Welcome to the quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Brock Armstrong and I'm the Get Fit Guy.

And today we're going to take a closer look at body fat.

Where does it come from? What is it used for?

Why do we need it? What are the best ways to burn it off and where the heck does it go?

Body fat, or the more technical term, adipocytes,

adipo meaning fat and site meaning cell, is found in many places around the human body,

but it's mostly found underneath the skin, and that's what we call subcutaneous fat.

But there's also some on the top of your kidneys, inside your liver,

and a small amount inside your muscle tissue, and we call that visceral fat. An adult male often carries

his body fat in his chest, his abdomen and buttocks, while an adult woman tends to carry

her fat in her breasts, hips, waist, and buttocks.

Other than being considered unattractive and unwanted by the majority of our society, today's society

anyway, the main role of body fat is as a type of energy storage facility.

Up until the mid-90s, it was thought of as strictly a passive place to store energy for the hard

times.

Those times when our ancestors' hunt didn't go well or the weather was bad and while there

wasn't enough food available.

This idea actually turned out to be incorrect.

It does have other uses,

but it is also exceedingly good at storing energy. A single pound of fat contains roughly

3,500 calories of stored energy. Now, assuming you could burn 100% of your body fat as fuel,

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