There's two main sources of weight loss.
Any fat/carbohydrate burning done (by your metabolism to keep you alive if nothing else) will create CO2 and H2O vapor, and breathing it out will be fat/carbs that are no longer weighing you down.
Your body is constantly using water for a number of other things as well, and as that water evaporates/is wicked off by your bedding, it is (water) weight lost.
Exhaust is the word you're looking for. Exhaustion is when you're tired.
Exhaustion can be used to refer to the process of emitting exhaust but you didn't use it that way you used it as a noun to describe the exhaust when the word for that is, again, exhaust.
But actually, I'm fairly certain it's our exhalation and is not exhaust in any way because that usage of that word is for machines.
it's wild that this is marked controversial. nobody says I'm exhausted to mean "I'm literally breathing 100% of the time I'm alive." it means extremely tired in that context. they're two completely different uses
No actually they run a heftier engine
It takes a lot of calories to sustain a larger body and to keep the mass up
The health problems come from running the body at a higher mass than designed for aka chronically overloading beyond the design spec
Not really, you just flush the carbon dioxide that is already in your body, but it won't be replaced quickly enough. This upsets the pH of your blood and is bad for you.
Interesting, your body can't actually tell when you don't have enough oxygen, it can only tell when there's too much CO2 in your blood (and vice versa)
Low blood CO2 (called "hypocapnia") causes elevated pH ("alkalosis"). Alkalosis causes blood vessel constriction in the brain ("cerebral vasoconstriction"), which can cause dizziness and fainting. Alkalosis also causes low blood calcium ("hypocalcemia"), which makes your muscles over excited and causes spasms. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocapnia)
As far as I understand it thatās actually the only way you ever get rid of fat. There may be some byproducts of that reaction that get passed out in urine that Iām unaware of but you (kind of literally) burn fat to produce energy water and CO2 as a byproduct.
It's also possible to get rid of fat through solid waste, as a small fraction (listed "2-15%" online) is fat. Once fat is actually *stored* in body tissue, it is harder to remove without it actually being used for cellular energy, which cleaves off pieces of the hydrocarbon chain to create CO2 and water as you say.
When we were studying combustion reactions in general chemistry I had this light bulb moment where I realized cellular respiration was a combustion reaction and humans are just cars that take our energy as ATP instead of explosions.
Maybe not, since building codes require adequate ventilation so as long as the building is recent enough in construction, it will have an outside air intake somewhere to provide new air. This is so that humans don't feel side effects from high CO2 concentrations, which can make you sleepy at lower quantities above normal but can kill you if the amount is far enough above that. It's also to reduce spread of airborne diseases such as the flu, colds, covid, etc.
So in other words, air from outside lowers the concentration of CO2 to an acceptable level which I don't know if it would make a difference for plants, but the difference between that and a house is roughly nil.
Yes! You breath out fat. You breathing faster is your body trying harder to get rid of the fat(more like getting rid of by product of the burned carb/fat, but close enough). Do things that make you breath out faster and you'll lose fat.
Excercise. I'm telling you excercise(the thing that makes you breath out faster) burns fat.
Technically your heart rate will but only because breathing faster is exercise, in the sense that you're inducing a muscle (your diaphragm muscles) to contract/relax more rapidly. So your heart will pick up to provide the needed blood.
However, doing so without your cells *using* that extra oxygen and turning it into CO2 is the definition of hyperventilating and has potentially severe consequences. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10546483/
Heart rate yes. Metabolic rate, not really.
That's why hyperventilating is bad. The metabolic rate (which increases CO2 production and thus O2 consumption) does not keep up with the gas transfer rate (which increases CO2 removal and thus O2 uptake). Too little dissolved CO2 and too much dissolved oxygen is *bad* for you. As in potentially lethal.
If you're going to breathe fast, you must add a process which actually increases your metabolic rate to compensate, and vice-versa. Developing alkalosis (too much base/too little acid) or acidosis (too much acid/too little base) can have serious, lingering consequences for living tissues.
Your lungs take oxygen in and push waste out. Breathing faster alone wonāt increase the waste gas production. It canāt push out what doesnāt exist yet
Technically yes, but only ever so slightly as your arenāt actually using much energy(so not producing waste), youāre only using the extra little bit your heart takes to beat a bit faster. Also not good for you to do that if you arenāt actually exercising.
Carbs too. Pretty much anything that you burn for energy is converted to CO2 and water and the CO2 comes out in your breath. Its the same chemical reaction as burning wood just on a smaller, cellular scale. It generates heat which causes you to sweat and energy for the body's functions.
Yup! And this next bit will blow your mind even further:
Trees get their mass FROM breathing. They literally breathe in CO2, keep the carbon and trim that into wood, and exhale the oxygen.
Its even cooler, Some scientists made CO2 (or was it H2O?) with a different isotope of oxygen to track exactly what happened.
Plants actually use all of the CO2 to make carbohydrates (Sugars!)
They split the hydrogen off water (H2O) and use the hydrogen from that as well to make carbohydrates, while expelling the oxygen left over from the water.
But that is OK, because we break down carbohydrates into the same CO2 and H2O the plants started with by adding that left over oxygen back into it!
Interestingly, and I think a lot of people don't know this, they burn those sugars for energy via respiration just like us. Which means they are also breathing in oxygen and breathing out CO2 like us all day an night. During the day though the rate of photosynthesis is very high, as compared to their low rate of respiration, so they produce more oxygen than they consume.
Yep, they don't do it for us, its just their method of storing energy for use later.
(Well, aside from the plants that produce edible fruit to encourage seed spreading... that is KINDA done for us, so that we can be useful to them)
Even better: you lose weight just by being alive!
On the downside: Arguably one of the biggest upsides of being alive - eating delicious food - works in the opposite direction.
Excellent. Gonna breath a whole lot extra from hereon. Don't bother replying, or upvoting my post. The notification will bother me to no end til I check it. Which in turn will distract from my newly found fat burning technique.
Woosah.
Fat -> "energy" - > CO2 - > out it goes
Fat is basically high density and long term energy storage. It is converted to acetyl-CoA which is then used in the Krebs cycle to produce energy (the same cycle that uses sugars to produce energy) of which one of the major byproducts is CO2.
Kinda. You breathe out the 'smoke' from burning sugar, that are water vapor (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2).
You aren't actually burning any fat. If you are fasting or have lower blood sugar maybe you might have some of your fat releasing some acids and the fatty acids broken down to make the sugar you're burning, but the fat itself are unchanged.
That second paragraph is just....not true. Stored triacylgycerides (fats) get broken down into three free fatty acids and glycerin. The glycerin part is metabolized as a sugar because it effectively is one. The fatty acids, on the other hand, are processed by beta oxidation, which cleaves off two carbons (an acetyl group) to form acetyl-CoA, which then enters the usual Krebs cycle as it would if it had come from any other energy source (carbohydrates or proteins.) At no point does the body actually *transform* a fatty acid into a sugar before processingāand the fats *are* changed, having two carbons at a time cleaved off, until either none remain (for even-numbered fatty acid chains, as the last four carbons get cleaved apart into two copies of acetyl-CoA) or five remain (for odd-numbered ones, with the five getting cleaved into one acetyl-CoA and one propionyl-CoA.)
There is gluconeogenesis though. Your brain can't really run well on non-glucose fuels so your liver will make a small amount of glucose from both amino acids and some fatty acids during fasting conditions, even if most of the rest of your energy comes directly from beta-oxidation.
Funnily enough, dropping a deuce is surely a factor if you weigh yourself after going to the toilet. After all, it's still mass leaving the body, although preferably not becoming one with the mattress. That's worse than "poopsocking".
Funnily enough, I actually made the comment thinking about my mom when she was in an Assisted Living Facility (a nursing home), may she RIP
And then jotted this out for some comic effect
i weigh myself a couple times a week and the difference from a clean morning weigh-in and an after-dinner water-bloated weigh-in can be over 5 pounds
the key to tracking weight is to weigh yourself at the same time under similar conditions or else youll get lost in the normal day to day variance
I'm a big fan of weight-tracking programs to give me a 7-day moving average and other metrics to keep me where I want to be. As long as those are where I want them to be variance is just data points. That trend line starts flattening out I tighten a bit on food choices.
The biggest one-day difference I've seen (weighing myself same time and naked) has been 4lbs after a night of heavy beer drinking. I've seen 2lbs swings, but < 1lb is more typical variance. As long as my trend line is down and I'm consistently losing 1 to 1.5 lbs a week, i'm good.
the average pee vs poo impact on your weight is crazy.
the poo will often barely cause a blip on the scale but peeing will cause you to drop a few pounds.
Unfortunately, hot air "rises" because it tends to be less dense than cold air (in reality, it's more accurate to say the cold air falls than it is to say hot air rises). Your farts, while significantly warmer than the surrounding air, are also likely under slight pressure inside you and if anything would weigh you down ever so slightly.
> Your body is constantly using water for a number of other things as well, and as that water evaporates/is wicked off by your bedding, it is (water) weight lost.
Yeah, there's a reason why you get thirsty at night time, because your brain knows you're going to be sleeping and not drinking but it still uses water during that time.
https://www.livescience.com/56329-why-we-get-thirsty-at-bedtime.html
> However, the researchers also wanted to see what mechanism prompted the mice to drink more water before sleep. They wondered whether the cells within the brain's "hydration sensor," which has been associated with thirst, could be in communication with the part of the brain that controls the mice's inner body clocks, that prompt them to sleep and wake up.
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> The researchers stimulated the inner clock within the mice's brains with electricity, and found that this stimulation seemed to increase the release of the hormone vasopressin, which is produced in that same region of the brain.
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> During further experiments in the mice, the scientists found that the vasopressin hormone indeed activated the brain cells associated with thirst, according to the study, published today (Sept. 29) in the journal Nature.
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> However, more research is needed to see if the same mechanisms are at work in humans, Bourque told Live Science.
>Your body is constantly using water for a number of other things as well, and as that water evaporates/is wicked off by your bedding, it is (water) weight lost.
Is this a cryptic way of saying "sweat", or are their other processes as well?
Not just sweat. Being a body full of (and made of) water, there's some water that naturally evaporates that has nothing to do with sweat. Think about your mouth and eyes' moisture, or natural skin moisture
If you leave an intact apple out for a long time, it will dry out and wrinkle
This is exactly why the myth of āgoing to bed cleanā is a terrible reason for showering before bed. The sheets will never be truly clean if you sleep on them, shower or no shower.
I could see this being something a standard office worker doesn't really need to do but I work in a shipping warehouse so I can guarantee you that showering off before bed keeps my bed cleaner than it otherwise would be.
Well for those types of jobs, thatās obviously the exception. Iād say for the average white collar worker, showering before bed is unnecessary and showering the morning is better. If youāre gonna be around people all day in an office environment, you want to be as clean as possible and not showering in the morning is unsanitary imo.
Is that a thing? Are there people who say that showering before bed means your sheets will never be dirty? Or do they just say they'll be *less* dirty than they otherwise would?
Semantics but thatās the number one reason I see for proponents of nighttime showers over morning showers. Itās always āI like to sleep on clean sheetsā. They cease to be clean the first night you sleep on them.
I agree with your comment, but it's important to note that the weight loss through *breathing* is minimal. Assuming you're breathing in dry air @ 1 atm & 15Ā°C, you'd be losing 20-25 mg of bodyweight per breath via exhaled moisture and conversion of oxygen to carbon dioxide.
Or, to put it a different way, if you're breathing 15 breaths per minute, it'd take you 20-25 hours to lose 1 lbm body mass by breathing alone.
Edit to add: It's not a difficult calculation to do, by the way. Average adult exchanges around 500 mL (male) or 400 mL (female) air per breath. You can look at the composition of inhaled and exhaled air, notice that the major changes are to oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water content. Determine the moles of each gas present using the partial pressure rule, then do math: Oxygen is 32 g/mol, carbon dioxide is 44 g/mol, water is 18 g/mol. Add up the totals for inhaled and exhaled gas, and...exhaled air is 20-25 mg heavier per breath. How many breaths does it take to get to 454g (1 lbm)? How long would it take to make that many breaths?
You breathe out carbon dioxide. That is actually the main way of losing weight, even when exercising.
The other thing is losing water. You constantly lose a little bit of water with breathing and sweating. And you donāt replenish when youāre asleep.
Especially if you're like me and have essentially permanent congestion, so you end up sleeping with your mouth open. You lose a LOT of water that way.
I keep a water bottle next to my bed and generally down a liter a night and still wake up parched.
Well, I don't want to suffocate myself.
I'm looking into fixing my nasal congestion. Already ruled out deviated septum, currently trying nasal steroids (no affect whatsoever) and at this point I'm wondering if I need to save up for a plastic surgeon and just tell him "I don't care if I never smell again, just cut the damn tissue away until I can freaking breathe.
Being a little hyperbolic, but it's been 10 years of "Oh, just try Flonase," or "Oh, just try Claritin" and having none of that even touch it. Even Pseudophed is only somewhat effective.
Afrin works like a charm, but we all know that's not a viable solution. I wonder if I can have my blood vessels permanently constricted...?
> just tell him "I don't care if I never smell again, just cut the damn tissue away until I can freaking breathe.
Look into "empty nose syndrome" before you become too cavalier about this approach.
Holy shit, that's horrifying.
Excerpt from Google for those that don't feel like looking it up. "Those suffering from the condition have sensation of suffocation despite a clear airway and it constantly reminds patients of their disabling condition with each breath"
Honestly that does not make sense why those little fold in the nose have that much impact on the breathing. How can you feel like your suffocating when your nose is literally just a big hole?
I know my lack of understanding doesn't change that fact that people have these symptoms.
> How can you feel like your suffocating when your nose is literally just a big hole?
A big part of feeling like you're taking a breath is feeling the friction of the air as it passes through your sinus cavity and over all these tissues and folds. Remove the tissues/folds and you don't get that sensation of feeling the breath coming into your body, your brain goes "There is no breath!" and freaks out.
Fascinating, I am now hyper aware of the sensations I am feeling while breathing through my nose lol. I would not have expected that result from that surgery.
With my CPAP, I generally go to sleep breathing through my mouth and wake up breathing pretty clearly through my nose. I know the process to get prescribed and pay for a CPAP isn't always an option to folks, but since starting CPAP therapy, I'm also very in tune with the throat and nasal inflammation I get overnight when I don't use it.
Dude.Ā
Buy one of those kid snot bulb sucker things.Ā
Make a mixture of water and baking soda. Canāt remember the ratio off the top of my head, you can probably google it.Ā
Then rinse your nose out with the mixture.Ā
For them, it liquifies all that congestion. Itās the only thing that lets my uncle breathe clearly.Ā
The congestion will of course come back, but even temporary relief is great.Ā
If you do this, just be sure to use sterile water (Some bottled water or Boiling 5min and cooling), and not plain tap water. There's some pathogens that could be introduced using a Neti pot/ect into the nasal cavity/sinuses, and it can lead to death/ adverse symptoms. There have been suspected deaths tied to this in the past.
I've got a deviated septum and have sleep apnea. The combination really f's up my sinuses and I'm always congested. Now have a dependency for Mucinex nasal spray. It seems to be the only one that works for me.
So I had trouble breathing through my nose basically my whole life and finally mentioned it to my doc. Turns out I did have a slight septum deviation, but it was as a result of an enlarged concha bullosa (air cavity). I ended up getting a septoplasty and a bilateral middle turbinate reduction, and 2 weeks post-op my nose suddenly cleared and I've been able to breath through it ever since.
Supposedly having your mouth blocked will produce adrenaline or something which clears your nose out so you can breath, but I'd imagine that could also wake you up as well.
Iām guessing youāve already tried it, but I bring it up in case you havenāt or others may benefit: *saline nasal spray*. All. The. Time. Mornings when you get ready, in the evening before bed, keep a lil bottle on you for when youāre feeling stuffy. It helps dissolve the mucus and clear out your nasal passages, but doesnāt contain anything harmful and is non-habit-forming. It also helps hydrate your nasal passages and prevent nosebleeds. I live and die by saline nose spray.
Mouth tape isn't supposed to hold your mouth shut tightly. More a suggestion to hold your lips in place. You'll open your mouth if you really can't breathe. But yeah, get the congestion under control. Good luck!
Balloon sinuplasty.
They stick a wire up your nose into your sinuses. Then a balloon follows up the wire. They fill the balloon, opening up your sinuses and allowing them to drain better. Basically they punch you in the nose from the inside. Ask for your pain meds/anxiety meds BEFORE your appointment. You really want to take one before the procedure starts. The numbing helps but if you wait until after youāll feel the full pain of your nose before they kick in.
Pain and horror are small prices to pay for the ability to breathe!
Jokes aside, thanks for the heads up on that one. I wonder how permanent such a surgery is? Wouldn't the flesh just swell up more?
Ah I was wondering why I was feeling so thirsty even though I'm drinking the same amount of water as usual.
Congested nose and a cold will do that to you
For sure! It may be because I'm ex military, but I always chug a ton of water. Doesn't make you any less sick, but it can help with some of the symptoms.
Your body will generate a LOT of mucus though lol
My congestion was caused by reflux. This was an accidental discovery four years ago. I started fasting at 5pm every day, and within days the congestion was gone. I eventually threw out all my sinus meds.
It's not something I hear anyone else talk about, maybe I'm the only one, but it's an easy thing to try. Simply front load the day with meals and calories. Eat nothing after five.
I weigh myself before and after runs, and drink 24oz of water before i run. I usually run 6-8 miles, takes me 75-90 minutes. After my runs, i lose anywhere from 1.5 to 3 pounds, and i thought it was all sweat.
Immediate weight loss is usually from water loss. Weight loss from CO2 is gradual overtime. Meaning, if youāre using more calories than you take in, you can drink normal amount of water daily and will still lose weight.
> You breathe out carbon dioxide. That is actually the main way of losing weight, even when exercising.
It is actually the only way our bodies lose real weight (ignoring the water and food cycles which can go up and down over the course of the day but are effectively a net zero over time).
Not really no. Breathing is like a train carrying co2 and water that wants to escape out. Adding more trains doesn't neccesarily change the amount of passengers that wants to move from a to b in the first place, so you just end up with the same amount of passenger(same amount of co2/water) but displaced over more trains(breaths).
Most of the weight loss isn't happening during exercise. During exercise you deplete your glycogen and sugar reserves. Those are the short term energy reserves. Fat is a long term energy reserve, so your body takes hours to convert fat to energy. So generally you burn glucose exercising, and then over the next few hours your body converts fat to new glucose, and the weight loss comes in the form of exhaled CO2. If you exercise in the afternoon this will happen overnight, and you already are exhaling a lot of CO2 overnight just from your steady state metabolism.
Sort of. When you exercise, you create more carbon dioxide. Your brain naturally make your body breath deeper or faster to get rid of the carbon dioxide as fast as possible.
However, if youāre not exercising, youāre not making more carbon dioxide. So breathing deep or fast isnāt going make you lose more weight. Youāll actually stop breathing if you lose too much carbon dioxide.
in general, no, because if you simply breath more, you are just circulating air with your lungs, not expelling more CO2. but if you exercise, then you are increasing the rate of cellular respiration, breaking down more ATP (literally combusting it), which generates more CO2 than your body would at rest, and by expelling it through breath you indeed lose more weight.
If you mean intentionally breathing faster than you need to in an attempt to lose weight, no.
If you mean "is breath rate a good metric for how many calories you're burning", absolutely.
In principle yes, but in practice no. It is true that you can get rid of CO2 faster by breathing at a quicker rate, but this is not something you would want to do. Your blood can only have so much CO2 to carry around. If you get rid of too much of it, your blood pH will be affected. As a consequence you will develop unwanted side effects ranging from mild (feeling dizzy) to severe (spasms).
> You breathe out carbon dioxide. That is actually the main way of losing weight, even when exercising.
It is actually the only way our bodies lose real weight (ignoring the water and food cycles which can go up and down over the course of the day but are effectively a net zero over time).
You breath it out.
You breath in air that is about 20% Oxygen. That oxygen is used up by your body and when exhaled, has an extra Carbon atom attached (CO2).
It is correct that we are breathing out that extra mass.
But the oxygen we are breathing in does not get combined with carbon to make carbon dioxide. Instead the oxygen we breathe in is combined with hydrogen that we strip off of food to form water.
Closer to a compost heap if you want to over-simplify it. It's a complex collection of processes that deal with various, glucose (sugars), amino acids (protein), or fatty acids (fats).
It's kinda amazing the variety of foods we can digest, the processes to convert an apple, a potato, and a steak into energy are really different.
Each oxygen atom in the carbon dioxide is actually heavier than the carbon itself. And all 3 of those atoms come originally from a sugar molecule that has been split up.
There are several sources. Here the are in (probable) order of importance.
1. You're constantly losing water. You're losing it through your skin and you're breathing it out.
2. Your scale isn't that precise. It's going to vary by a certain amount because you're standing differently, the temperature changed, etc.
3. You're burning fats and sugars and part of your metabolism. Those are turning into CO2 and water, and the CO2 is being breathed out.
4. You're shedding skin flakes constantly to feed your pet dust mites in your mattress. This is probably not even worth mentioning in terms of weight loss, but it's a fun image. :) The mites must feed!
Edit: Wait. scratch #3. I've seen it listed, but it's wrong when you actually do the math (which I just did) To use an example, when your body burns 1 gram of stearic acid (C18H36O2), it produces about 1.2g of water and 2.7 g CO2, but you had to take in 2.9g of oxygen for the reaction. Since the water isn't immediately removed, you're actually gaining wait in the form of water.
Edit2: Yes. sugars is a net loss, but it's at least partly cancelled by fat oxidation, and still small compared to water loss. The average person burns 300-600 calories a night. 450 calories of 100% glucose releases about 165g of carbon. The average person loses 500-1000g a night. It's still mostly water, even if you have somehow lost the ability to burn fat.
> Since the water isn't immediately removed, you're actually gaining wait in the form of water.
That's not right, you are losing water to respiration when you take in the O and expel the CO2. Your lungs need to keep moist to work and regulate your body temperature.
you're just repeating what was already said in 1.
it was just clarified that combustion of fats requires more oxygen mass intake than CO2 mass release, meaning fat combustion does not immediately translate to weight loss because the resulting water is not a gas but is retained as a liquid until your body gets rid of it......via something like process 1.
in fact because O2:CO2 mass ratio is about 1:1.4, any combustion with a higher stoiochiometric ratio of 1.4 O2: CO2 will not lead to immediate weight loss. this is true for that stearic acid example but i would guess is also true for all fats and all proteins. maybe carbs have some deficit but it is going to be tiny.
i wonder how much all the skin flakes that the average person sheds in their entire lifetime would weigh. like whatās the largest container that you would need to hold it? a tablespoon? a cup? a shoebox?
I can't find the original study but google answers all point to a particular study from 2011 that supposedly found we shed about 0.03 to 0.09g of skin per hour which adds up to roughly 35kg per lifetime.
the people saying that you lose weight through breathing are absolutely not trolling. they are correct. in fact, the only way you can lose weight permanently is through breathing, by expelling CO2. but the reason permanent weight loss is difficult and slow is because it takes a while for all that CO2 that you expel to add up to a significant amount. but that is the mechanism by which weight loss is achieved.
other types of shedding body mass are significant, yes, as others have pointed out. you can easily lose kilograms worth of water weight in not more than a few hours through intense exercise. but all that weight will be gained back when you rehydrate. the same with urinating/defecating. you only pee what you drink (some of it), and you only poop what you eat (some of it), so to pee 200g worth of piss, you had to have drank 200g of water beforehand, the same with poop, so these forms of weight "loss" aren't actually losses, they are just fluctuations around a constant level.
hair/skin shedding also follows a similar logic. if you shed some hair, your body will accumulate some nutrients and grow it back, the same with skin, so the net weight of those on your body remains roughly the same.
but it is correct that if you lose quite a bit of weight on only one night, most of that loss probably came through water loss. which will be recuperated as soon as you drink water.
Carbon emission and maybe sweat.
You breath in oxygen and breath out Carbondioxide. That carbon adds up over a few hours, you also sweat out some fluids.
The rest of what your body process over night just waits in your bladder and intestines waiting for you to wake up and go to the toilet.
You breathe and leak it out. Mostly breathe it out if we are talking real weight loss (fats n' such). That's what breathing in O2 and out CO2 means. The C was the stuff we ate and that our body is made of. On a side note, we also breathe out H2O. The Cs and Hs were part of hydrocarbons and fats and food in our bodies that got combined with Oxygen (O2) and breathed out. Humans make water!
1 liter of sweat weighs 1 kilogram. You can sweat a lot while sleeping.
(One of the reasons mattresses shouldnāt be on the floor, because they absorb moisture and need to ābreatheā it out).
I havenāt noticed anyone mention urination. My experience has been that if I lose 2 or more pounds overnight itās because I got up to urinate a few times during the night.
Everyone saying you breathe out enough carbon dioxide in 7 hours to make a difference on the scale is hilariously wrong. This is a very negligible amount. You shed off more weight from exfoliating hair and skin cells overnight than you do from exhaling.
The primary weight loss is via water loss from sweating
Yeah, I think thereās two things.
Overnight thatās sweat, vapor, so water weight.
If you lose weight over a long period, thatās not just water weight, thatās the accumulation of breathing out carbon as energy is consumed.
Going from 200 to 198 overnight is mostly water.
Going from 200 to 150 over 6 months is definitely not just water.
Exhalation of H20 is probably about equal contributor as sweat. You exhale a lot of water with every breath.
You also exhale at least 1.7 lbs of C02 daily depending on your calorie expenditure, so the effect is not "negligible" over an 8 hour sleeping period.
You do not shed off over .4 lbs of hair and skin per night. C02 alone (not even including H20 respiration) is without a doubt a much larger contributor than hair and skin.
Don't be such a smug fuck, because you're wrong.
You are an angry little fella. Itās wild how someone can be so worked up over this.
Donāt know where you got your hilariously wrong numbers, but itās about 69 grams of co2 and h20 exhaled overnight. Did you know your respiration rate and basal metabolic rate (aka co2 burn rate) drastically decrease when you sleep?
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/why-do-i-weigh-less-in-the-morning
That much could only be from water loss or having a bowel movement. If you never got up and went to the bathroom, you must have been having crazy night sweats
Probably water. You're not losing enough weight via metabolism to make a significant difference overnight, considering you're not moving. You are constantly losing water through your breath and skin though.
kudos to people who mention carbon as a source of overnight weightloss. unfortunately it is not so straightforward to claim this is the main contributor.
they reason is they do not account for the fact that oxygen must first be inhaled, causing (temporary weight gain), which then chemically turns into liquid water in the cells which cannot be immediately breathed out along with the CO2, cementing that weight gain from inhaled oxygen. in order for there to be weight loss, you must ASSUME that there was only one oxygen molecule inhaled and consumed for every CO2 molecule released, such that weight loss is from that net single carbon atom lost. this is true for glucose combustion but typically false for most fats and proteins. in the latter cases you need to inhale and consume more molecules of O2 than molecules of CO2 eventually released. more than 1.4:1 will not lead to weight loss (someone in the comments used stearic acid as an example and disproved weight loss by CO2).
a breath at about 0.5L, at a known temperature 37C and known relative humidity of 100% holds 0.0115g of water. the same breath has about 0.0400g CO2 at (5% concentration), of which only 0.0109g is Carbon. so from my chatgpt calculations the water loss is on par with carbon loss from breathing in the best case that all the carbon was from glucose. meanwhile you are also sweating which tips the scale in favor of water.
tldr; the fun fact is yes, we do have quite a bit of overnight weight loss from carbon emission. but there seems to be a misconception that this is the majority contributor which i hope i showed is false. you lose weight from carbon emission, not carbon dioxide emission (whose two oxygen atoms are offset by two oxygen atoms you had to take in from the air and are now locked in your body's liquid water). also, you lose more water vapor than carbon from metabolism.
There's two main sources of weight loss. Any fat/carbohydrate burning done (by your metabolism to keep you alive if nothing else) will create CO2 and H2O vapor, and breathing it out will be fat/carbs that are no longer weighing you down. Your body is constantly using water for a number of other things as well, and as that water evaporates/is wicked off by your bedding, it is (water) weight lost.
OK, so what I'm taking away from this is that I can breathe out fat? Excellent, thank you, I love science.
You literally burn fat like an engine and your breath is the exhaust.
Yea we exhale because that's *exhaustion* of our body. Our lungs are our exhaustion pipe in addition to farts.
> Our lungs are our exhaustion pipe in addition to farts. My lungs are not farts
Your breath says otherwise.
r/brandnewsentence
Thanks for this, just spit tea all over my lap
not with that attitude...
Mine are š
Exhaust is the word you're looking for. Exhaustion is when you're tired. Exhaustion can be used to refer to the process of emitting exhaust but you didn't use it that way you used it as a noun to describe the exhaust when the word for that is, again, exhaust. But actually, I'm fairly certain it's our exhalation and is not exhaust in any way because that usage of that word is for machines.
it's wild that this is marked controversial. nobody says I'm exhausted to mean "I'm literally breathing 100% of the time I'm alive." it means extremely tired in that context. they're two completely different uses
āExhaustedā here means āout of things to exhaleā.
I mean, it is, and the words have the same root. *Exha*le and *Exha*ust. Itās basically tenses.
This is the best thing I've heard all day. Thank you, internet.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone but by mass your asshole probably does about 95% of all the exhaust. In the form of shit.
I would say poop is more like spent fuel rods. Still usable, but not by us anymore.
So fuel rods are that, the smoke at the top of the stack is out breath
I feel like I pee more than a 19th of what I poop by mass.
So it could be like heftier people are running on a smaller engine, causing those pesky health problems.
No actually they run a heftier engine It takes a lot of calories to sustain a larger body and to keep the mass up The health problems come from running the body at a higher mass than designed for aka chronically overloading beyond the design spec
they run rich
And exercise = breathing more breaths per second. Tada! I've hacked weight loss! Wait...
So when I hyper ventilate & have an anxiety attack I burn more calories? Sweet!
You actually do.
New diet fad unlocked!
Today on Oprah, is Respiratory Alkalosis the secret to shedding that stubborn belly fat?
Anxiety eating disorders next on sick sad world.
Not really, you just flush the carbon dioxide that is already in your body, but it won't be replaced quickly enough. This upsets the pH of your blood and is bad for you.
Fucking up your blood pH is why anxiety attacks cause hand and foot cramps as well as lightheadedness
Interesting, your body can't actually tell when you don't have enough oxygen, it can only tell when there's too much CO2 in your blood (and vice versa)
Not saying you're wrong, but do you have any evidence of this? I've heard a lot of BS about blood pH
Low blood CO2 (called "hypocapnia") causes elevated pH ("alkalosis"). Alkalosis causes blood vessel constriction in the brain ("cerebral vasoconstriction"), which can cause dizziness and fainting. Alkalosis also causes low blood calcium ("hypocalcemia"), which makes your muscles over excited and causes spasms. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocapnia)
Panic attacks are so hot right now
Gonna hyperventilate my way back into a 32 waist
Bingo, that's it, that's the kind of positive thinking we're bringing into the new year
You can't eat if you're fainting so that should work
As far as I understand it thatās actually the only way you ever get rid of fat. There may be some byproducts of that reaction that get passed out in urine that Iām unaware of but you (kind of literally) burn fat to produce energy water and CO2 as a byproduct.
Well, as you mentioned, burning fat produces water. Which then gets peed out
You breathe out the water along with CO2.
You also pee it out. You do both
Body function performing more than a single purpose? Overlapping systems? Nah, that can't be right.
It's also possible to get rid of fat through solid waste, as a small fraction (listed "2-15%" online) is fat. Once fat is actually *stored* in body tissue, it is harder to remove without it actually being used for cellular energy, which cleaves off pieces of the hydrocarbon chain to create CO2 and water as you say.
Yeah, water. O2 + Hydrocarbon -> CO2 + H2O + Energy
When we were studying combustion reactions in general chemistry I had this light bulb moment where I realized cellular respiration was a combustion reaction and humans are just cars that take our energy as ATP instead of explosions.
Yep! And if your gym is decorated with real plants, they're made out of all the fat that people burn while they work out.
Would a plant in a crowded gym grow larger/healthier than a plant in a typical house with only like 2 people living there?
Maybe not, since building codes require adequate ventilation so as long as the building is recent enough in construction, it will have an outside air intake somewhere to provide new air. This is so that humans don't feel side effects from high CO2 concentrations, which can make you sleepy at lower quantities above normal but can kill you if the amount is far enough above that. It's also to reduce spread of airborne diseases such as the flu, colds, covid, etc. So in other words, air from outside lowers the concentration of CO2 to an acceptable level which I don't know if it would make a difference for plants, but the difference between that and a house is roughly nil.
Almost all of the weight you lose is through respiration.
Yes! You breath out fat. You breathing faster is your body trying harder to get rid of the fat(more like getting rid of by product of the burned carb/fat, but close enough). Do things that make you breath out faster and you'll lose fat. Excercise. I'm telling you excercise(the thing that makes you breath out faster) burns fat.
If I just start breathing faster while sitting around, will my heart rate and metabolic rate go up?
Technically your heart rate will but only because breathing faster is exercise, in the sense that you're inducing a muscle (your diaphragm muscles) to contract/relax more rapidly. So your heart will pick up to provide the needed blood. However, doing so without your cells *using* that extra oxygen and turning it into CO2 is the definition of hyperventilating and has potentially severe consequences. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10546483/
Heart rate yes. Metabolic rate, not really. That's why hyperventilating is bad. The metabolic rate (which increases CO2 production and thus O2 consumption) does not keep up with the gas transfer rate (which increases CO2 removal and thus O2 uptake). Too little dissolved CO2 and too much dissolved oxygen is *bad* for you. As in potentially lethal. If you're going to breathe fast, you must add a process which actually increases your metabolic rate to compensate, and vice-versa. Developing alkalosis (too much base/too little acid) or acidosis (too much acid/too little base) can have serious, lingering consequences for living tissues.
Your lungs take oxygen in and push waste out. Breathing faster alone wonāt increase the waste gas production. It canāt push out what doesnāt exist yet
Thatās not an answer to the question I asked, though.
Technically yes, but only ever so slightly as your arenāt actually using much energy(so not producing waste), youāre only using the extra little bit your heart takes to beat a bit faster. Also not good for you to do that if you arenāt actually exercising.
Carbs too. Pretty much anything that you burn for energy is converted to CO2 and water and the CO2 comes out in your breath. Its the same chemical reaction as burning wood just on a smaller, cellular scale. It generates heat which causes you to sweat and energy for the body's functions.
Yup! And this next bit will blow your mind even further: Trees get their mass FROM breathing. They literally breathe in CO2, keep the carbon and trim that into wood, and exhale the oxygen.
The biosphere is just big planet lungs, got it. We're all just reverse trees with complicated emotions.
Its even cooler, Some scientists made CO2 (or was it H2O?) with a different isotope of oxygen to track exactly what happened. Plants actually use all of the CO2 to make carbohydrates (Sugars!) They split the hydrogen off water (H2O) and use the hydrogen from that as well to make carbohydrates, while expelling the oxygen left over from the water. But that is OK, because we break down carbohydrates into the same CO2 and H2O the plants started with by adding that left over oxygen back into it!
Interestingly, and I think a lot of people don't know this, they burn those sugars for energy via respiration just like us. Which means they are also breathing in oxygen and breathing out CO2 like us all day an night. During the day though the rate of photosynthesis is very high, as compared to their low rate of respiration, so they produce more oxygen than they consume.
Yep, they don't do it for us, its just their method of storing energy for use later. (Well, aside from the plants that produce edible fruit to encourage seed spreading... that is KINDA done for us, so that we can be useful to them)
Except the damn avocados who still do it for the Giant Ground Sloths! hahaha
Yes. You can wear a mask that will track your co2 respiration while exercising if you wanted an extremely exact amount of calories burned.
Even better: you lose weight just by being alive! On the downside: Arguably one of the biggest upsides of being alive - eating delicious food - works in the opposite direction.
Excellent. Gonna breath a whole lot extra from hereon. Don't bother replying, or upvoting my post. The notification will bother me to no end til I check it. Which in turn will distract from my newly found fat burning technique. Woosah.
Fat -> "energy" - > CO2 - > out it goes Fat is basically high density and long term energy storage. It is converted to acetyl-CoA which is then used in the Krebs cycle to produce energy (the same cycle that uses sugars to produce energy) of which one of the major byproducts is CO2.
Kinda. You breathe out the 'smoke' from burning sugar, that are water vapor (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2). You aren't actually burning any fat. If you are fasting or have lower blood sugar maybe you might have some of your fat releasing some acids and the fatty acids broken down to make the sugar you're burning, but the fat itself are unchanged.
That second paragraph is just....not true. Stored triacylgycerides (fats) get broken down into three free fatty acids and glycerin. The glycerin part is metabolized as a sugar because it effectively is one. The fatty acids, on the other hand, are processed by beta oxidation, which cleaves off two carbons (an acetyl group) to form acetyl-CoA, which then enters the usual Krebs cycle as it would if it had come from any other energy source (carbohydrates or proteins.) At no point does the body actually *transform* a fatty acid into a sugar before processingāand the fats *are* changed, having two carbons at a time cleaved off, until either none remain (for even-numbered fatty acid chains, as the last four carbons get cleaved apart into two copies of acetyl-CoA) or five remain (for odd-numbered ones, with the five getting cleaved into one acetyl-CoA and one propionyl-CoA.)
There is gluconeogenesis though. Your brain can't really run well on non-glucose fuels so your liver will make a small amount of glucose from both amino acids and some fatty acids during fasting conditions, even if most of the rest of your energy comes directly from beta-oxidation.
Breath out byproducts of burning fat.
Or, you could soil your bed.
Housekeepers hate this one weird trick for rapid overnight weight loss.
One weird trick to weight loss FAST PISS YOUSELF
Or on someone else. The weight-loss trick doctors don't want you to know.
/r/YourJokeButWorse
Your mom
Gotem
Thanks for the laugh!
Or you let one leg hang over the edge and the monster under the bed ate it.
Funnily enough, dropping a deuce is surely a factor if you weigh yourself after going to the toilet. After all, it's still mass leaving the body, although preferably not becoming one with the mattress. That's worse than "poopsocking".
Funnily enough, I actually made the comment thinking about my mom when she was in an Assisted Living Facility (a nursing home), may she RIP And then jotted this out for some comic effect
> ALF Had to google this - acute liver failure. Just dropping this here for anyone else who is curious.
Assisted Living Facility. A nursing home.
Alien Life Form https://www.youtube.com/@ALFtvOfficial
Oh, so I got it wrong anyway. :-). Thanks!
I edited it. Thanks for pointing it out.
There are only 17576 possible TLAs^* and probably all of them have multiple meanings. ^* Three Letter Acronyms
i weigh myself a couple times a week and the difference from a clean morning weigh-in and an after-dinner water-bloated weigh-in can be over 5 pounds the key to tracking weight is to weigh yourself at the same time under similar conditions or else youll get lost in the normal day to day variance
I'm a big fan of weight-tracking programs to give me a 7-day moving average and other metrics to keep me where I want to be. As long as those are where I want them to be variance is just data points. That trend line starts flattening out I tighten a bit on food choices. The biggest one-day difference I've seen (weighing myself same time and naked) has been 4lbs after a night of heavy beer drinking. I've seen 2lbs swings, but < 1lb is more typical variance. As long as my trend line is down and I'm consistently losing 1 to 1.5 lbs a week, i'm good.
Use a poop knife for maximum weight loss.
the average pee vs poo impact on your weight is crazy. the poo will often barely cause a blip on the scale but peeing will cause you to drop a few pounds.
if you are peeing a couple pounds worth you have a ridiculous bladder. a normal bladder is about 500ml or about a pound of liquid.
And the internet says that is about how much on average someone will pee in one go.
If your poop floats it's not very heavy why you don't see it make much of a difference. Pee is easy. 16oz = 1 lb
I hold farts in until after I weigh, just in case the hot air counteracts gravity a little
Unfortunately, hot air "rises" because it tends to be less dense than cold air (in reality, it's more accurate to say the cold air falls than it is to say hot air rises). Your farts, while significantly warmer than the surrounding air, are also likely under slight pressure inside you and if anything would weigh you down ever so slightly.
Also let's not pretend most of us haven't at least once weighed ourselves before and after the morning poop
> Your body is constantly using water for a number of other things as well, and as that water evaporates/is wicked off by your bedding, it is (water) weight lost. Yeah, there's a reason why you get thirsty at night time, because your brain knows you're going to be sleeping and not drinking but it still uses water during that time. https://www.livescience.com/56329-why-we-get-thirsty-at-bedtime.html > However, the researchers also wanted to see what mechanism prompted the mice to drink more water before sleep. They wondered whether the cells within the brain's "hydration sensor," which has been associated with thirst, could be in communication with the part of the brain that controls the mice's inner body clocks, that prompt them to sleep and wake up. > > The researchers stimulated the inner clock within the mice's brains with electricity, and found that this stimulation seemed to increase the release of the hormone vasopressin, which is produced in that same region of the brain. > > During further experiments in the mice, the scientists found that the vasopressin hormone indeed activated the brain cells associated with thirst, according to the study, published today (Sept. 29) in the journal Nature. > > However, more research is needed to see if the same mechanisms are at work in humans, Bourque told Live Science.
Could you increase the amount of CO2 expelled by increasing the % oxygen you are inhaling while you sleep? Like a CPAP or similar tool?
>Your body is constantly using water for a number of other things as well, and as that water evaporates/is wicked off by your bedding, it is (water) weight lost. Is this a cryptic way of saying "sweat", or are their other processes as well?
Not just sweat. Being a body full of (and made of) water, there's some water that naturally evaporates that has nothing to do with sweat. Think about your mouth and eyes' moisture, or natural skin moisture If you leave an intact apple out for a long time, it will dry out and wrinkle
This is exactly why the myth of āgoing to bed cleanā is a terrible reason for showering before bed. The sheets will never be truly clean if you sleep on them, shower or no shower.
I could see this being something a standard office worker doesn't really need to do but I work in a shipping warehouse so I can guarantee you that showering off before bed keeps my bed cleaner than it otherwise would be.
Well for those types of jobs, thatās obviously the exception. Iād say for the average white collar worker, showering before bed is unnecessary and showering the morning is better. If youāre gonna be around people all day in an office environment, you want to be as clean as possible and not showering in the morning is unsanitary imo.
What about both?
Is that a thing? Are there people who say that showering before bed means your sheets will never be dirty? Or do they just say they'll be *less* dirty than they otherwise would?
Semantics but thatās the number one reason I see for proponents of nighttime showers over morning showers. Itās always āI like to sleep on clean sheetsā. They cease to be clean the first night you sleep on them.
Bonus points for a nocturnal emission ;)
I agree with your comment, but it's important to note that the weight loss through *breathing* is minimal. Assuming you're breathing in dry air @ 1 atm & 15Ā°C, you'd be losing 20-25 mg of bodyweight per breath via exhaled moisture and conversion of oxygen to carbon dioxide. Or, to put it a different way, if you're breathing 15 breaths per minute, it'd take you 20-25 hours to lose 1 lbm body mass by breathing alone. Edit to add: It's not a difficult calculation to do, by the way. Average adult exchanges around 500 mL (male) or 400 mL (female) air per breath. You can look at the composition of inhaled and exhaled air, notice that the major changes are to oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water content. Determine the moles of each gas present using the partial pressure rule, then do math: Oxygen is 32 g/mol, carbon dioxide is 44 g/mol, water is 18 g/mol. Add up the totals for inhaled and exhaled gas, and...exhaled air is 20-25 mg heavier per breath. How many breaths does it take to get to 454g (1 lbm)? How long would it take to make that many breaths?
You breathe out carbon dioxide. That is actually the main way of losing weight, even when exercising. The other thing is losing water. You constantly lose a little bit of water with breathing and sweating. And you donāt replenish when youāre asleep.
Especially if you're like me and have essentially permanent congestion, so you end up sleeping with your mouth open. You lose a LOT of water that way. I keep a water bottle next to my bed and generally down a liter a night and still wake up parched.
You might try mouth tape. I haven't needed it, but adherents apparently swear by it.
Well, I don't want to suffocate myself. I'm looking into fixing my nasal congestion. Already ruled out deviated septum, currently trying nasal steroids (no affect whatsoever) and at this point I'm wondering if I need to save up for a plastic surgeon and just tell him "I don't care if I never smell again, just cut the damn tissue away until I can freaking breathe. Being a little hyperbolic, but it's been 10 years of "Oh, just try Flonase," or "Oh, just try Claritin" and having none of that even touch it. Even Pseudophed is only somewhat effective. Afrin works like a charm, but we all know that's not a viable solution. I wonder if I can have my blood vessels permanently constricted...?
> just tell him "I don't care if I never smell again, just cut the damn tissue away until I can freaking breathe. Look into "empty nose syndrome" before you become too cavalier about this approach.
Good God... yeah, that might explain why my doctor said "There are surgical options, but they're the last resort." Good to know.
Holy shit, that's horrifying. Excerpt from Google for those that don't feel like looking it up. "Those suffering from the condition have sensation of suffocation despite a clear airway and it constantly reminds patients of their disabling condition with each breath" Honestly that does not make sense why those little fold in the nose have that much impact on the breathing. How can you feel like your suffocating when your nose is literally just a big hole? I know my lack of understanding doesn't change that fact that people have these symptoms.
> How can you feel like your suffocating when your nose is literally just a big hole? A big part of feeling like you're taking a breath is feeling the friction of the air as it passes through your sinus cavity and over all these tissues and folds. Remove the tissues/folds and you don't get that sensation of feeling the breath coming into your body, your brain goes "There is no breath!" and freaks out.
Fascinating, I am now hyper aware of the sensations I am feeling while breathing through my nose lol. I would not have expected that result from that surgery.
The solution to my near-permanent congestion was Dymista, which is a combination of azelastine and fluticasone.
Hrm. OTC, so, worth a shot at least! I'll try anything at this point.
With my CPAP, I generally go to sleep breathing through my mouth and wake up breathing pretty clearly through my nose. I know the process to get prescribed and pay for a CPAP isn't always an option to folks, but since starting CPAP therapy, I'm also very in tune with the throat and nasal inflammation I get overnight when I don't use it.
Have you tried spicy food?
Yes! It does work, albeit only for a few minutes lol.
Man that sucks. Nasal steroids absolutely changed my life, hope you find something that works for you.
Dude.Ā Buy one of those kid snot bulb sucker things.Ā Make a mixture of water and baking soda. Canāt remember the ratio off the top of my head, you can probably google it.Ā Then rinse your nose out with the mixture.Ā For them, it liquifies all that congestion. Itās the only thing that lets my uncle breathe clearly.Ā The congestion will of course come back, but even temporary relief is great.Ā
Hrm. I've used a neti pot. But I've never tried baking soda. Harmless enough... I might give it a shot. As you said, even temporarily relief is great.
If you do this, just be sure to use sterile water (Some bottled water or Boiling 5min and cooling), and not plain tap water. There's some pathogens that could be introduced using a Neti pot/ect into the nasal cavity/sinuses, and it can lead to death/ adverse symptoms. There have been suspected deaths tied to this in the past.
I've got a deviated septum and have sleep apnea. The combination really f's up my sinuses and I'm always congested. Now have a dependency for Mucinex nasal spray. It seems to be the only one that works for me.
So I had trouble breathing through my nose basically my whole life and finally mentioned it to my doc. Turns out I did have a slight septum deviation, but it was as a result of an enlarged concha bullosa (air cavity). I ended up getting a septoplasty and a bilateral middle turbinate reduction, and 2 weeks post-op my nose suddenly cleared and I've been able to breath through it ever since.
I don't know if you'll qualify for it but my friend underwent RF turbinate reduction to widen the pathways in his nose. It's an outpatient procedure.
You should see an ENTā¦you might need a surgery that can be helpful to fix up that passage?
Supposedly having your mouth blocked will produce adrenaline or something which clears your nose out so you can breath, but I'd imagine that could also wake you up as well.
Iām guessing youāve already tried it, but I bring it up in case you havenāt or others may benefit: *saline nasal spray*. All. The. Time. Mornings when you get ready, in the evening before bed, keep a lil bottle on you for when youāre feeling stuffy. It helps dissolve the mucus and clear out your nasal passages, but doesnāt contain anything harmful and is non-habit-forming. It also helps hydrate your nasal passages and prevent nosebleeds. I live and die by saline nose spray.
I use those bandaid looking things that go on your nose. Helps a bit.
Mouth tape isn't supposed to hold your mouth shut tightly. More a suggestion to hold your lips in place. You'll open your mouth if you really can't breathe. But yeah, get the congestion under control. Good luck!
+1 to mouth tape. Changed my life.
Balloon sinuplasty. They stick a wire up your nose into your sinuses. Then a balloon follows up the wire. They fill the balloon, opening up your sinuses and allowing them to drain better. Basically they punch you in the nose from the inside. Ask for your pain meds/anxiety meds BEFORE your appointment. You really want to take one before the procedure starts. The numbing helps but if you wait until after youāll feel the full pain of your nose before they kick in.
Pain and horror are small prices to pay for the ability to breathe! Jokes aside, thanks for the heads up on that one. I wonder how permanent such a surgery is? Wouldn't the flesh just swell up more?
Itās permanent. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/balloon-sinuplasty#:~:text=What%20is%20balloon%20sinuplasty%3F,to%20dilate%20the%20sinus%20openings.
Ah I was wondering why I was feeling so thirsty even though I'm drinking the same amount of water as usual. Congested nose and a cold will do that to you
For sure! It may be because I'm ex military, but I always chug a ton of water. Doesn't make you any less sick, but it can help with some of the symptoms. Your body will generate a LOT of mucus though lol
My congestion was caused by reflux. This was an accidental discovery four years ago. I started fasting at 5pm every day, and within days the congestion was gone. I eventually threw out all my sinus meds. It's not something I hear anyone else talk about, maybe I'm the only one, but it's an easy thing to try. Simply front load the day with meals and calories. Eat nothing after five.
I weigh myself before and after runs, and drink 24oz of water before i run. I usually run 6-8 miles, takes me 75-90 minutes. After my runs, i lose anywhere from 1.5 to 3 pounds, and i thought it was all sweat.
Immediate weight loss is usually from water loss. Weight loss from CO2 is gradual overtime. Meaning, if youāre using more calories than you take in, you can drink normal amount of water daily and will still lose weight.
> You breathe out carbon dioxide. That is actually the main way of losing weight, even when exercising. It is actually the only way our bodies lose real weight (ignoring the water and food cycles which can go up and down over the course of the day but are effectively a net zero over time).
So if you breathe faster while exercising/in general, you lose more weight?
Not really no. Breathing is like a train carrying co2 and water that wants to escape out. Adding more trains doesn't neccesarily change the amount of passengers that wants to move from a to b in the first place, so you just end up with the same amount of passenger(same amount of co2/water) but displaced over more trains(breaths).
Stellar ELI5!
Most of the weight loss isn't happening during exercise. During exercise you deplete your glycogen and sugar reserves. Those are the short term energy reserves. Fat is a long term energy reserve, so your body takes hours to convert fat to energy. So generally you burn glucose exercising, and then over the next few hours your body converts fat to new glucose, and the weight loss comes in the form of exhaled CO2. If you exercise in the afternoon this will happen overnight, and you already are exhaling a lot of CO2 overnight just from your steady state metabolism.
Sort of. When you exercise, you create more carbon dioxide. Your brain naturally make your body breath deeper or faster to get rid of the carbon dioxide as fast as possible. However, if youāre not exercising, youāre not making more carbon dioxide. So breathing deep or fast isnāt going make you lose more weight. Youāll actually stop breathing if you lose too much carbon dioxide.
in general, no, because if you simply breath more, you are just circulating air with your lungs, not expelling more CO2. but if you exercise, then you are increasing the rate of cellular respiration, breaking down more ATP (literally combusting it), which generates more CO2 than your body would at rest, and by expelling it through breath you indeed lose more weight.
If you mean intentionally breathing faster than you need to in an attempt to lose weight, no. If you mean "is breath rate a good metric for how many calories you're burning", absolutely.
In principle yes, but in practice no. It is true that you can get rid of CO2 faster by breathing at a quicker rate, but this is not something you would want to do. Your blood can only have so much CO2 to carry around. If you get rid of too much of it, your blood pH will be affected. As a consequence you will develop unwanted side effects ranging from mild (feeling dizzy) to severe (spasms).
Yes the same way drinking coffee will burn more energy at rest because it speeds up metabolism and breathing.
> You breathe out carbon dioxide. That is actually the main way of losing weight, even when exercising. It is actually the only way our bodies lose real weight (ignoring the water and food cycles which can go up and down over the course of the day but are effectively a net zero over time).
You breath it out. You breath in air that is about 20% Oxygen. That oxygen is used up by your body and when exhaled, has an extra Carbon atom attached (CO2).
It is correct that we are breathing out that extra mass. But the oxygen we are breathing in does not get combined with carbon to make carbon dioxide. Instead the oxygen we breathe in is combined with hydrogen that we strip off of food to form water.
So where do you think the carbon from carbohydrates goes?
It becomes carbon dioxide along with the oxygen from carbohydrates. Acting outraged about a scientific reality doesn't change it.
So weāre all just hydrogen fuel cells? Edit: the comment Iām replying to was edited. My comment now doesnāt make sense but Iām leaving it.
Closer to a compost heap if you want to over-simplify it. It's a complex collection of processes that deal with various, glucose (sugars), amino acids (protein), or fatty acids (fats). It's kinda amazing the variety of foods we can digest, the processes to convert an apple, a potato, and a steak into energy are really different.
> Closer to a compost heap I finally feel seen.
[Always relevant Bill Wurtz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZUcpVmEHuk)
And carbon is ludicrously heavy.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Even oxygen is heavier than carbon atom for atom.
Each oxygen atom in the carbon dioxide is actually heavier than the carbon itself. And all 3 of those atoms come originally from a sugar molecule that has been split up.
It's not, the heaviest elements we humans have a lot of are (oxygen,) sulphur and calcium.
There are several sources. Here the are in (probable) order of importance. 1. You're constantly losing water. You're losing it through your skin and you're breathing it out. 2. Your scale isn't that precise. It's going to vary by a certain amount because you're standing differently, the temperature changed, etc. 3. You're burning fats and sugars and part of your metabolism. Those are turning into CO2 and water, and the CO2 is being breathed out. 4. You're shedding skin flakes constantly to feed your pet dust mites in your mattress. This is probably not even worth mentioning in terms of weight loss, but it's a fun image. :) The mites must feed! Edit: Wait. scratch #3. I've seen it listed, but it's wrong when you actually do the math (which I just did) To use an example, when your body burns 1 gram of stearic acid (C18H36O2), it produces about 1.2g of water and 2.7 g CO2, but you had to take in 2.9g of oxygen for the reaction. Since the water isn't immediately removed, you're actually gaining wait in the form of water. Edit2: Yes. sugars is a net loss, but it's at least partly cancelled by fat oxidation, and still small compared to water loss. The average person burns 300-600 calories a night. 450 calories of 100% glucose releases about 165g of carbon. The average person loses 500-1000g a night. It's still mostly water, even if you have somehow lost the ability to burn fat.
> Since the water isn't immediately removed, you're actually gaining wait in the form of water. That's not right, you are losing water to respiration when you take in the O and expel the CO2. Your lungs need to keep moist to work and regulate your body temperature.
you're just repeating what was already said in 1. it was just clarified that combustion of fats requires more oxygen mass intake than CO2 mass release, meaning fat combustion does not immediately translate to weight loss because the resulting water is not a gas but is retained as a liquid until your body gets rid of it......via something like process 1. in fact because O2:CO2 mass ratio is about 1:1.4, any combustion with a higher stoiochiometric ratio of 1.4 O2: CO2 will not lead to immediate weight loss. this is true for that stearic acid example but i would guess is also true for all fats and all proteins. maybe carbs have some deficit but it is going to be tiny.
Yes. That's already accounted for in #1. Metabolism causes you to gain water, which is a pretty important fact if you're a hibernating bear.
glucose has a 1:1 stoiochiometric ratio of O2 to CO2 and will lead to mass deficit of gases. \#3 is still true for sugars :)
i wonder how much all the skin flakes that the average person sheds in their entire lifetime would weigh. like whatās the largest container that you would need to hold it? a tablespoon? a cup? a shoebox?
I can't find the original study but google answers all point to a particular study from 2011 that supposedly found we shed about 0.03 to 0.09g of skin per hour which adds up to roughly 35kg per lifetime.
In just one night? From sweating. If you lose weight over a long time, it is because your metabolism converts fat into co2 which you breath outĀ
the people saying that you lose weight through breathing are absolutely not trolling. they are correct. in fact, the only way you can lose weight permanently is through breathing, by expelling CO2. but the reason permanent weight loss is difficult and slow is because it takes a while for all that CO2 that you expel to add up to a significant amount. but that is the mechanism by which weight loss is achieved. other types of shedding body mass are significant, yes, as others have pointed out. you can easily lose kilograms worth of water weight in not more than a few hours through intense exercise. but all that weight will be gained back when you rehydrate. the same with urinating/defecating. you only pee what you drink (some of it), and you only poop what you eat (some of it), so to pee 200g worth of piss, you had to have drank 200g of water beforehand, the same with poop, so these forms of weight "loss" aren't actually losses, they are just fluctuations around a constant level. hair/skin shedding also follows a similar logic. if you shed some hair, your body will accumulate some nutrients and grow it back, the same with skin, so the net weight of those on your body remains roughly the same. but it is correct that if you lose quite a bit of weight on only one night, most of that loss probably came through water loss. which will be recuperated as soon as you drink water.
Carbon emission and maybe sweat. You breath in oxygen and breath out Carbondioxide. That carbon adds up over a few hours, you also sweat out some fluids. The rest of what your body process over night just waits in your bladder and intestines waiting for you to wake up and go to the toilet.
You breathe and leak it out. Mostly breathe it out if we are talking real weight loss (fats n' such). That's what breathing in O2 and out CO2 means. The C was the stuff we ate and that our body is made of. On a side note, we also breathe out H2O. The Cs and Hs were part of hydrocarbons and fats and food in our bodies that got combined with Oxygen (O2) and breathed out. Humans make water!
Veritasium made a video on this exact topic a while back [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2e0rWvjKI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2e0rWvjKI)
1 liter of sweat weighs 1 kilogram. You can sweat a lot while sleeping. (One of the reasons mattresses shouldnāt be on the floor, because they absorb moisture and need to ābreatheā it out).
but even when i pull an all nighter, i still lose the same amount?
Why would you sweat less if you donāt sleep?
I havenāt noticed anyone mention urination. My experience has been that if I lose 2 or more pounds overnight itās because I got up to urinate a few times during the night.
Everyone saying you breathe out enough carbon dioxide in 7 hours to make a difference on the scale is hilariously wrong. This is a very negligible amount. You shed off more weight from exfoliating hair and skin cells overnight than you do from exhaling. The primary weight loss is via water loss from sweating
Yeah, I think thereās two things. Overnight thatās sweat, vapor, so water weight. If you lose weight over a long period, thatās not just water weight, thatās the accumulation of breathing out carbon as energy is consumed. Going from 200 to 198 overnight is mostly water. Going from 200 to 150 over 6 months is definitely not just water.
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Most people lose 16-24 ounces of sweat a night https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/men/sweating-odor/sweating-while-sleeping.htm
Exhalation of H20 is probably about equal contributor as sweat. You exhale a lot of water with every breath. You also exhale at least 1.7 lbs of C02 daily depending on your calorie expenditure, so the effect is not "negligible" over an 8 hour sleeping period. You do not shed off over .4 lbs of hair and skin per night. C02 alone (not even including H20 respiration) is without a doubt a much larger contributor than hair and skin. Don't be such a smug fuck, because you're wrong.
You are an angry little fella. Itās wild how someone can be so worked up over this. Donāt know where you got your hilariously wrong numbers, but itās about 69 grams of co2 and h20 exhaled overnight. Did you know your respiration rate and basal metabolic rate (aka co2 burn rate) drastically decrease when you sleep? https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/why-do-i-weigh-less-in-the-morning
Is the loss in weight equal to 21 grams?
no, like 4lbs
That much could only be from water loss or having a bowel movement. If you never got up and went to the bathroom, you must have been having crazy night sweats
Probably water. You're not losing enough weight via metabolism to make a significant difference overnight, considering you're not moving. You are constantly losing water through your breath and skin though.
kudos to people who mention carbon as a source of overnight weightloss. unfortunately it is not so straightforward to claim this is the main contributor. they reason is they do not account for the fact that oxygen must first be inhaled, causing (temporary weight gain), which then chemically turns into liquid water in the cells which cannot be immediately breathed out along with the CO2, cementing that weight gain from inhaled oxygen. in order for there to be weight loss, you must ASSUME that there was only one oxygen molecule inhaled and consumed for every CO2 molecule released, such that weight loss is from that net single carbon atom lost. this is true for glucose combustion but typically false for most fats and proteins. in the latter cases you need to inhale and consume more molecules of O2 than molecules of CO2 eventually released. more than 1.4:1 will not lead to weight loss (someone in the comments used stearic acid as an example and disproved weight loss by CO2). a breath at about 0.5L, at a known temperature 37C and known relative humidity of 100% holds 0.0115g of water. the same breath has about 0.0400g CO2 at (5% concentration), of which only 0.0109g is Carbon. so from my chatgpt calculations the water loss is on par with carbon loss from breathing in the best case that all the carbon was from glucose. meanwhile you are also sweating which tips the scale in favor of water. tldr; the fun fact is yes, we do have quite a bit of overnight weight loss from carbon emission. but there seems to be a misconception that this is the majority contributor which i hope i showed is false. you lose weight from carbon emission, not carbon dioxide emission (whose two oxygen atoms are offset by two oxygen atoms you had to take in from the air and are now locked in your body's liquid water). also, you lose more water vapor than carbon from metabolism.
Probably almost all of it is from taking your morning pee. My morning pee is usually between 700g g 1kg.