Where does fat go?

Because the human body evolved to store it. It's only within the last 100 years that food has been easily available. Storing fat was a survival necessity for 99.999% of human existence.

Germany! The same place your hunger goes when you eat a snickers bar.
Warum bin ich immer hungrig?!!

You might always be hungry if you're only eating Snickers bars! :bigsmile:

An interesting question! I thought our liver burned the fat stored in our bodies then we wee'd it out - which is why we should drink lots of water - to flush the toxins out? I heard that somewhere but may be wrong.

That's a complete myth.

Fat is burned for energy, not flushed out by water.

Well I googled it - and the answer that came up was the 35000 year old Venus of Willendorf statue or something .... not sure whether that was artistic licence tho!???? Anyway is just nonsense speculation - I suppose there is a reason that we don't effectively get rid of it and you may be right that 2,000 odd years is the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms anyway.

There are some ancient people of girth:
The Roman physician Galen, writing in the first century, cites the case of one Nichomachus of Smyrna, who was so heavy that he could neither move nor be moved from his bed. Other authors tell of a Roman senator who was able to walk only when two slaves carried his belly for him, and of a latter-day Egyptian pharaoh whose belly was broader than the span of a man's outstretched arms.

Dionysius of Heracleia was notorious for his appetite, and eventually grew so weighty that he could scarcely budge: he suffered from apnea or narcolepsy besides, prompting his doctors to prick his flesh with needles whenever he fell asleep on his throne.

Here is the oldest actually recorded fat woman I could find - an ancient ruler of Egypt apparently from 3,500 years ago:
http://www.livescience.com/7336-mummy-reveals-egyptian-queen-fat-balding-bearded.html

So does the amount of fat cells a person has - change, i.e. increase in number?

Young mammals, including young humans, can grow more fat cells. Mature mammals don't really grow that many more. They just pack the excisting fat cells full of fat.

.

And why is the body so inept at getting rid of excess fat, if it doesn't need it?

Like Tiger says... we're evolutionarily programmed to keep it. It improved our chances of survival in the past. It's in our genes.

Is the only way to get rid get of fat to "burn" it? Can't the body "excrete" it?

No. We cannot excrete fat. Unless you count the minimal excretion of oil from glands in the skin. You know, the kind that makes our hair oily, or our face, if we don't wash often. I don't count that because the amount that we lose is so small it doesn't make a difference.

The only way to get rid of fat is for our bodies to break it apart for energy, a.k.a., we burn it.

You literally breathe it out. The molecules that make up fat are broken down into water and carbon, which becomes part of the CO2 that you exhale. (Of course I'm leaving out lots of complexity, but that's the basic idea.)

Yep had this question in my bio exam. It was a multiple choice and thanks to MFP and I believe this post (ok I studied too) I picked the correct answer.

This thread is from a year ago but the correct answer has already been posted several times. You exhale it in the form of CO2.