I was wondering where you start to lose fat first. Not sure why that popped into my head, but I did some looking and it appears that you tend to lose weight from the top down. Starting with your face and head then moving down to your body.

It gets interesting when you have problem areas like the pelvis, buttocks, and thighs of women and the bellies of men. In these cases you need to give those areas extra love (crunchies etc.) in order to burn fat. Another interesting note, the fat that women develop has an advantage during pregnancy (none beyond that) while the fat that men accumulate does nothing except shorten our lives.

Curious about what happens to the fat? The following is from the Mayo Clinic website, one of my favorites.

Body fat breaks down during a series of complex metabolic processes.

When you burn more calories than you consume, your body uses fat (triglycerides) for energy. This causes your fat cells to shrink. In turn, triglycerides are broken down into two different substances — glycerol and fatty acids — which are absorbed into your liver, kidneys and muscle tissue. From there, the glycerol and fatty acids are further broken down by chemical processes that ultimately produce energy for your body.

These activities generate heat, which helps maintain your body temperature. The resulting waste products — water and carbon dioxide — are excreted in urine and sweat or exhaled from your lungs.

– Katherine Zeratsky, R.D., L.D.

 

FitBit added a bunch of new stuff to their site yesterday. There is now a Premium area that adds a bunch of analytics and reporting as well as the FitBit trainer. This is designed to move you along from a sedentary to active lifestyle. It analyzes the activity that you record and creates goals and encouragements. I did the trial and here is how it looks for the daily view.

As you can see, I have a little more work to do tonight. Will hit the mini-tramp while catching an episode of something (probably MI-5). A got a swim in today and it was good. Getting my wind back and enjoying the time to think while in the water. It cracks me up a bit to get out of the pool and sweat. It makes sense, but seems wrong somehow.