Body Fat: How to Use It and Lose It

A closer look at body fat: Where does it come from, why do we need it, what are the best ways to burn it off, and where the heck does it go?

By Get-Fit Guy Brock Armstrong

Join Our Community of Science Lovers!

Body fat, or the more technical term adipocytes (adipo means fat and cyte means cell), is found in many places around the human body and mostly underneath your skin, what we call subcutaneous fat. There is also some on top of your kidneys, inside your liver, and a small amount in your muscle tissue, which we call visceral fat.

An adult male often tends to carry his body fat in his chest, abdomen, and buttocks. An adult female tends to carry her fat in the breasts, hips, waist, and buttocks.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

The main role of body fat is to serve as a type of energy storage facility. Up until the mid-nineties, it was thought of strictly as a passive place for us to store energy for the hard times, the times when our ancestors’ hunt didn’t go well (or the weather was poor) and there wasn’t enough food available. This turned out to be incorrect and it does have other uses but it is exceedingly good at storing energy.

A single pound of fat contains roughly 3,500 calories of stored energy. Assuming you could burn 100% body fat as fuel, this is enough energy for a 150-pound person to trudge about 35 miles. And that is only one pound of fat and most of us have a lot more than that to spare.

»Body Fat: How to Use It and Lose It” on QuickAndDirtyTips.com

Subscribe to Support Independent Journalism

Great science journalism requires human expertise, time, effort and creativity. And it costs money. That’s why I and the journalists here at Scientific American hope you’ll join our community.

When you subscribe, you are supporting staff and freelance journalists who are passionate about telling science stories that are true, important and compelling. Our editors and reporters are often experts in their fields, which means they understand the nuances of big discoveries and can untangle the breakthroughs from the hype. With a subscription, you are also supporting rigorous fact-checking to ensure the words we publish are precise and accurate. And you’re supporting original illustrations, graphics and photos that bring you closer to an advanced laboratory, an ice sheet in Antarctica or a space mission in orbit. You’re helping us craft other types of high-quality journalism as well: Our newsletters are carefully written, edited and curated by staffers you have or will come to know and love. Our Science Quickly podcast is based on original reporting, collaboration with editors and scientists and exacting production.

Subscriptions keep this engine running so we can continue to deliver thoughtful, rigorous and independent science journalism to you. In an era of viral misinformation, this work is crucial. If you value what we do, I hope you’ll consider joining us as a subscriber

Thank you,

Jeanna Bryner, Editor in Chief, Scientific American