If you want to lose weight, take a deep breath before reading this -- and then exhale. It turns out that your lungs are the primary exit avenue for those excess pounds. Your body stores excessive caloric intake in the form of fat, or triglyceride molecules. To get rid of the excess, your body must break down the molecules into their constituent parts: carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Although exercise is required to release energy and break down the triglycerides, the atoms still remain. Your lungs remove most of these extra atoms -- about 84 percent -- in the form of carbon dioxide. The rest is turned into water and released as urine, sweat, tears, and other liquids.
Getting that weight off:
- Weight loss supplements do very little on their own, but they can sometimes help dieters become more conscious of what they are eating.
- Many biological, genetic, and environmental factors can have a major impact on one's weight.
- Adipocytes, better known as fat cells, never actually go away, but they can be made smaller. When fat cells die, new ones are created to replace them.