I’ve been losing weight a bit at a time for 4 months and am pondering the physiological question of how fat caused by eating too many calories is formed and how it comes to be stored at various spots around the body and in the abdomen.
Also, if someone can educate me, when you eat less than is needed to maintain your weight, how does the body take that fat from the cells and turn it into energy?
I suppose the process is common to all mammals and marsupials, but how about reptiles? Do snakes get fat?
In the wild, food is scarcer… and if it were more plentiful, the reptile would lose out quickly were it overweight, so being overweight in the wild would allow it to fall victim to prey more easily. Sort of a catch-22… because obesity is death in the wild, whereas in captivity, humans can nurse an overweight wild animal along for quite some time (mainly by giving it food and removing the hunt, and protecting it, since it’s not prone to prey anymore).
The synergy of eating/digesting/resting/eating/repeat is going to work best if the reptile in question is not overeating and/or obese. Sort of solves for itself in the wild.
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There’s almost no natural selection against being overweight in the wild, because being overweight is what you might call a first-world problem. In the wild, it’s so tough to get enough to eat to become overweight that it basically never comes up in the first place, and if it did somehow occur and made the animal less fit to hunt, well then, there’s your diet plan, and the animal will slim down again.
To an extent, I agree. You don’t see wild animals that are as fat as the neighbor’s pampered, overfed pooch, but we do see a variety of fat content when we butcher deer in the fall. If one harvests a deer that lives near a farm or other good food sources, we often see a fair amount of fat around the ribs, belly and hips. These deer are able to eat ample amounts of corn, apples and other high-calorie foods. Deer who live in the big woods away from farms have to subsist on grass, plants and other food, and don’t develop much subcutaneous fat. I wouldn’t really call any deer “fat” (as we apply the term to people and pets) I’ve ever processed, but there is quite a bit of variance, and some have a pretty good fat store entering winter. The same applies to bears, of course, who gorge themselves in the summer and fall to get through winter.
And if the good food source somehow goes away, the deer that took the opportunity to store up some extra fat will be the ones who last longer in the new lean times. It’s not a handicap. If it were, no animal would ever store up fat to begin with.
Animals have evolved to get more fat, including evolving the desire for more food than is needed to maintain weight so they’ll eat enough to get fat, because that’s an advantage. Animals have not, in general, evolved a limit to how fat they’ll get, because until we came along, there hasn’t been a need.
sort of. anyway, it occurs to me that for some animals, such as birds, increased nutrition results in increased fecundity. Feed a chicken well vs. poorly and you see a big increase in egg production. I would suppose that increases in wild animal population are proportional to an increase in food supply. Lots of rabbits, lots more fox kits? etc.
I’m pretty sure there is work underway to manage the mechanics of fat storage, by interrupting different phases.
Typically, appetite control has been a stage under attack for sometime, as well as artificial fats that can’t be absorbed (thus, can’t be stored)… but then you get side effects such as anal leakage.
Interfering with the process of having your body store/convert excess calories as fat is proving quite challenging.
I think the appetite control phase is the most important and shows the most potential (anecdotally, from reading). Just my two cents.