From Cryotherapy to Weight Loss to Beach Body?
Can you really get into a freezer and come out again, leaving your unwanted fat behind?
I just heard about this (yeah, this method has already been promoted for years and I am not omniscient) when a friend of mine asked me if the benefits are real? She had read about it somewhere as a last-minute-booster for getting a missing beach body in shape. Having some knowledge about the physio-usage of cryotherapy I denied her question. At the same time I knew I had to do some research myself. Would I have to call her to admit my answer was too quick and I was wrong?
Cryotherapy to lose weight
Cryotherapy?
Short: The use of cold materials (ice, cold air etc.) in a therapy setting.
On the one hand cryotherapy is almost exclusively used for pain relief in my job (for example in treatment of people suffering from ankylosing spondylitis as well as other inflammation). On the other hand the body uses muscle contractions to generate heat when we are cold and — short form — this muscle activity is done at the cost of calories.
Calories burned? You must mean losing weight as in exercising!
Of course you can exercise with a focus on losing weight. You even benefit from some exercises more than from others. It’s based on oxygen consumption:
[…] to burn more calories during exercise you need to increase oxygen consumption. The issue of exercise and caloric expenditure is as simple as that.
The faulty derivation you are sold
More muscles used → more oxygen consumption → more weight loss
So if you use almost every major muscle in your body because of shivering you have an “exercise” (no, not really) that makes use of the whole body. You can’t use more muscles at the same time so there is your maximum of oxygen consumption thus the calories just melt away like a snowflake attending a BBQ.
Missing points in that derivation
- The heart rate plays a significant role in caloric expenditure (University of New Mexico)
→ the heart rate rises during exercise, not during exposition to cold temperatures - The heart rate of human organisms seems to develop a physiological habituation to whole-body-cryotherapy (European Journal of Applied Medicine in PubMed)
→ so during exposure the heart rate does not rise to a caloric-burning level but the exact opposite happens - White fat is the typical fat that ends up around our middles and other places, and stores the extra calories we eat (Johns Hopkins Medicine)
→ this is the fat that keeps you away from the beach - Heat is generated by brown fat; It’s too soon to know whether brown fat’s calorie-burning properties can be harnessed for weight loss (Mayo Clinic; Harvard)
→ this is the fat you want to keep - […] intensive cryotherapy may be a viable option for combating obesity and overweight (Journal of Obesity);
Whole-Body Cryotherapy Is an Effective Method of Reducing Abdominal Obesity in Menopausal Women with Metabolic Syndrome (Journal of Clinical Medicine)
→ these are not comparable to “I have no beach body” - a 6-month-long exercise program including whole-body-cryotherapy did not change body weight or BMI, or waist-hip-ratio, although a downward trend was observed (Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longeivety)
→ the participants in this study had no diet to follow, so it’s likely they just took more calories in because of the increased activity
So, no easy-freezy beach body for me?
Now this depends on what you, personally, define as beach body.
- Do you want to be slim?
Lower your caloric intake. - Do you want to show off your abs?
Lower your BMI. - Do you want to impress by working out at the beach?
Impress by working out at the beach.
Whatever you do, take care and watch out not to slip into anorexial behavior!
Don’t let the charlatans rip you off!
The price for a single whole-body-cryo is between 40$ and 60$, of course it gets cheaper if you buy a series or even book a membership… yeah sure!
If you ever thought about whole-body-cryo do yourself a favor and invest (a small part of that money) in sports clothes and get out there. No amount of cryotherapy will ever raise your endorphins.
When you finally have become an ultrarunner, go get into that cryo chamber for regeneration — but that’s a completely different story.
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