Permanently Ripped: 5 Ways to Change Fat Cells

Permanently Ripped: 5 Ways to Change Fat Cells
What kinds of body fat are good, what kinds are bad, and why you want to develop more of one particular kind to burn 300 extra calories per day.

Most people don’t think of it this way, but fat is actually just another organ in the body. It may not have one set location in the body like a heart, liver, or pancreas, but it does act like those organs in that it has specific functions. One of these functions is calorie storage, but fat also releases hormones that control metabolism.

Regardless, many of us wish we could just treat this organ like an inflamed appendix and just surgically rip all of it out so that we could proudly walk around semi-naked for the rest of our lives. That’s a bit misguided, though, because not all types of fat are bad. Sure, some types are unsightly and even dangerous to our health, but others are actually altruistic cannibals in that they eat up their own kind in an effort to keep us lean.

The key lies in increasing the amount of the good type of fat so that dieting might actually become obsolete.

The Two Main Categories of Body Fat
Humans have white fat and brown fat. Both types store energy, but white fat cells each contain only one droplet of fat, while brown fat contains lots of tiny droplets of fat. Brown fat also contains tons of the brownish cellular organelles known as mitochondria, which use the droplets of fat to create energy and, as a byproduct of creating energy, heat.

Have you ever privately mocked a baby for having poor delt separation because it carries all that fat around its neck and shoulders? Okay, probably not. Even so, there’s a reason for all that extra tissue on babies – it’s comprised of brown fat. Since they don’t have the ability to shiver (and thereby produce heat) in the cold, babies rely on all those mitochondria-rich brown fat cells to produce warmth.

Scientists used to think humans lost all that brown fat as they got older, but now they know that adults also have brown fat. How much we each have plays a large part in determining how fat or how lean we are.

So, brown fat is good. The verdict on white fat is a little more complicated.