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hillsanddales t1_j20sgmt wrote

Let's say you heat your house with a wood fireplace. Every day, you get a wood delivery that is just enough to feed the fire to warm your house. One day you decide to buy more wood than you need. First you make the fire a bit bigger to use more wood, but it's not enough. So you start storing the extra wood in your living room, then kitchen, and then you start adding more rooms to your house to fit all the unused wood.

That's kind of what your body is doing. It's not "useless" fat. The fat acts as an energy store so you can survive longer in times of famine. If you don't diminish your energy intake or use more energy through exercise (make a bigger fire), you will keep storing more and more fat.

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86tuning t1_j210cor wrote

this is perhaps the best analogy so far.

the body naturally converts energy to fat for storage. some body fat is necessary to stay healthy, the bodybuilders that cut to 1% for competitions don't look like that year round, it's actually not healthy to be at that percentage at all. that said, less than .0001% of the population can do this, which means we are not in danger of this at all.

the opposite is also true. excess body fat leads to all sorts of health problems.

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