When I saw my chiro this week, his initial reaction to my weight loss was kinda funny. Eyes popping out of his head, he asked if I forgot the other half of me at home. Well it’s a nice compliment, sure! In a funky and twisted way, this once super-fat girl is thinking “man, I musta been huuuuuge!” Well, that’s just how my mind works.

He’s a very natural, health oriented kinda guy, so he was very interested to talk about how I lost 52 pounds, what I ate, what I drank, all that jazz. Then he throws this tidbit my way that really made me feel like “wow! I’ve done an awesome thing!” that has now been dispelled. Dammit.

He told me that in every pound of fat, we have 100 miles of capillaries. (Approximately) That calculates out to 5,200 MILES of capillaries that I’ve removed from my circulatory system and how much strain I’ve taken off of my heart. Being that I used to have a few valves going bad, it kinda reaffirmed that last echochardiogram I had in November, which took me from having 3 degenerating valves to just 1, with a fibrillating wall (or something). So the weight loss has done incredible things for my heart, indeed! BUT, not 5,200 miles worth.

Now for those of you who have heard that saying before, I am going to link you here, which will give you a nice huge pageful of scientific type information. Here’s the part about how many miles of capillaries are in a pound of fat:

“How many miles of blood vessels are there in a pound of fat?” People write me about this every once in a while. Let’s figure it out. Assume an adipocyte is 50 microns across; it’ll vary from 10-100 depending on how fat the person is. The fatter you are, the less vascular is your fat, which is one more reason that this whole inquiry is silly. In a section of body fat, which I examine often enough under the microscope, the capillary (there has to be at least one) that supplies each fat cell is not usually visible, so I’ll assume one per adipocyte. Put a single capillary between each pair of fat cells and that’s about 20 capillaries per millimeter, or 500 capillaries per inch. Assume a pound of fat is a cube 4″ on a side, which is good enough for junk science, and that is 2000 capillaries crosswise, for a total of 8000 inches. Multiply by three for three dimensions, and this is 24,000 inches or … well, go figure. That this questions is fundamentally wrong-headed can be understood by anyone who considers whether moving a certain total number of cars through Kansas City would be easier with more highways or fewer highways. Further, vast majority of these capillaries are comletely closed at any moment during your life, and not carrying any blood. The real question isn’t, “How many extra miles of blood vessels?”, but “How much rougher is it on my heart to be fat?” Think about walking around carrying 100 lb of weights everywhere you go. The truth is that “education” and moral exhortation do not cause people to lose weight; overeating is programmed just like scratching when you itch. “

24,000 inches is only 0.3 miles. So the whole thing must have been devised by some master exaggerator! Ah well, it’s still a great thing to do for your body. 🙂

My other tidbit for the moment is my header for the day, which is meant more as a “Confucius say” than anything. I thought it funny, because someone out there has been following me around for quite some time, and even mentioned that they hope they’re not wearing stiletto’s when they step on my toes. Heh. I just built a bathroom, I think I can take on a pair of stilettos, eh?