Calories in fat & weight loss

So how many calories are there in a pound of fat? The answer is approximately three thousand five hundred calories per pound of body fat. It can vary slightly depending on the percentage of water involved but generally speaking each pound of fat contains ten percent water.

Unfortunately you need to lose slightly more calories than this in order to see a comparable difference on the weighing scales. This is because the body's metabolism is complex. Factors such as age, genetics, and lifestyle all affect the way in which your body turns fat into fuel. It takes longer for the body to burn up fat and so in order to get the amount of oxygen your cells need, your body will tend to burn carbohydrates first. If you go on a diet that vastly restricts your calorie intake, it can be somewhat self-defeating in that your body may go into starvation mode. In other words, it thinks you're facing a famine so it starts to store as much fat as possible to protect you from dying of hunger. Far better is to set yourself realistic goals where small reductions in calorie in take are accompanied by healthy eating and exercise. Exercise builds muscle, which in turn increases your metabolism so that your body starts to burn far more calories. Muscle in fact weighs more than fat due to its greater density. In other words, because muscle is more compact, it takes up less space so while you might weigh the same, you will look and feel far trimmer.