One fat helps you use up the calories you eat each day. The other is nothing but a repository for more fat and toxins to end up making you visibly fat in all the places you don’t want it.
The first — the good kind — is called brown fat. It’s a fat your body needs to burn energy and keep it warm.
The other fat — the one you don’t want more of — is white fat. It’s there to provide an energy reserve so you don’t starve when there’s not enough food.
People with more brown fat tend to be slender. But the older we get, the less likely we are to have high levels of brown fat, so we burn fewer calories, we store more of them, and we gain weight.
However, since winter is here, I want to show you a way to employ those cold temperatures to your benefit, and change your fat type and help melt off excess pounds.
Sounds remarkable, but cold can help you convert white fat into a different type of fat that turns you into a calorie-burning furnace and cause your body to spontaneously drop weight.
One compelling study shows that if you are exposed to cold temperatures, some of the white adipose tissue that can accumulate in areas we hate to see it — thighs and belly — can shift into beige fat. This is a type of tissue that burns off calories to produce body heat.
Beige fat is sort of a hybrid form of fat that shares the characteristics of both brown and white fat. Brown fat, also called brown adipose tissue (BAT), is a specialized type of fat that burns energy and sugar to help heat the body. Babies use their brown fat to stay warm, as do bears and other hibernating animals, for example.
While white fat normally can’t burn calories to heat the body. But under some circumstances, such as when you are exposed to chilly temperatures, it can assume some of the features of brown fat.
“(In this study) we wanted to investigate whether human adults had the ability to transform some white fat deposits into beige fat when they were exposed to cold,” says researcher Philip A. Kern. “Browning fat tissue would be an excellent defense against obesity. It would result in the body burning extra calories rather than converting them into additional fat tissue.”
The research showed that belly and thigh fat that was analyzed in the winter months had genetic markers showing that it was functioning as beige fat. In the summer, the body fat displayed lower levels of these genetic markers.
Another study showed that up to 30 percent of your white fat cells can switch to brown fat when exposed to cold.
So, how can you harness this power to convert calorie-storing white fat to calorie-burning brown fat in order to lose weight?
The answer is known as BAT (brown adipose tissue) activation. You can do this in a number of ways:
- Go for a “cold walk.” You don’t need freezing temperatures. Any walk in temperatures below what you are used to as “room temperature” will work. Also, here’s some good advice from a “cold fat loss” practitioner: “Keep in mind that if you do a fasted cold walk or jog, you are combining 3 energizing, fat-burning strategies into one…exercise, cold exposure and fasting. This is like taking a powerful, but all-natural combination pill that helps your body produce more energy out of glucose and fat. Like any combination pill, because the individual ingredients work synergistically, you don’t need to do any single one to an extreme. An overnight fast of 12-16 hours and a vigorous walk (no need to sprint or run) in cold weather, or topped off with a cold shower (see next) can work together effectively.”
- Take cold showers (Although this should only be used if you’re healthy since cold showers can raise your blood pressure). You can do this in intervals, and switch back and forth between lukewarm and cold, if you can’t handle a few minutes under very cold water.
- Turn down the thermostat (Lowering temps to the mid-60s or below can help turn on your brown fat)
- Wear fewer layers in the winter
- Swim in a cold pool or ocean
- Use an icy foot bath (One study found that placing a foot in ice water for five minutes and then repeating on the other side helped participants increased activation of their brown fat by 15 times.)So, how to achieve this turn from excess white fat to healthier beige and brown using the cold?
- If you’re very serious about fat loss, and want to go to a cold extreme, you can use the Wim Hof technique, Wim Hof is a Dutch extreme athlete, whose feats are legendary, but also studies by scientists to figure out why they work so well. You can read about them here.
Bob Livingston
