More 'Fat Burning' Basics with Math, Too!

In the previous post, I reviewed what happens, chemically, when you 'burn fat.' As I mentioned, you are always burning fat for energy. But, most of you want to know, how do I burn off my body fat? In order to do that, you need to create an energy deficit. Body fat stores, in the adipose tissue, are an extremely dense form of energy. In fact, the energy concentration is greater than that of TNT (dynamite). Unfortunately, you cannot convert the fat energy as rapidly as TNT is converted to energy (hence the big explosion, what a sight that would be if you could).
A pound of body fat has about 3500 Calories, or 14,650,000 Joules of energy. What does that mean? Well a watt, which most of you are familiar with from the kb snatch challenge, is a power output of one joule per second. If you averaged a power output of 40 watts, it would take you 99.65 hours to burn one pound of fat! Of, course you burn additional energy just to maintain your body, but I wanted to give you an appreciation of how much energy is in a pound of fat.

Relax, it is easier to burn body fat than I may be leading you to believe. I will discuss how to create a calorie deficit in another post.