As anyone who has suffered a severe thermal burn can tell you, human fat does indeed burn. But other than painful and frequently life-threatening accidents, there is another way fat burns -- chemically, to provide fuel for your body. In fact, when you alter your lifestyle to force your body to burn stored fat for energy instead of relying on a constant influx of food energy, your love handles shrink and your pants fit again.
Weight Loss
Simply put, weight loss happens when you give your body less energy than it needs to run. That weight can come from either fat or muscle though, so a weight loss regimen requires a careful balance of muscle-saving exercise and fat-reducing calorie restriction to ensure that you lose the right weight. Creating a deficit of 500 calories per day leads to a loss of a pound per week, and creating part of that deficit by performing resistance exercise encourages your body to feed off of stored fat instead of the more accessible muscle protein for energy.
Stored Fat
Pinch an inch -- your fat tissue is made up of adipose cells, each filled with triglycerides. When there is a demand for fuel that isn't met by your food intake -- because you're dieting -- your hormones send signals to an enzyme called lipase that lives in the fat cells with the triglycerides. Upon receiving this message, the lipase breaks each triglyceride molecule into a glycerol molecule and three fatty acid chains. These smaller molecules are tiny enough to pass through the cell membrane and into the bloodstream. Your blood distributes these components to the liver and muscle tissue, which break them down into even smaller molecules.
Fuel Source
The glycerol and fatty acids are chemically altered several times over until they take the form of acetyl-CoA, which combines with other chemicals in the mitochondria of the tissue cells to form yet another compound that initiates a chain reaction that breaks the molecules down further until a usable form of energy -- a glucose molecule -- is reached. This process creates waste in the form of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, another energy source, and water and carbon dioxide. The ATP is used by your muscles to fuel other cell business, you exhale the carbon dioxide, and you sweat or urinate out the water.
Lost Inches
That's why the term "fat burn" is so common in weight loss parlance. Think of a pinpricked water balloon -- the small, constant drain on the filling will eventually leave the balloon empty, and that's the same process that goes on in your adipose cells when you diet and exercise. As the cells empty out, they shrink, which becomes noticeable as lost inches over time. This is also why you can't pinpoint a certain body part to make smaller -- this same process happens to all of your fat cells at once. The area with more stored fat will be the last to shrink, only because they contain more full balloons that must be drained.
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