The basics

Mr. Nuclear Powers and the Gergster have been getting on my case lately because of my "lack of research" and my "not doing work" so this is here to prove them wrong for a little bit.

So first off lets start with the basics because you can say what you want to do but without knowing what happens and how it happens you are just kind of guessing at what will work.

What is fat?

When you eat food you are providing calories to your body that are necessary for your everyday activities from walking and talking to breathing and your heart beating. Your body needs a certain amount of calories to function, this varies from person to person and is based on several factors including but not limited to height, weight, build, activity level, and metabolism. In order to get these calories that are needed you must eat food that contain among other things calories. The body will ingest this break it down into much smaller useable chains of energy  then transport it to your cells which in turn will use them as the coal in their furnace of energy. Eating lots of food is all well and good but if you eat too much your body can't use all of it at once so it will store the excess energy together in the form of body fat. It is here that the body keeps it as a reserve so that if it needs energy and there is nothing immediately available they can tap into these fat storages and use them for energy. Essentially fat is like a back up gas tank. If your original gas tank runs dry the car can tap into this back up reserve tank for power.

How do you burn fat?

Burning fat is complicated but it can be boiled down into two easy points, eat less and move more.

If you are eating less food throughout the day your body has less energy to run on so it has to tap into the extra energy it has stored in case of emergency which will burn fat. When you exercise you are using much more energy  than when you are sedentary which means you will more calories than if you were, say, sitting on the couch watching tv. If you add these two components up you get the answer to the question of how to lose fat.

How do you build muscle?

Muscle is one of the four types of tissue muscle however is the only one of the four that you can grow more of on purpose. There are many different ways of going about building muscle mass but they are all essentially doing the exact same thing, tearing the microscopic fibers in the tissue and through recovery becoming larger and stronger. These tears that occur aren't the large tears you typically think of when you think of someone tearing a muscle. These are tiny rips, like the fraying of an old rope, are caused by stress put on the muscle so the body recognizes that this may happen again and becomes stronger in order to avoid it. This is very noticeable because say you do 5 reps of 135 pound on flat bench press and the next time you do bench you can get 6 or 7 reps. This is from your body realizing the stress being put on your body and adapting to it by building muscle.

Hopefully this was a little helpful to anyone reading or confused about how my project was going on down on a much smaller scale. These are only a few things I have learned so far and I will try and make it a point of having a post like this at least once a week for now on in order to show the research I have been doing.