Losing weight is a battle for most people, but what if we could simply turn down the thermostat to help us fight the battle of the bulge? What would that look like even? We’d all be running home from sitting for eight hours behind a desk only to cozy up to freezing temperatures. No longer would we consider turning down the heat merely to save on our energy bill. Now turning down the heat could mean the difference between a size 12 and a size 16. Is it really true that we can lose weight simply by sitting in frigid temperatures? Well here is what the study showed.
The study published in The New England Journal of Medicine revealed that we have the presence of brown fat in our bodies. Brown fat is good fat, and in the past it was always known that this fat helps the bodies of mammal and small infants to generate heat when they are not able to shiver. Brown fat is good for us because while generating heat, the body burns calories. Brown fat does not settle around our waistlines like other fats do.
However, it was erroneously thought that after the body goes into “shivering mode” brown fat ceases to do it’s job and stops causing the body to lose weight. The new studies found that brown fat was still very much present in the human body even after shivering had occurred. The fat was present and metabolically active especially after the body had been exposed to very cold temperatures. It was also found that lean people had more brown fat than obese people, this makes one suspect that the absence of brown fat is a factor in weight gain.
So what does this mean? Well, perhaps one day, a pill will be invented that will either increase the amount of brown fat present in our bodies, or increase brown fat activity. Most diet pills and supplements today merely work to decrease and inhibit appetite. A type of pill like this one would be the first to work with the body’s energy expenditure.
But all in all sitting in the cold is not substitute for proper diet and exercise, but it certainly might be able to help.
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