Category: fad diets

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just “flush” your excess body fat down the toi­let? Over­weight peo­ple love that idea, so they’re vul­ner­a­ble to any­one who promis­es that they can sim­ply “flush” their fat away. The prob­lem is that “fat flush­ing” doesn’t work.

Body fat isn’t waste, it’s stored ener­gy. It’s like mon­ey in the bank. Your body doesn’t want to “flush” that away! Even if it want­ed to, it couldn’t.

Your body has a lim­it­ed num­ber of ways to get rid of waste. Car­bon diox­ide leaves your body through your lungs. In hot weath­er, you can lose a lot of water and salt through your sweat glands. How­ev­er, most of what we think of as waste leaves the body through either the kid­neys or the liv­er.

You can’t flush fat from the body through the kid­neys. If you could, you’d end up see­ing an oil slick on top of your urine. It’s not nor­mal to pass any sig­nif­i­cant amount of fat in the urine. The pres­ence of even small amounts of fat in the urine is called lipiduria. It’s a sign of a seri­ous med­ical con­di­tion, such as severe kid­ney dis­ease or a frac­ture in a large bone.

The liv­er breaks down a lot of tox­ins and oth­er sub­stances. It can also put some waste prod­ucts into a flu­id called bile. The bile then pass­es into the small intes­tine. How­ev­er, the intestines then reab­sorb much of what the liv­er had put into the bile. The mate­r­i­al that is reab­sorbed then gets car­ried straight back to the liv­er.

If your liv­er were flush­ing fat out of your body, the fat would be going into your small intes­tine. Then it would get reab­sorbed and car­ried straight back to the liv­er. If you were los­ing a sig­nif­i­cant amount of fat through your intestines, you would end up pass­ing a lot of fat in your feces. So unless you are find­ing lots of fat in your toi­let bowl, you sim­ply aren’t “flush­ing” fat from your body.

One pop­u­lar author of diet books pro­motes what she calls a “fat flush” diet. How­ev­er, her diet can’t over­come the basic biol­o­gy of the human body. Although that author doesn’t have the kind of sci­en­tif­ic cre­den­tials that she pre­tends to have, she prob­a­bly knows that you can’t flush fat from the liv­er. That’s why her “fat flush” reg­i­men also includes a severe­ly low-calo­rie diet. So while the dieters imag­ine that they are flush­ing their fat, they are actu­al­ly los­ing weight the con­ven­tion­al way, by eat­ing a low few­er calo­ries than they burn up.