> A human body is like an iPhone with a battery pack that can grow nearly indefinitely, and with the abundance of food around us we scarcely unplug from the charging outlet. In this case, the batteries are primarily the adipose tissue and triglycerides (fat) stored within, which are eagerly stockpiled (or sometimes also synthesized!) by your body to be burned for energy in case food becomes scarce.
Incidentally, this is how/why liposuction works: if you remove fat cells from a certain area, your body can't store fat in that spot anymore. The flip side being that if you gain weight afterwards, it still has to go somewhere, but you can't/won't store fat in the lipo'd spot.
And you can't remove every single fat cell in your body because you do need to store fat to stay alive, but it's good for sculpting specific areas.
(I should add that I got a bit of lipo done ~6 months ago and I'm loving it so far. Very little in the way of pounds shed, but it made a huge difference for my silhouette, which is what I wanted.)
I am now reading _Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution_, Cat Bohannon's fascinating book on the female body from an evolutionary perspective. Only the first few chapters blew my mind a couple of times. Here is something she writes about liposuction:
> It seems that women who have liposuction on their hips and thighs do grow back some of their fat, but they grow it back in different places. [...] As it turns out, women’s fat isn’t the same as men’s. Each fat deposit on our body is a little bit different, but women’s hip, buttock, and upper thigh fat, or “gluteofemoral” fat, is chock-full of unusual lipids: long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, or LC-PUFAs. (Think omega-3. Think fish oil.) Our livers are bad at making these kinds of fats from scratch, so we need to get most of them from our diet. And bodies that can become pregnant need them so they can make baby brains and retinas.
> Most of the time, female gluteofemoral fat resists being metabolized. As many women know, these areas are the first places we gain weight and the last places we lose it. But in the last trimester of pregnancy—when the fetus ramps up its brain development and its own fat stores—the mother’s body starts retrieving and dumping these special lipids by the boatload into the baby’s body. This specialized hoovering of the mother’s gluteofemoral fat stores continues throughout the first year of breast-feeding—the most important time, as it happens, for infant brain and eye development. Some evolutionary biologists now believe that women evolved to have fatty hips precisely because they’re specialized to provide the building blocks for human babies’ big brains. Since we can’t get enough of those LC-PUFAs from our daily diet, women start storing them from childhood forward. Other primates don't seem to have this pattern.
> Meanwhile, we found out just a few years ago--again someone finally asked the question--that a human girl's fat may be one of the best predictors for when she'll get her first period. [...] That is how important this fat is for reproduction. Our ovaries won't even kick in until we've stored up enough of this fat to form a decent baseline.
Cryolipolysis (commonly referred to as “fat freezing” where the area is cooled down to the temp that kills fat cells but not surrounding cells) has the same effect.
Interesting (to me at least): the process was borne from the inventor theorizing that their child’s dimples were caused by the child keeping popsicles in their mouths.
Evolution indeed gave us fat storage which is one of those traits becoming unnecessary in the post industrial world of abundance. The problem is our body is more adapted to the too little rather than to the too much. E.g: fasting comes with a flurry of benefits (autophagy, mitophagy, ketones, microbiome reset, inflammation control....) in the absence of which our overall metabolism slowly poisons itself - you know the story, obesity, diabetes and so on.
BTW keto (fast mimicking) diet was invited in the 20s in the Mayo clinic to cure epileptic children. I encourage people to have a look at the fascinating "Brain Energy" book from Chris Palmer (or watch him on youtube) to see what's underneath it and how metabolism and brain efficiency are linked
Incidentally, this is how/why liposuction works: if you remove fat cells from a certain area, your body can't store fat in that spot anymore. The flip side being that if you gain weight afterwards, it still has to go somewhere, but you can't/won't store fat in the lipo'd spot.
And you can't remove every single fat cell in your body because you do need to store fat to stay alive, but it's good for sculpting specific areas.
(I should add that I got a bit of lipo done ~6 months ago and I'm loving it so far. Very little in the way of pounds shed, but it made a huge difference for my silhouette, which is what I wanted.)