Every Breath You Take
I've lost ten kilos. It didn't leave the way you'd assume - and the actual answer is stranger and more obvious than pissing, shitting, or sweating it out.
I’ve lost about ten kilos.
So where the fuck did it actually go?
The obvious answers all feel right.
I pissed some of it out.
I shat some of it out.
I sweated some of it out.
None of those is where most of it went.
I looked into the actual chemistry, expecting it to confirm the obvious answer. It didn’t.
Fat isn’t just “burned off” in the way that phrase implies. When your body metabolises stored fat, the carbon in it gets oxidised — combined with oxygen — and turned into carbon dioxide and water. The water leaves the normal ways: urine, sweat, breath, all of it. The carbon dioxide gets exhaled.
And the split isn’t close. For roughly every 10 kg of fat your body actually metabolises, about 8.4 kg of it leaves as CO₂ through your lungs. Only about 1.6 kg becomes water.
Fat plus oxygen becomes carbon dioxide, water, and energy. That’s genuinely most of the equation.
That’s more or less my exact situation. Of my ten kilos, something like 8.4 kg of it left as carbon dioxide, breathed out one lungful at a time. The other 1.6 kg or so left as water.
The biggest exit route for ten kilos of me wasn’t the toilet. It was breathing.
I’ve spent months watching what goes into my mouth, worrying about what comes out the other end, and weighing myself every morning like the number on the scales is the whole story.
And the biggest exit route was sitting under my nose the entire time. Every breath — cycling to work, climbing those six flights of stairs, or just sat on the sofa doing nothing — is part of the machinery actually getting rid of it.
Turns out my lungs have been quietly disposing of several kilos of me without telling me.
That’s a stranger fact than I expected to find when I went looking for it.