenic organisms, and someone needs to inform health professionals, trainers, and even most nutritionists because the majority speak of exercise as if it is a panacea for nearly every health problem we have. Fat? Exercise. Depressed? Exercise. Have cancer? Exercise. But never mind when it does not work. ‘You just aren’t trying hard enough,’ they say.

If we are operating on even the smallest amount of curiosity or intelligence this in reality should be opened up further to ask questions about what is really going on during exercise? Why doesn’t it work for everyone? How can we better learn about the human body and the effects of exercise upon it? After all, if the goal is to actually be healthy and not to just spite others then understanding what is going on can give us a better understanding about how to be healthy, right? Which is the point of exercise in the first place? No? You’d rather just stick to your asinine neuroses and inferences and what you read on Facebook?

Exercise works for those who are young and healthy because they, obviously, have not yet encountered significant health stress and their body can continue to meet the demands which are incurred during exercise. Exercise is physically demanding, requiring all sorts of sufficient nutrients to facilitate. I was friends with a couple through one of my old boyfriends of whom the wife engaged in marathon training. She had less hair than a middle-aged Red State politician, no breasts, no hips, and her eyes looked like they might at any moment fall right from their sockets and land on the floor. Yet in spite of her obvious and alarming condition we were all expected to just act like nothing was wrong, that this person we all supposedly cared about was not about to just die at any moment from severe malnutrition and exhaustion. Being as young as she was this problem was obviously one of an accompanying eating disorder, since young people can usually engage in even severe physical training without such horrendous side effects until they are older. But this goes to illustrate one of the most ridiculous precepts which accompany prevailing exercise and diet philosophies—which is that people treat the body like it can run on pure air, or just the fat stores on your unwanted love handles. Get up and go running in the morning before eating? Where is all that required energy coming from? Shoot excessive caffeine and pre-workout before the gym? What is that doing to your heart, liver, kidneys, or even your penis? Even cells that are not engaged in strenuous physical exertion require copious amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, short chain fatty acids to produce cholesterol to produce steroids, elements of zinc, sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, magnesium, manganese, boron, iron, copper, selenium, iodine, sulfur, phosphorus, B1, B2, B3, B5, B7, B9, B12, vitamin C, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K, sunlight, water, just to name a few. Dieting or overuse removes these nutrients, so when the body later engages in vigorous physical exercise during any kind of deficiency it has a severe destabilizing effect on the normal homeostasis of biological systems. In response to these deficiencies the body engages backup pathways such as stress hormones which step in to prevent the catastrophic cellular destruction, but stress hormones themselves also have severe metabolic consequences such as glycogen depletion or the catabolism of lean tissue and internal organs. That young people can withstand exercise at all is simply because they have adequate stores of most of these required nutrients—their bodies having spent many years prior to adolescence growing bones, brains, and muscles stocked with trace, rare nutrients like boron and manganese, and the ability to diet and exercise without severe consequences to our health is merely an illusion created by how efficient and prepared the body is for the stresses of adulthood. Treating the body then with ignorance to this reality is what leads us headlong and willing into severe metabolic problems as we age—though you don’t even have to be old to arrive there, such as when I developed thyroid disease, cancer, and accompanying symptoms such as hair loss, fatigue, insomnia, and erectile dysfunction in my early thirties. Some people are fortunate to develop well in the womb and are supplied a healthy and generous diet during youth which in turn prolongs their ability to abuse and neglect the body as an adult without serious or premature consequences. But most people do not get this lottery, and health problems like insomnia, erectile dysfunction, and weight gain occur earlier, in turn and in addition met with no small amount of derision, harassment, and callousness by those who are ignorant to the realities of mortality, biology, and their own self worth.

Fat is not lost during exercise because it is “burned” into energy as is commonly assumed by totally fucking misinformed people. When the body engages in “burning” fat what is actually occurring is that fat is converted into CO2 (carbon dioxide) and water. So exercise in someone who is healthy immediately results in a large increase in CO2 and water, and fat is actually lost through breathing and peeing and not because it is turned into energy. The rise in CO2, however, in turn promotes mitochondrial proliferation and respiration, which in turn increases the caloric demands of a body since more mitochondria means more nutrient requirements to sustain all that mitochondria. Mitochondria produce CO2 from respiration, so more mitochondria means even more CO2, more mitochondria, and as such less requirement for CO2 from fat stores, so fat stops being stored and thus produces the illusion of fat loss which in reality is actually an absence of fat gain. Mitochondria primarily respirate using carbohydrate, but they can also oxidize fatty acids, but the presence of fatty acids causes a reverse reaction catalyzing mitochondrial attenuation, because the presence of fatty acids is a signal to the body of reduced carbohydrate availability and as such likely reduced nutritional/seasonal availability of nutrients, so the body reduces the number of mitochondria to extend and prolong stored nutrients as much as possible. It is through this mechanism that over exercise and under eating (and other metabolic stressors) actually promote weight gain in the long term, as the body ages or succumbs to metabolic stress, and why the ignoramuses on social media have absolutely no fucking idea what they are talking about when referring to fat, diabetes, and heart disease. Exercise itself induces fatty acid oxidation pretty rapidly after starting, and the more metabolically ill someone is the more fatty acids they release during physical exertion, so exercise itself can actually induce mitochondrial attenuation instead of proliferation and sustain and even promote metabolic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease rather than relieve them. Those who do find relief from metabolic illness through exercise benefit simply from the increase in CO2 produced during exercise from fat cells because their mitochondrial function is not yet so diminished as to prevent the increase in CO2, and typically exercise routines are begun in tandem with improved diet, which itself is a stronger promoter of mitochondrial health and respiration than exercise, with trainers and clients alike assuming it was the exercise rather than the diet which was responsible. Excessive diet and exercise can and do manually induce mitochondrial attenuation due to perceived nutrient deficiency caused by the release of fatty acids, however, and it is this state which is seen in those who eventually lose the ability to lose weight from diet and exercise, their metabolic state so stressed that it can no longer respond to the demands of exercise during caloric and nutritional insufficiency. Reduced mitochondrial density then reduces the body’s capacity for physical exertion even further which in turn results in greater stress hormone expression even when at rest, and since stress hormones strongly inhibit mitochondrial respiration it eventually causes an inability to resist stress, which is when severe metabolic problems occur. Adding in the myriad of other factors which can affect our ability to properly respirate such as microbial pathogens or environmental and industrial toxins like dioxin the problem of physical wellness extends far beyond lay concepts of exercise. What makes this even more amazing is that someone who is fit, young, and healthy produces so much CO2 from so much mitochondria that exercise for them is easy—while someone who is overweight with diabetes produces so little CO2 that their efforts are in reality herculean compared to those who drive and whip them with shame and derision, who having never had metabolic disease have in all likelihood never actually experienced what it really means to work hard.

Fat and weight loss in reality are never a function of willpower, dedication, resolve, or exercise, but the chemical pathways which regulate mitochondrial density and the production of CO2, which happen to be promoted in the very young and healthy even under excessive stress but which quickly takes a toll and promotes aging and metabolic disease. These pathways are instead properly maintained by a diet which is plentiful in all nutrients, but especially carbohydrates, B vitamins, vitamin C, sunlight, sugar, and even love, since togetherness and emotional wellness promotes reductions in stress hormones which interfere with mitochondrial respiration. This is part of the reason that pricks with six-packs fat shaming those with metabolic problems are not also known for their winning personalities or jovial senses of humor—because their bodies are so pumped full of stress hormones and thus an inability to relax and enjoy themselves they can find no peace nor enjoyment in their own experience and must in turn redirect that frustration outward. The first rule of exercise is that it should always be fun. If it’s not, it’s likely a sign your body is beginning to fail (or has) and should be addressed, not ignored and pushed through. The metabolic problems which result from misunderstanding the biology behind exercise, fat, sugar, and wellness can be easily avoided by discarding hubris and spending a little time learning about the real way in which the body works by reading my goddamned book. At the very least—if you’re so insecure that you feel uncomfortable when other people are fat, keep your fucking mouth shut and get to work on yourself instead.