How does fat escape the body and if barre helps
New studio guests often ask me: Will I lose weight taking barre classes?
My answer is: yes and no.
Yes, you will. When you move more, you breathe more. And barre class sure moves you. The more you breathe, the more fat exits your body.
No, you won’t lose as much as you’d like unless you change your food habits.
What barre class does for you, it creates a natural corset — built-in spandex, if you will. What you hang on this corset depends upon what comes from your kitchen and what you put in your body.
This article in the British Journal of Medicine explains how fat escapes the body when we slim down and puts to rest mass delusions that fat turns into energy, converts into muscle, or goes down the toilet.
Triglycerides, i.e. fats, are made of three elements: carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O). Fat cannot be converted into protein, i.e. muscle: human body cannot magically change carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen into nitrogen or sulphur necessary to make proteins.
Since fats are made of atoms, they weigh something and not nothing. According to the laws of physics — Lavoisier’s law of conservation of mass and Einstein’s law of special relativity — chemical reactions do not change the amount of matter in a closed system, i.e. no matter what you do, the mass of your body remains the same unless it exists somehow somewhere. Energy is measured in kilojoules, but to lose weight we need to lose kilograms.
Ultimately, all our fat is converted into carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O). Then, we exhale our fat. Out of 10 kg of fat lost, 8.4 kg departs as CO2 and 1.6 kg as H2O — in breath. This makes lungs our primary organ for fat removal.
We can stop eating for a while, but we cannot stop breathing. Thus, we are constantly losing weight. The proof of that is that we weigh less in the morning than we do at night. We don’t melt away because we continue to eat and drink.
With that, the old wisdom of eating less and moving more remains the only option to lose weight. And it’s mostly food.