Although emotions and feelings often feel impossible to understand, most of the body is mechanical and predictable. Like any complex machine, it might take hundreds of hours of studying, observation, and practical experience to feel completely comfortable with how the body works. Plus, gaining such comfort is made all the more difficult by hundreds of sources that seek to capitalize on your desire to make your body behave a certain way. Blinded by desire and the hope of an easy path, people are funneled into different diets, supplements, gyms, and fitness routines that are likely to only be mildly effective. Mostly because the people behind them are looking to hook people and make as much money off of them as possible, as opposed to actually help the people achieve their desired results. Sure, there are some good actors out there, but for the most part, if a capitalistic actor helps achieve a fitness goal too quickly, then they did a poor job capitalizing.

Fat burning is certainly the area where people are getting capitalized on the most. Sadly, a combination of a poor education on how the body works as a machine, along with hope, makes it easy for people to get taken advantage of without achieving the desired results. So- to balance the playing field- this letter aims to take hundreds of hours of experience that have yielded results and distill the experience into a handful of paragraphs. Hopefully this letter arms the reader with the information they need to form an approach to fat burning that works well for them.

People with an informed but limited understanding of fat burning will point you to the formula 'calories burned - calories consumed', which isn't wrong, but it is misleading. Mostly because there are multiple different ways to burn calories, as well as several types of calories. The types of calories are typically referred to as macros, or macro nutrients. These macros consist of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.

Carbs come in two major forms-- simple and complex. The simpler the carb is, the closer it is to sugar, and the more complex the carb is the further it is from sugar. Ultimately, the body uses carbs to produce glucose (blood sugar) which is the main fuel source for the body. So any unused fuel has to get stored somewhere (fat...more on this soon). Now, if you keep in mind how close a carb is to sugar, you can be more aware of the likelihood of it creating unused fuel. So to minimize a carb being unused fuel, it helps to have the carb come from something like a vegetable starch. Where there are several other nutrients that the body takes time to pull apart and process. The more processing and the more nutrients beyond sugar, the higher likelihood of utilization instead of storage.

The body is particular about storage. It will maintain about two thousand calories worth of carbs that are readily available to convert into glucose (fuel). But when that store is full, the body will convert any type of macro into fat. Fat is the body's rainy day energy store. Long ago, when humans were hunters and gathers, we didn't have unlimited calories at our fingertips and three meals a day, so we are designed to be able to not eat much for a couple days. That's the core purpose of fat-- to act as a special type of reserve fuel storage when our core carb store is depleted. Fat is slower to burn because it's more nutrient dense. Where a gram of fat has more calories in it than carbs or proteins.

Protein have a critical but different role than both fats and carbs. There are many different types of proteins with special functions in the body, but in general, they serve in a repair and growth capacity. For example, when you lift weights and tear muscles fibers, it is the responsibility of proteins to mend the torn fibers, as well as build new ones to fortify the area that took more damage than it could handle. Despite the importance of protein, the body doesn't have a storage system for it beyond the twenty four hours of circulation in the blood stream. So when protein goes unused, it also gets converted to fat.

Storing fat isn't necessarily a bad thing because our body truly needs it to keep the lights on when we've blown through our primary store. But it can be a bad thing without the right level of moderation or exercise. Moderation mostly comes from knowledge and discipline and should be the primary tool for those who don't like to exercise. Note, though, that exercise is superior to moderation because it has lasting fitness benefits for the body.

The carbohydrate store that we've mentioned a couple times is big enough to absorb most fitness activities. A fact that makes it extremely challenging for most people to burn fat. All is not lost for those who wish to burn fat, though. You simply must understand the type of exercise that pushes your body into fat burning mode. Also note that fat burning can be engaged by more extreme moderation, but we'll cover the exercise case first, since it's more beneficial.

We'll use an illustration to help understand how the body stores fat and burns it. Picture your metabolism as a rather large team of cute little yellow minions working at a conveyor belt at the end of the digestive track. Their job is to inspect nuggets of nutrients and process them accordingly. For the first wave of minions, their primary job is to ensure that a series of shelves to their backs are full of carbohydrates (the aforementioned carb store). Then, a bit further down, the conveyor splits-- one way for protein processing and one way for conversion to fat storage. Clearly, these forks take more processing than simply placing nutrients on the shelves behind the minions.

Proteins get routed into the bloodstream with prioritization instructions to head wherever needs the most repair work. On the other hand, the processing for fat storage is the minions least favorite. They call the fat stores "the vaults". When they have to package nutrients for the vaults, they need special equipment that's basically the equivalent of canning and vacuum sealing in one. Remember that fat has twice as many energy units as carbs.

After packaging, they need a vault logistics team to deliver the fat package to the right vault. The vault logistics teams are condescending to the line minions because they have special skills and access. These special teams have to make calculations on which vault the fat packs should be stored in, based on what will keep the body most balanced. Then they need special training for accessing and utilizing the vaults. Much more challenging than simply turning around and putting a carb pack on the shelves.

While there's some theatrics around storing fat, there's an equivalent amount around burning it. In order to access the vaults and burn fat, the head minion in the conveyor department has to either see that the shelves are empty or that the body's nutrient burn rate is a better fit for fats than carbs. Unsurprisingly, the empty shelves is state of crises for all the minions. Everyone goes into high alert trying to ensure that the energy system can sustain operations. Fortunately, this state is much more rare than the body hitting the sweet spot for fat burning.

The head minion keeps careful watch of the body's heart rate to see if he can trigger vault access for fat burning. When the heart is at 70% of a maximum for at least 20 minutes and seems like it's going to be there for a while longer, he signals the special teams to access the vaults. This percentage is the perfect balance between processing time and required energy. For heart rates below that percentage, pulling packs from the vaults will end up supplying too much energy because of how dense the packs are. On the other hand, a percentage that's higher requires the fuel much faster than fat can be converted into burnable fuel. Similarly, time that's less than 20 minutes isn't even worth calling up the vault teams, because they're dramatic enough as it is. Always complaining about how they have to travel to vaults all around the body instead of being able to hang out on the line.

So to burn fat, the body needs to be at that very particular heart rate. Ideally for as long as possible. For people who don't want to wear a heart rate monitor, they can aim for barely being able to talk, but still being able to carry on a conversation. Fortunately, the type of activity doesn't matter, provided your heart rate hits the target and is consistent. Jogging and cycling are most common, but it could be something more fun like dancing, provided your heart stays thumping on target.

Earlier, we mentioned that exercise isn't the only way to burn fat; you can also get there with moderation. Admittedly, the moderation is extreme by modern standards, as the minion pit boss won't even consider giving the signal for vault access until most of the shelves are empty. For most people, emptying most of the shelves starts at about twelve hours of fasting. Ideally, an effective fat burning fast would be closer to 18-24 hours, in order to totally turn the shelves over.

Fasting and moderation is mental for most people. These days, we've trained ourselves to eat whenever we're hungry, and often even when we're not but when we've hit one of the three standard meal times. Skipping two meals sounds ludicrous to most people, and three feels inhumane. Beyond cultural norms, people are generally confused about what hunger actually is to their body versus their mind. Like we mentioned earlier, it's very rare that people actually empty their shelves. So when they feel muscle movement in their digestive track, they've correlated that feeling with the need to eat. Really, though, that feeling is nothing more than the bulk of the minions showing up to work based on when they usually have to process nutrients on the line. And if there's no nutrients to process, they all yell and stomp their feet because they hate showing up to work and not having work to do. Most people listen to the frustration of the minions even if their shelves might be full. However, we can, and probably should, ignore the minions in many cases. Just because they're throwing a tantrum for getting out of bed and having nothing to do doesn't mean we should cave and give them something to do.

Plus, when you ignore the pouting of the line minions, you help train your body to empty the shelves and eventually access the fat storage vaults. You have to think- if the vault teams start getting called every other day, then they have to start being on standby instead of taking their coveted afternoon nap. Knowing this fact, some people shoot for ketosis (keto), which is training the body to utilize fats almost exclusively. They shift to a high-percentage fat diet and eat farther apart so that the vault workers are constantly on the move.

For completeness, there's a nutrient category that isn't commonly considered a macro, but is nearly as important when working on dietary practices that help with fat burning. Fiber is something that doesn't get converted to energy but passes through the digestive system. So fiber can help you feel full without risk of stashing anything on the shelves or vaults. Knowing this notion, when the minions throw a tantrum and you think you're hungry, eating something high in fiber, or totally fiber, can quell the uneasy lines of minions.

Fiber can really help when trying to complete something like a 24 hour fast, but more commonly- you'll be working on balancing food intake and exercise. The 24 hour mark ends up being meaningful because that's how long it takes to deplete your shelves. By that logic, the body uses about 2000 calories a day (same capacity of the carb shelves). So for someone aiming to burn fat, they should ideally be taking in that number of calories per day and trying to create a deficit by burning additional fat.

When you're in the fat burning cardio sweet spot (70%), you'll be burning about 600 calories an hour, and 60-70% of those calories will be from fat (as opposed to carbs from the shelf). And since there's 9 calories per gram of fat, an hour of exercise in the fat burning sweet spot ends up being about 45 grams. With 450 grams in a pound, you need about 10 days of an hour in the sweet spot to burn off a pound of fat. That is, of course, provided your calorie intake isn't causing the minions to route new (excess) nutrients to the fat vaults.

With that formulaic description of fat burning, you should be able to plan exactly how much time in the fat burning sweet spot you need to hit your target results.