Revealed: Where your fat actually GOES when you lose weight

We’re only days away from January, season of the latest ‘scientifically proven’ fad diets - so it might come as a surprise that few health professionals have any idea where fat goes as you lose weight.

Despite our cultural obsession with diets and weight loss, doctors have had the wrong idea for years about what happens to the fat in our bodies as we lose weight.

Instead of burning it off as heat or energy, we simply breathe it out.

The research, published in the British medical journal, and conducted by researchers at the University of New South Wales Science in Sydney, found that fat mostlyll turns into carbon dioxide, which we breathe out.

Every ten kilos of fat that we shed turns into 8.4kg of carbon dioxide, plus 1.6kg of water, which we excrete through sweat, urine and tears.

To lose that weight, we need to breathe in 26kg of oxygen - and also burn 94,000 calories.

Sadly, the research found that breathing heavily didn’t offer a ‘cheat’s way’ to lose weight.

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‘You can only breathe so many times a day; on a day of rest, you breathe around 12 times a minute so 17,280 times you'll breathe in a day and each one takes 10 milligrams of carbon with it, roughly,’ said Ruben Meerman, lead author of the paper.

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‘So there's your limit on how much you're going to lose in a day with no exercise.’

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Meerman conducted the research after losing weight - and discovering that no doctor could tell him where his fat had actually gone.