What did you eat for breakfast?
What have you eaten this morning? Well, in three hours it's going to have made it's way to your waistline where it's going to be staying put for a while.
New research has indicated that within three hours of eating an average meal, about 10ml of fat - between two-to-three tespoons - will have lodged itself around your waist, hips and thighs.
And for those who favour a fry-up, the quantity can be greater as the process is more efficient earlier in the day, a study by Oxford researchers showed.
The analysed how long it takes to covert fat from a meal to fatty tissue.
Prior to the discovery, published in the Physiological Reviews journal, scientists had believed that the process took a far longer time.
"We found that, after eating a meal, the first fat from it enters the blood about an hour later," Oxford University's professor of metabolic medicine, Fredrik Karpe, said.
"By the time three to four hours have passed, most of it has been incorporated into adipose tissue, mostly in the shorter-term fat stores around our waists."
In the experiments, volunteers ate fat which could be traced around the body. This was found to take around an hour to be broken down in the gut and then enter the bloodstream as tiny droplets.
The droplets are then whisked around the body - but not for long - before they are 'caught' and stored. "The process is very fast," continued Fredrik Karpe. "The cells in the adipose tissue around the waist catch the fat droplets as the blood carries them and incorporates them into the cells for storage."
The good news is the storage system is temporary, with the fat deposited quickly drawn on, or mobilised, to feed our muscles. But when we overeat, it is a different story, Professor Karpe warns.
"If you eat too much, you don't get into this phase of starting to mobilise it," he said. "There will just be constant accumulation and you will start to put on weight."