Thread: Questions About Fat Cells

I've been researching about fat cells in the past couple of days and found really confusing information.


1. Number of fat cells: I understand that this is not yet figured out completely by researchers and research is still very much ongoing and professionals disagree, but can anyone tell me of the better theory at this time? I found four different theories during my research, these are all about adulthood (not childhood or teens):

1. Number of fat cells during adulthood remains constant no matter how much weight you gain or lose. The cells just change in size.
2. Number of fat cells can increase during adulthood during intervals of extreme weight gain. However they will never decrease. They will just shrink when we lose weight and are there for life.
3. Number of fat cells can increase at any time. Even professional athletes who go for example from 5% body fat to 10% body fat actually have the risk of increasing the number of their fat cells. They are there for life.
4. Same as above, only that the number of fat cells can actually decrease very slowly if we lose and maintain our weight. It might takes tens of years to reach normal levels though.
5. There are different types of fat cells, some can increase and some can't. More specifically, most of the fat cells in the upper body will get bigger when we gain weight, and the cells in our lower body will increase when we gain weight. The number of fat cells will never decrease.

Can anyone tell me which one of these are more true?

2. Assuming the number of fat cells does increase when we gain weight - or we have a lot of them from our childhood, and the fact that the number of cells do not decrease, when we overweight people lose weight and go back into the healthy rage, we actually have much more fat cells than people who were never overweight but our fat cells are smaller. How does this affect our maintenance? Is it more difficult for us? Can we gain more weight by eating the same amount of calories? or is it just that we have more hormones made from these fat cells which increases our hunger and appetite? This is very unclear to me.


3. If we are aiming for low body fat (say below 7-8% for men), is it healthy to have the size of our fat cells shrunken that much? Because if you've never been fat and go for 8% body fat, your fat cells will be larger than ours because we have more cells. So what is the healthy size (or weight) of the fat cells? Is there a limit? Is there a minimum?

Crikey, I really wouldn't worry about it! Lots of people lose a lot of weight and keep it off. Relax!

Just wanted this for info. That's the scientist part of me trying to understand what's going on

Fat cells get bigger when your fat. Think of a balloon. Blow it up. Gets bigger. Reason I know this is apparently if you have lipo it's best to loose weight so fat cells are smaller then each pint ( or what measure they use) will contain more fat cells. You have same amount just they fat and stretched or small. Apparently but seems likely to me...

Originally Posted by Zest for Life

Fat cells get bigger when your fat. Think of a balloon. Blow it up. Gets bigger. Reason I know this is apparently if you have lipo it's best to loose weight so fat cells are smaller then each pint ( or what measure they use) will contain more fat cells. You have same amount just they fat and stretched or small. Apparently but seems likely to me...

I understand what you're saying - that's what people thought for a hundred years or so but in the past ten or so years they're claiming that there is evidence that actually fat cells can increase during adulthood.

I just don't know how much their evidence is sound and if they're experiments and studies are reputable in the scientific community. They certainly caught the attention of the media though. Being a researcher myself (not in biological sciences), I understand how a bad study can lead to a really rubbish conclusion and how media loves to cover rubbish news and claim it's coming from scientific research.

It's like skin, I had kids so my tummy skin stretched. I've got more skin cos it's stretched. But didn't grow more skin cells. X