Nobody Needs To Know

To put it as simply as possible:

During low intensity exercise, when you’re at roughly 50-70% of your maximum  heart rate, your body will utilize triglycerides from your adipose tissue. This is a metabolic process called catabolism: It breaks down those triglycerides into fatty acids that your muscles will use as fuel. That’s when you burn fat stores.

When you increase the intensity of your workout and hit more than 70% of your max heart rate, your body is no longer taking in enough oxygen to use fat catabolism. This is when you switch to carb catabolism: You’re getting energy from the glycogen stores that have been created by unused carbohydrates in your body. Now, you’re no longer directly burning fat, specifically because your oxygen levels are too low during high intensity exercises.

If at any point during your workout you return to low intensity exercises and decrease your heart rate, you’d switch back to fat catabolism. This is why HIIT is so popular: Since it’s tough for the average person to maintain a highly intense workout for any significant period of time, switching back and forth between moderate and intense exercising can allow your body to use both carbs and fat stores.

So generally speaking, the lower the intensity of your workout, the more your body will rely on fat as a substrate for energy. Then as the exercise intensity increases, the relative proportion of fat oxidation decreases while carb oxidation increases.

However, remember that none of this information is absolute: There’s no particular point where your body is guaranteed to be burning the greatest percentage of fat or carbs. All this info depends on your diet, your metabolism, your workout, your body, etc. Exercising at a 60% max heart rate doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically be in the ~fat burning zone~ or something similar. That kind of rhetoric is misleading since it implies weight/fat loss without accounting for overall calories burned or individual metabolic changes. Most likely, your body is always using some combination of fat and carb stores to keep up your energy levels. The proportions between those two will shift throughout the day depending on your personal needs and what type of activity you’re engaging in.

to feel comfortable sitting on my boyfriend’s lap.

to not feel like i’m going to break him when he tries to pick me up

to feel comfortable in different positions and not worry about how my fat looks

to stop thinking about my fat during sex and actually enjoy it

to take cute pictures with my boyfriend and not worry about my double chin next to his thin face

to not feel like my boyfriend is embarrassed to be dating such a fatass

to not feel like I could be left any day just because of how fat I am (technically, I know he wouldn’t, but it’s still a thought in my head)

to see him look at me like “holy shit, my girlfriend is fucking hot.”

to have other people look at us and be jealous

to have him look at me like he’s proud to have me on his arm

to be able to have him touch my body and not flinch because of how much i hate him touching my fat

to no be the fat one in the relationship (technically neither of us would be the fat one… he’s a fucking toothpick)

to not feel like a whale next to him when we’re in public places

to not have other girls stare at us like “why the fuck is he with Shamu?”

to be able to go to the beach with him

to be able to sit by his pool with him