hey guys… i was thinking about something… i dont have a weight problem but i have a few friends that do…
in any case. it seems like when its winter and im always cold, i can eat more and not really worry about gaining any weight, in the summer if i keep eating the same ill gain maybe 5lbs or so…
i came up with a theory, and all of you are completely free to tell me im wrong, please do… because i want to know if this is a valid arguement…
being cold burns calories, as your body, instead of using the food you eat to turn you into a fatass, has to use it to heat your body and keep your internal temperature at ~98.6*
it seems partially true when you consider the south is hotter and thus fatter than the north… houston tx is the fattest city in the US… it just happens to be a hot humid nasty city. im sure there are fat people up north, but it seems like there are less, i could be wrong, this is just a guess.
eating ice, or drinking very cold water does about the same thing, because in the case of ice , even if you chew it up, its still mostly frozen when you swallow (okay, maybe im the only one around here who eats ice… but… well, am i?) and once it gets down to your stomach, as i just read in another post about peeing = cold or something, it takes alot of energy to heat that water up… and eating alot of ice would theoretically make your body focus on trying to warm itself back up, instead of turning your food into fat cells or whatever…
so… is there any truth to these?
and if so, could it / would it / does it make a noticeable difference in weight?
also, sorry if any of my wording is offensive to overweight people, all through elementary/middle school and partially through high school i was pretty overweight.
For what it’s worth, I live in houston and indeed, everyone here (other than myself) is at least 40 pounds overweight. It’s disgusting. And yeah, it is hot and humid and horrible.
Anyway, your theory is correct to an extent, but not practical for weight-loss goals. If you drink 8 8 oz. glasses of icewater a day you’ll burn 200 extra calories by the increased homeostasis activity than you would by drinking the same amount of water at room temperature.
The thing is, burning those 200 calories is not going to increase your metabolism, so it’s really not going to help lose weight. Most people are just glad to know this fact because they usually drink at least 8 bottles of cold beer a day, so the extra bonus of drinking it cold makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside. Not gonna lose weight though. Quit eating shitfood and get on a treadmill if you want to lose weight.
Follow RM Mentock’s link. This topic is and has been done to death in another thread.
Kalt, I agree about exercise, but as to your comment about burning 200 extra calories, the other thread contains links that show that (on the best view of it) what you say is a gross oversimplification, and at worst is completely wrong. Whether you will burn any extra calories at all is dependant on a complex array of factors, including external temperature etc.
I’m not sure if drinking ice water will help you lose weight, but I lost a lot a weight a few summers ago by treading water in a very cold pool. I would tread water for 30 minutes per day, several days per week. I lost a lot of weight that way.
A while ago this question was asked on CBC Radio’s national science program, Quirks & Quarks. The question was written in by a listener, and they answered it as their “Question of the Week”.
They talked to a professor from some university, I can’t remember which, who said that the amount of calories you save by eating cold food is barely noticeable in an ordinary diet. The example given was eating ice cream. The listener that wrote in suggested that by eating ice cream cold, they would burn more calories, and so they could afford to eat the richer ice cream instead of the fat-free kind. The professor said that the number of calories used in warming the ice cream up to body temperature was far less than the amount gained in switching to richer ice cream.
I think it was the question answered by Dr. Sue Ghazala of Memorial University, referenced on this page. If you want to hear the audio clip from the show, you’ll have to have a program that can support the ‘Real Audio’ file format.
It may be just an opinion, RM Mentock but, as you know very well, it is an opinion supported by two pages worth of close argument and cites in that other thread. Those cites include reference to a paper that describes in great detail the body’s precise reaction to cold, including quantitative facts about body temperature control strategies by reference to metabolism changes, set points, body shell and internal temperatures etc. The paper even describes the precise effect of consuming large quantities of cold liquid under varying external temperature conditions.
None of the material I have cited in support of my position has even been commented upon by you, let alone discredited, and you are yet to support your position with a single cite.
And can I strongly suggest that rather than continue this subject in this thread, if posters are interested in this topic they go over to the other thread. Arguing the whole issue all over again is a bit pointless.
Drinking cold water WILL cause your body to burn calories as your body simply must do so in order to remain at 98.6 F. We’re warm-blooded, so it’s simply going to happen.
Are you saying that skipping a soda everyday won’t help you lose weight, or are you saying something else?
It will assist you in losing weight in a de minimus sort of way, but if you’re not exercising and eating right (aside from the soda) you may as well have the soda because you’re not gonna lose anything.
No. That is the easy simplistic and probably wrong conclusion that far too many people who should know better jump to when asked about this problem.
I refuse to debate that or reiterate the reasons in this thread. Read the other thread. I can recommend the analogy given by Race Bannon (do a search on his name on the first page of the thread) as a really quick way of getting a handle on the situation.
Besides Cecil’s column, that reference paper is about the only one, isn’t it? I don’t see that it really supports the argument. And–as you point out–your close argument is pretty much limited to qualtitative suppositions.
The matter is not closed. It deserves debate, not bashing.
It takes one calorie to warm up one gram of water one degree celsius. The problem is, that one calorie isn’t the same as the food Calorie. The food calorie is actually 1000 of the tiny calories so you’ll be drinking a lot of cold water before you lose weight.
It’s been a while since thermochem so I hope I have all this right.
First prove that your body will use a single calorie beyond that which it would have anyway in heating the water. Then move on to the basic thermochem.
Look at it differently. What if you just lowered the outside ambient temperature, and the thermostat mechanism that you envisage shuts down so that the body doesn’t lose as much heat. So the cold sink is external instead of internal. Will the body tend to lose weight in such an environment? The answer seems to be yes. So, why wouldn’t it work for the internal sink?
