SS 129 – Can Turning the Thermostat Down Help You Lose Fat?

 

Grant and Heavey discuss how exposure to cold temperature can actually contribute to loss of body fat. Does it work? Is it hackworthy? Is it the ultimate long-term solution to weight loss and fitness? Let’s dig in to find out!

 

[02:30] Lakers Article

 

Basketball is a great yet highly difficult sport. It’s physical. You’ve got to be athletic and skilled. But the Lakers don’t have much of that. They brought in Magic Johnson, arguably one of the top 5 players of all time, to be the president of the Lakers basketball operations.

 

In an article from Silver Screen and Roll, Magic says he’s happy with the direction they’re headed and they’ve got a good strategy. When asked what their plans are to improve the team, his response was:

 

“We told every player that they must improve and we want them to be in the best physical shape of their lives. We don’t want anybody over seven or eight percent body fat anymore, and basically all but one or two players were in double-figures in body fat (last season),”

 

 

[04:01] Does Low Body Fat Equal Performance?

 

On another note, a Twitter post showed an image of a locker room where they posted the basketball team’s body fat this season with one guy at 18.4% and others with 13%, 14%, 12% 10% 11%, two under 10%. Brandon Ingram has 9.2% body fat, who actually looks super skinny and then the other one was arguably the worst player on the roster who’s at 5.3% body fat.

 

Heavey thinks it’s a strange metrics to latch onto. Maybe they feel their players are letting themselves go but reducing body fat to very low levels doesn’t imply better performance on a basketball court in particular. He further says it’s an easy thing to hang your hat on considering it’s very measurable. Body fat percentage is something people latch onto as an accepted metric and that’s probably where Magic wants to hang his hat on. However, Heavey just doesn’t think striving for that is going to achieve athletic excellence for the Lakers and driving everybody’s body fat percentage down below 10% will give the Lakers another bad season.

 

Grant agrees with Heavey stressing that working on lowering body fat percentage all season is not going to make them better basketball players, Instead, they should focus on other metrics like free throw percentage, shooting percentage, x number of hours a day on the court, etc., otherwise it’s a backward way of getting to where a coach would want them to be.

 

 

[08:25] Are Weight Loss Hacks All Made Up?

 

There are “hacks” you can do to become thinner or fit. But Grant feels people are trying to get out of doing the hard work. There’s all this superfood and whatnot and Heavey thinks it just encourages this whole idea of band-aids and this distracts people from focusing on the things that really matter. People then make it an excuse to eat what they want while thinking they’re doing the right thing.

 

When you’re carb backloading, for instance, you’re eating super low carbs throughout the day and then you’re slamming carbs at night. In order for that to really work the way it’s advertised, you have to have a strong foundation which means you have to be insulin-sensitive and all these other core components have to be in place otherwise it’s not going to help you. Then you move on to the what other next hack you can try out. Instead of focusing on the real problem at hand, you’re just trying the next thing that comes up and the next. You’ll never make progress and be wondering why you’re not seeing any progress. And that’s because you’re focusing on the wrong things, on those hacks.

 

Of course, not all hacks are completely made up and a lot of them have a lot of truth. With superfoods, for example. There are really great micronutrient profiles which have nutrients we don’t normally get a lot of and it’s great to be exposed to them. But it’s not a solution to a poor diet.

 

 

[11:25] Cold Temp and Fat Burn

 

Another idea for fat loss is turning the thermostat down in order to induce body fat loss. In fact, this is backed by some research, where most of them are using as low as 59 degrees for hours at a time (and that’s darn cold!).

 

In the book The 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferriss talks about ice baths to trick your body to make brown fat. Brown fat gets activated when you’re cold and it’s part of what keeps the body up. Our bodies are designed to maintain an internal temperature homeostasis. In other words, your body has a thermostat and it tries as hard as it can to maintain that temperature which is 98.6 on average and this keeps us alive. But due to the principle of thermodynamics, your body can’t just magically heat you up or cool you down. It requires energy to maintain that temperature so your body ends up burning calories in order to maintain that homeostasis of temperature and basically run that heater in your body. This ends up being a huge percentage of the calories we burn in a day. The calories you burn to maintain your core temperature are part of that and it accounts for almost 50% of the calories we burn in a day. When you get too cold, your body starts shivering to try to create heat but you slowly adapt to that. So you stop shivering but your body still has to continue to make that heat by burning calories, which otherwise wouldn’t have been burning.

 

However, people tend to eat more when they’re bodies are at a lower temperature. Although not proven, but Grant’s theory is that because the body is burning calories, you feel hungrier, which is a reasonable explanation. When you’re cold, your body convinces you to eat more.

 

 

 

[15:07] Fat Loss at the Broncos Game

 

Here’s a personal experience Grant and Heavey had when they went to a Broncos game in one of the coldest days in the history of the earth. Plus, it was super windy and they were in the cheap seats at the top of the stadium and there was snow everywhere. Grant was so cold that he actually tried to cuddle Heavey at the football game. The point is they actually burnt some serious calories while they were freezing at that game.

 

 

 

[17:17] Brown Fat and White Fat

 

When you’re exposed to colder temperatures over extended periods, your body continues to burn more calories to produce the heat which comes from brown fat. While white fat is used for energy storage, brown fat is used for heat production.

 

The body has this energy currency called ATP which is how it produces energy to do everything except for producing heat through brown tissues. Heavey suspects it’s an inherent survival mechanism since the brown fat tissue only really gets activated and produced during exposure to cold temps. However, he believes that short exposure to cold doesn’t have a significant effect on the production of brown fat so what was mentioned on Tim’s book may not actually be 100% accurate.

 

 

 

[18:52] Cryochambers and Other Studies

 

Cryochambers are generally used for recovery but again, this is a short-term exposure, so it’s unlikely to help you get those brown fat activated. Some studies, meanwhile, exposed people to temperatures to as low as about 59 degrees for 3-4 hours per day. The results showed some increases in brown fat growth. Generally, 65 degrees or so is about the maximum that you can expect to stimulate brown fat but it’s going to require longer exposure time than it would with a much lower temperature.

 

Based on the increased calorie burn that resulted from cold exposure, the study suggests that if you spent extended periods of time in lower to mid-60’s, it could lead to a weight loss of up to 5-10 pounds throughout the year.

 

It must be noted though that since they are extrapolating from short-term studies for these long-term results, we actually don’t know what happens after extended exposure. Some sort of adaptation may happen but there hasn’t been any research on this. So you have to be careful that you’re not ramping up the amount you’re consuming as you continue to stay at a lower temperature.

 

 

 

[20:55] Is Brown Fat for Keeps?

 

Whether you get to keep brown fat forever or it goes away once you get warmer, Heavey thinks you hold onto it but they haven’t done any research on this yet. Brown fat can’t actually be measured until it gets activated in the body. So this holds a new area of research. Grant wants to hack the hack and is curious about the minimum amount of time at what certain temperature is needed to see results. But Heavey hasn’t found any research on this either.

 

 

[22:15] The Long-Term Path to Weight Loss

 

This is not the long-term path to weight loss you’re looking for. It’s dumb to think you can eat a doughnut a day because you had your thermostat down at 62 degrees. This is novel research and there isn’t enough out there to cement this claim of cold temps to induce weight loss. Again, this has been extrapolated over short-term research.

 

However, if you have a solid diet and exercise in place, and if it doesn’t bother you to keep your thermostat down to 65 degrees – give it a shot.  Again, it could just be five pounds over the course of a year which you might attribute to something else. Finally, Heavey doesn’t recommend it as your ultimate solution but you can stack it on top of good habits.

 

 

[26:00] Follow-Up on ROMWOD

 

Grant actually did his ROMWOD and he wanted it more so bad that he did another one right after. Heavey hasn’t done it yet but we’ll definitely get back to check on him.

 

Links:

Article on SB Nation Silver Screen and Roll

The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss