The Science of Weight Loss and Energy Usage in the Body

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 at 8:07 am

Guest Post: When you try to get into shape you will likely find a wealth of different information and advice. You’ll find unusually machines and contraptions, you’ll read about specific and odd sounding diets, and you’ll generally find a lot of conflicting advice.

This of course is not helpful when you’re trying to lose weight which is hard enough already even if you do know what you’re doing. So how do you cut through the nonsense and find the strategies that are really going to work for you?

The answer is that you need to understand the science behind weight loss and getting into shape. While there are lots of different fads and trends in the world of fitness, science is immune to these and is simply a method of objectively observing the way things work. We don’t know everything about the way the body works yet, but we know enough to rule out a variety of different fad diets and concepts. Here we will look at the underlying science when it comes to weight loss and energy use.

Fuel Sources in the Body

In all organic life there is one fuel source which is often referred to as the ‘energy currency ‘ of all living things. This energy ‘currency ‘ is what allows us to power all our movements and is called ‘ATP ‘ or ‘Adenosine Triphosphate ‘. This substance is made up of three ‘phosphate’ molecules that are bonded together powerfully. It is breaking those bonds by separating the phosphates (to create monophosphates) that releases the energy.

However this energy comes in other forms and is not readily available as ATP in the blood. Rather it exists as something called ‘glucose’ which is essentially nothing more than sugar. The body then finds this sugar in the blood and converts it into ATP with the help of insulin (the hormone that tells the body it needs to use up the sugar) and enzymes which are the catalysts used for the reaction.

This is one way the body gets short term energy for explosive movements like lifting weights and is offered referred to as the phosphate system. However if you continue to exert yourself for long enough this changes and you move onto the aerobic system of energy.

The reason for this is that you will have used up all the available glucose and ATP in your system, and this then means you need to look for it elsewhere – specifically the fat stores around our body (subcutaneous fat). This is what happened to the glucose that your body didn’t use up in the past and it requires oxygen in order to be freed up for more use. Thus your heart rate will increase and you will begin taking more breaths more deeply. This enables you to breath oxygen into your blood and then transport it to the fat in order to break it down into glucose and ATP and then transport it further to the muscles where it will be used to power your movements. Of course this is also how we burn our fat and lose weight.

In short then the basic principle behind weight loss is that you need to use more glucose than you take in, and the best way to achieve this is by taking in fewer calories, and by engaging in aerobic exercise.

Pauly Singh is a fitness expert and is good at giving genuine elliptical reviews. He likes to share his knowledge on his blog to help buyers to get the perfect elliptical machines.