Fat Cells – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Every appliance needs power to keep it running, from cooker to washing machine, and it is easiest to plug them into the mains and use electricity directly. Some things, like watches, run on batteries and others, radios for instance, can use both.

The human body is like that. The food we eat – our mains current – supplies us with energy and if we overeat the excess energy is stored to use later. The storage – our batteries – is our fat.

The Good

There are two kinds of fat cell – brown and white. The good news is that brown fat is used to make heat rather than store fat and we’re all born with brown fat; the not so good news is that as we grow beyond newborn the brown fat cells disappear.

The Bad

As we grow up, the number of white fat cells increases and an average adult could have 30-40 BILLION of them. The trigger points for increases in cell numbers are often puberty, pregnancy and large weight gain.

Each pound of human fat can contain around 750,000 fat cells.

The bad news is that once you have a fat cell, it’s usually there for life. Worse, women are genetically more likely to have more fat cells than men. If you lose weight the cell just gets smaller, but it’s there waiting to be filled up with fat if you regain weight.

The Ugly

The unfortunate truth is that 65% of Americans are either overweight or obese. Now that’s a lot of extra fat cells – up to 75-100 billion per overweight person and a whopping (sorry) 250-300 billion for an obese person. And a podgy person’s fat cells can be three times larger than a slim person’s fat cells – not fair is it?

Like using the mains rather than batteries, our bodies would rather use our day-to-day intake of energy than burn the fuel from fat because it’s easier metabolically speaking.

To kick-start the fat-burning process we have to make our bodies get some of the power they need from our fat cells. That simply means eating fewer calories than we use. Since human fat contains 3,500 calories per pound, cutting 500 calories a day will let us lose one pound per week.

We shouldn’t try to cut more than 1,000 calories per day (unless under medical instruction) as this will force our bodies into thinking we are starving and this makes them hold onto that fat rather than burning it. Again, not fair!

A safe maximum – and sustainable – weight loss is no more than two pounds a week.

So let’s get to work on having thinner fat cells.

© Eleanor Knowles 2010

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