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How fat piles on

Any surplus energy (calories) is stored in the body as fat. If your calorie intake exceeds your calorie expenditure by even 1 per cent, you'll end up adding one kilo of body fat a year. There's no getting away from that basic arithmetic: Stored fat = Calories eaten - Calories burned as energy.

Though calories come from three different sources — carbohydrates, proteins and fats — it's mostly the calories from fats that end up as stored fat... stored on your ribs. There are several reasons for this. First, each gram of fat brings in 9 calories, as against the 4 calories brought in by each gram of protein or carbohydrate. Carbohydrates are easily burned by the body as its primary fuel. The excess carbohydrate calories are indeed converted to body fat, but only after a quarter of these calories are burned in the conversion process itself. The body stores a small — though only a small — reserve of carbohydrates for quick-reaction energy in the liver and the muscles.

As for proteins, they are normally difficult to store as fat. They are needed for the growth and repair of your body’s cells, and they form your body’s lean muscle tissue.

But fat from food is so similar in composition to body fat that it requires just a simple chemical alteration for it to be stored in the body's fat cells. That is why, as nutritionists say, "Most of the fat you wear comes from the fat you eat".

Everybody's born with a certain number of fat cells (known as adipose cells), and through childhood and the teenage years they keep growing in number — it's a natural process of development.

Towards the end of adolescence, the body is less able to generate new fat cells though some experts believe that these cells continue to divide — and multiply — particularly in severely obese people. Whatever their number, the important characteristic of fat cells is their capacity to expand as they are filled with fat, and to shrink in size as fat is lost during weight loss. There is no way you can get rid of these fat cells — except through liposuction, a surgical process that involves breaking up fat cells and then sucking them out of the body.

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