I came across this interesting article today. Thought i’d share it here.

When you’re losing weight, where does the fat go?

By Madison Park, CNN

(CNN) — Multiple chins, bulging tummies and flabby arms: It’s easy to see where fat accumulates on the body.

When a person starts losing weight, where does the fat go? And what parts of the body can you expect to see results?

Headlines from fitness magazines promise exercises to blast away belly fat and activities to spot-reduce flab. The scientific evidence, unfortunately, doesn’t back those sexy headlines.

Here are three things to know about weight-loss and body fat.

You can’t change your shape, just your size.

You can’t cherry-pick where you shed fat; weight loss doesn’t work like a point-and-shoot.

MRIs, CT scans and dexa scans, which use X-ray beams to measure body composition, show no evidence for spot reduction.

“Basically, when we lose weight, we lose weight all over in exactly the proportion that’s distributed throughout our body,” said Susan Fried, director of the Boston Obesity and Nutrition Research Center at the Boston University School of Medicine.  read the rest here

Here’s the part that most struck me from the article

Humans carry about 10 billion to 30 billion fat cells. People who are obese can have up to 100 billion.

“If anyone of us overeats long and hard enough, we can increase the number of fat cells in our body,” Fried said. “When we lose weight, we don’t lose the number of fat cells.”

The size of the cells shrinks, but the capacity to expand is always there.

The basic truth seems to be that once you’ve expanded your fat cell count, they’re with you for life and ready to pop back to full size at any moment. It’s a sad sad truth!