I have read several people say that stalls occur when your empty fat cells fill with water, causing them to break down and be released. I have always heard that once you have fat cells, you will always have those fat cells and that they just shrink when you lose weight. I have read that this is the reason people who lose weight gain quicker than those who have never been heavy in the first place. So where did this idea that we are losing fat cells come from? Is this correct?

yva0099,

We must have watched the same shows, lol.

I sure have a lot of them -- you can feel and see them all over my upper legs and on the back of my arms, they feel like hard knots. I was hoping to lose them as well.

Re-read Pounds & Inches, (in the listing to the left) - it is the "abnormal fat" that we are releasing, not the structual or normal fat.

"But there is a third type of fat which is entirely abnormal. It is the accumulation of such fat, and of such fat only, from which the overweight patient suffers. This abnormal fat is also a potential reserve of fuel, but unlike the normal reserves it is not available to the body in a nutritional emergency. It is, so to speak, locked away in a fixed deposit and is not kept in a current account[2], as are the normal reserves.

When an obese patient tries to reduce by starving himself, he will first lose his normal fat reserves. When these are exhausted he begins to burn up structural fat, and only as a last resort will the body yield its abnormal reserves, though by that time the patient usually feels so weak and hungry that the diet is abandoned. It is just for this reason that obese patients complain that when they diet they lose the wrong fat. They feel famished and tired and their face becomes drawn and haggard, but their belly, hips, thighs and upper arms show little improvement. The fat they have come to detest stays on and the fat they need to cover their bones gets less and less. Their skin wrinkles and they look old and miserable. And that is one of the most frustrating and depressing experiences a human being can have."

I know I have read it (somewhere-trying to find it now), that water takes the place of the abnormal fat cells and once the body has decided it is time, it will release the cells. I have heard of the shrinking fat cells too.

Maybe some of it came from this passage
"When abnormal fat is no longer being put into circulation either because it has been consumed or because immunity has set in, this is always felt by the patient as sudden, intolerable and constant hunger. In this sense, the HCG method is completely self-limiting. With HCG it is impossible to reduce a patient, however enthusiastic, beyond his normal weight. As soon as no more abnormal fat is being issued, the body starts consuming normal fat, and this is always regained as soon as ordinary feeding is resumed. The patient then finds that the 2-3 lbs. he has lost during the last days of treatment are immediately regained. A meal is skipped and maybe a pound is lost. The next day this pound is regained, in spite of a careful watch over the food intake. In a few days a tearful patient is back in the consulting room, convinced that her case is a failure.
All that is happening is that the essential fat lost at the end of the treatment, owing to the patient's reluctance to report a much greater hunger, is being replaced. The weight at which such a patient must stabilize thus lies 2-3 lbs. higher than the weight reached at the end of the treatment. Once this higher basic level is established, further difficulties in controlling the weight at the new point of stabilization hardly arise."