Answer: Exhaled Carbon Dioxide

Most people are so thankful to shed their extra unwanted pounds that they don’t give much thought at all (if any) to considering where exactly the extra pounds have gone. Do we burn it off? Do we excrete it through our gastrointestinal tract? Do we sweat it out? Does it become heat energy, burned up by our bodies?

The answer is surprisingly, for the majority of the mass we lose, none of the above. Despite the widely held belief that the metabolites of fat are converted to muscle or excreted via the gastrointestinal tract, it’s neither. We exhale it. The metabolite of the fatty hydrocarbon chains that make up our excess weight is gas and liquid; a whopping 84 percent of all the fat mass we lose when losing weight is exhaled as carbon dioxide and the remaining 16 percent is excreted in urine, faeces, sweat, breath, tears, or other bodily fluids.

Although the research and calculations that support this explanation for weight loss are recent, the research fully supports the oldest weight loss advice around: eat less, move more. Increased activity leads to increased respiration which leads to increased activity of the very excretory mechanism purging the fat from your system.