Complex Numbers

Breathe

I've had a few today. The drafthouse cinema had a screening of Dr. Strangelove, a movie that is all over popular culture and yet, somehow, one that I had never seen.

Now I've seen it, and I understand so much more.

Altered state of mind notwithstanding, I'm still doing one of these entries.

https://www.popsci.com/where-does-fat-go/

When you burn fat, where does it actually go?
Getting rid of fat can be exhausting, but it's as natural as breathing.

One of the basic principles of physics, as I understand it (and I don't pretend I do, much), is that of conservation. Specifically, conservation of mass/energy. I mean, there are other conservation laws: angular momentum, particle charge, whatever. For our purposes today, though, I'm only concerned with mass/energy.

I put the slash in there to emphasize that while the total of mass and energy must be conserved, one can be converted into the other, as per some guy named Albert.

So, in my quest to lose weight, it struck me: where does all that weight actually go? Shit? Piss? Sweat? What? It's not like it can just, as the gymrats put it, "melt away." Weight is mass under the influence of gravity, and it can't just disappear.

Or can it? I mean, again as I understand it, there's nothing inherent about the conservation laws. That is, they don't arise as a logical result of anything basic; they're just so consistently observed that any perceived violation of them would be tantamount to the discovery of unicorns, fairy dust, or honest politicians. Still, their consistency means I wondered about the mechanism by which excess avoirdupois leaves one's body and goes... somewhere else.

My limited amount of Googling on the topic yielded nothing of use, just more stupid motivational quotes which are useless to me because my contrarian nature makes me rebel against anyone who says "YOU CAN DO IT" by going "NO I CAN'T." And then I just happened upon the above article, which leads me to...

Humans have two kinds of fat cells, brown fat cells and white fat cells, the latter of which are far more common.

I first encountered this article when I was sober, and I remember thinking something about that being a metaphor for racism in the US, but the mechanics of that eludes me at the moment. Eventually I'll figure it out again.

So what happens during that shrinking process, when you actually lose some fat? Contrary to popular beliefs, all of the fat used by the body doesn't get turned directly into energy, it doesn't magically transform into muscle, and it doesn't exit with your other solid waste.

I was pretty sure magic wasn't involved, so... thanks, PopSci?

But it has to go somewhere. That's the beauty of the conservation of mass. Much as some people might want it to, fat can't just disappear.

Again, it's more like "conservation of mass/energy." But I can't be arsed to follow the link in the article.

The fat inside your adipose cells is stored and then sent back out into your body as triglycerides. These go through a series of chemical reactions to convert into energy, but the process isn’t 100-percent efficient. Our bodies are good, but they’re not that good.

Well, duh. No conversion process is 100 percent efficient. Some French dude figured that out when he was studying steam engines way back when steam engines were cool. Carnot? Maybe.

Some of the water produced as the body consumes fat exits in the usual way, through your urine and sweat. But a 2014 study in the British Medical Journal found that most of the byproducts of fat (including all that carbon dioxide) leaves the body through the respiratory system.

Great. So what you're saying is, by losing weight, I'm contributing to global warming.

Oh well. Tough shit.

But hey, this gives me an excuse to embed a Pink Floyd video again.



For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave