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Why is CO2 the correct answer, the answer should be energy/heat + CO2 + H2O? The "burning" of fat in oxygen to CO2 and H2O is exothermic.
TFA does say "energy/heat + CO2 + H2O", but most of the output in terms of mass -- which is what one is interested in when it comes to losing weight -- is carbon dioxide.
Why is CO2 the correct answer, the answer should be energy/heat + CO2 + H2O? The "burning" of fat in oxygen to CO2 and H2O is exothermic.
For anyone coming straight to the comments looking for an answer to the question: it turns into CO2 (and a bit of water) and you breathe it out. When you realize that you have to breathe out all the weight you lose, I think it gives you a bigger appreciation for how difficult weight loss can be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easier to eat less calories than exercise.
I don't know about easier, but it's certainly more efficient.
There are infographics and whatnot out there detailing the caloric density of different kinds of food, that make it clear that, depending on the diet you already eat, you can reduce your calorie intake by vast amounts just by switching up what kinds of food you eat. But it's potentially a more expensive way to eat, and probably a more time-consuming one if you don't already enjoy cooking.
For anyone coming straight to the comments looking for an answer to the question: it turns into CO2 (and a bit of water) and you breathe it out. When you realize that you have to breathe out all the weight you lose, I think it gives you a bigger appreciation for how difficult weight loss can be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the paper "Replacing one hour of rest with exercise that raises the metabolic rate to seven times that of resting by, for example, jogging, removes an additional 39 g of carbon from the body, raising the total by about 20% to 240 g. For comparison, a single 100 g muffin represents about 20% of an average person’s total daily energy requirement. Physical activity as a weight loss strategy is, therefore, easily fo…
200g are what would be "breathed out" in one hour without exercise? So you can only increase your "burn rate" by 20%?
Exercise is still a good way to drop in weight, but not simply due to burning up the fat; that could happen anyway. What seems to be happening is that the exercise improves the body's budgeting logic, probably by putting you back in a regime evolution already dealt with.
The way to drop in weight isn't to exercise (as such), and it isn't to eat less. All the logic that says those count, is valid, but you have to account for the body fighting back. The goal is to eat less because you don't feel hungry, not despite feeling hungry. Very few have the willpower to literally starve themselves.
Reminds me of the question “what are trees made of?” (The answer to both questions is “mostly atmospheric CO2.”)
I once saw a documentary about "big animals" in the past.
Like, why did we have giant spiders and insects while they have a rather simple respiratory system that doesn't scale very well.
Because: trees!
Somehow plants managed to create wood, which bound the C from CO2, but the rest of the biosphere didn't know what to make of the wood. So there were more and more trees and more and more C got removed from the atmosphere. A much bigger part of the atmosphere was O2 and so the insects could grow bigger.
But in the end the fungi figured out how to make short work of wood and in turn released much of the C again into the atmosphere as CO2, so the animals shrunk again.
Why is CO2 the correct answer, the answer should be energy/heat + CO2 + H2O? The "burning" of fat in oxygen to CO2 and H2O is exothermic.
From the abstract: "Most people believed that fat is converted to energy or heat, which violates the law of conservation of mass."