You slaved and sweated. You even watched what you ate. And FINALLY, you lost the extra fat that was dragging you down.

While it’s awesome that these pounds of fat are no longer on you, it begs the question: where did they GO?

Go ahead and guess before you keep scrolling. I’ll bet you don’t know (I didn’t). Most doctors, dieticians and personal trainers don’t even get it right….
OK ready to find out?

“The correct answer is that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. It goes into thin air,” said Ruben Meerman, a physicist and co-author of a study published in the British Medical Journal.

“I lost 15 kilograms [33 pound] in 2013 and simply wanted to know where those kilograms were going. After a self-directed, crash course in biochemistry, I stumbled onto this amazing result,” Meerman said in a press release.

“There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss,” agreed Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences. Many health and fitness professionals incorrectly assume fat is converted into energy or heat, but that’s not the case.

If you follow the atoms in 10 kilograms of fat as they are ‘lost’, 8.4 of those kilograms are exhaled as carbon dioxide through the lungs. The remaining 1.6 kilograms become water, which may be excreted in urine, faeces, sweat, breath, tears and other bodily fluids, the authors report.

“None of this is obvious to people because the carbon dioxide gas we exhale is invisible,” says Mr. Meerman.

You can say that again!

Also check out: The Life-Changing Reason Running Shoes Have An Extra Shoelace Hole

featured image via miamifitnesstv