3 Cool hacks to lose weight without changing what you eat and how much
Disclaimer: two of them are actually cold, not just cool
Feel you have a little too much ‘cushion’ around the waist or thighs? Statistics say you are likely to answer yes. Obesity has been rising steadily and dramatically. A study on 27,000 people published in JAMA shows percentage of people overweight or obese has risen by 25% in the past 30 years, from 53% to 66%.
The worse news is that the same study shows we are increasingly considering fat as normal: the percentage of overweight or obese people who attempted to lose weight decreased from 56 percent to 49 percent.
What to do?
Let’s look at someone who is not fat, but “should” be.
Michael Phelps reportedly eats an astonishing amount of calories: over 12,000 calories per day. According to “Calories In, Calories Out model” he has to exercise a lot to burn all those calories. Looking at his photos, it is quite clear he does not have excess fat. So how much does he train to burn 12,000 calories each day?
According to “Calories-in, Calories-out model”, Michael Phelps training and diet should make him gain more than half a kilogram each day. This means one extra pound of fat every day.
Using general models, swimming can burn up to 900 calories per hour at an intense level (intense for him, not for us non-Olympians). This implies Phelps would have to swim at a highly intense level for 12 hours each day.
Does he spend so much time training? He reports training 5–6 hours a day (source). Assuming he burns 2000 calories for the rest of the day just by being alive, this still leaves an excess of calories in of over 4500 calories.
According to the “Calories-in, calories-out model”, 7000 calories equals one kilogram. Phelps has a weight of 88 kg (194 lbs). If weight was only calories in — calories out, he would gain 650 grams of added weight each day.
He would weight 107 kg (236 lbs) after just one month of such training.
Clearly Michael Phelps is not gaining weight and will not weight over 100 kgs any time soon. So what is his secret? How can he burn so much fat?
What is going on?
The secret might lie in an ubiquitous element: water.
Swimmers train all day in cold water. This might be the reason for Michael Phelps’ extraordinary high calories input. To see the link one has to look beyond the simplistic “Calories-in, calories-out model”. Our resting energy expenditure (REE) is the amount of energy we consume while doing nothing: calories burned just to stay alive. The calories-in, calories-out model assumes that, besides exercise, the amount of calories one burns is more or less constant. So that the REE is constant and depends on statistical variables (age, gender, body weight). This oversimplification comes from the fact that it is quite complicated to measure actual calorie burn. It was practically impossible before the widespread of fitness trackers for consumers to conveniently measure it. Now fitness trackers measure it, however the error is so high, it is of debatable usefulness.
The golden standard for measuring energy expenditure is indirect calorimetry. Indirect calorimetry estimates energy expenditure by measuring oxygen content in the breath. It has a relatively low error margin because oxygen is involved in ATP production through respiration in the human cells. A study in 2017 showed conventional fitness trackers have an error of between 25% and 90% in estimating calories compared to indirect calorimetry.
In reality our resting energy expenditure varies a great deal from one person to another. A large part of this energy goes into temperature control. We use quite a lot of energy to keep our bodies at a set temperature. This amount increases when the ambient temperature is lower and decreases when it’s higher.
We are not equally good at generating heat to warm ourselves.
This difference is the cause of innumerable arguments about the setting for the thermostat in offices worldwide and gallant gestures of gentlemen offering their coats to trembling mademoiselles. So what makes us so different in generating heat? Is it an organ or a muscle?
We need to be cold more often, to re-train our bodies to burn off excess fat.
No. It is fat. But not just any fat. Regular fat merely insulates us, but it does not generate heat. We generate heat through a special kind of fat called brown fat. Also called BAT (Brown Adipose Tissue). In babies, brown fat makes up around 5 percent of their total body mass and helps to keep them warm.
Brown fat is extremely powerful at generating heat: 250 g of brown fat is estimated to consume 100% of basal energy expenditure of a human (source). It is no wonder studies have suggested that adults who have greater amounts of brown fat are leaner, and that increasing the production of brown fat may be an effective weight loss strategy. Concomitantly excess of the regular amount of fat seems to reduce the amount of brown fat. This might be because better insulation reduces the amount of heat your body has to generate. But it might also mean that the same causes that make people fat, reduce their brown fat.
Spurred by this correlation between brown fat and leanness, pharma researchers have been trying to find drugs that stimulate the production of brown fat. In one large effort they tested over 200,000 chemicals. Their efforts show promise for some drugs, but they also come with serious side effects. As of the time of writing of this article, there are no safe drugs approved for human use that are proven to significantly increase brown fat.
There are non-pharmacological ways to increase your brown fat.
The role of brown fat is to keep us warm. It stands to reason then that the more exposure to cold, the more brown fat you have. And thus we come back to Michael Phelps’ training. He spends over 6 hours per day in cold water. He needs to generate much more heat than regular people to maintain a healthy body temperature. We can assume all this cold exposure had led his body to grow more brown fat to provide all this heat.
You might be thinking that is great for Micheal Phelps, but you are not Michael Phelps and cannot spend 6 hours per day in a pool. Don’t give up. There are ways of us non-Olympians to grow brown fat. Let’s look at some of the research around cold and brown fat. And the cool hacks of how this research might be applied in everyday life.
Cold Hack #1: Set your thermostat a few degrees lower than at present.
This study measured metabolic rate for people spending one day in rooms at either 24 degrees Celsius or 19 degrees Celsius. This small short-term exposure still had a noticeable effect: 5% increase in energy expenditure. 5% might seem small. It is from just one day and it adds up without actually doing anything.
Incremental decreases of one degree at a time will lead to a big difference on the long term without you actually suffering that much. This effect can, and should, be enhanced by continuing the acclimatization outside: put on one layer less of clothes than usual.
The biggest risk for colds actually lies in big temperature changes, rather than the absolute values of temperature. This research identified a link between cold mini-epidemic and large drops in temperature. So to raise brown fat, but avoid colds, it’s best to try to lower ambient temperature both inside and outside the home.
Cold Hack #2: Pour cold water on the back of your neck for 2+ minutes every time you shower.
Unlike other mammals, brown fat in humans is concentrated in the back of the head. Until recently it was believed that we each have a fixed amount. However this study shows that cold exposure actually increases the amount of brown fat, and thus long term energy expenditure. This study shows the same effect and proves a direct link between brown fat and energy expenditure.
The concentration of brown in fat in one region suggests a targeted approach: apply cold only to the area where most brown fat resides. This is why you get a small chill and are more awake if you put ice on the back of your neck.
The beauty is that if you are careful not to spill water to other areas of your body, you do not even feel cold.
Cold hack #3: Quickly drop body temperature for limited amounts of time.
The first two hacks are great to gradually subject your body to more cold and grow brown fat. Because they are gradual, the effects are felt only after consistent practice. There are more powerful methods to shock your body into more brown fat. These have to be undertaken with care and might seem daunting, yet they also offer additional benefits.
Method#1: Cooling-vests. Wear around the home while doing chores, relaxing. Even sleep with it (if your partner does not mind sleeping with an iceberg instead of a warm cuddle).
One alternative is to use one of the cooling vests on the market (example here, I am not affiliated in any way with them). Or you can improvise using cloth and ice-packs. You have to wear these on your body specifically on the back of the neck where there is most brown fat. The advantage is that the sensation of cold is greatly reduced and they are practical to wear around the home while doing various activities.
Such ice vest are more comfortable than they seem. The brain puts more emphasis on signals about cold from our extremities, our chests and our foreheads. Because you can keep these areas relatively warm while wearing a cooling vest, the sensation of cold is greatly reduced.
In my personal experience I have found cooling vests can allow very low temperatures with limited apparent discomfort. However they are not magic. In prolonged use (over 1 hour) there is apathy and decrease in energy (which is part of the body’s response). On occasion you might also feel weak, a bit dizzy and might get quite hungry. And there are risks if you go overboard: too much, too soon can have serious consequences. In one situation I did find myself in a near-hypothermia state after lowering temperature for too much, too long. I urge caution when wearing them, especially in the beginning.
Method#2: Ice-baths. Either bath at home with ice or in frozen lakes and rivers
As evidenced by looking at Michael Phelps, water is highly effective in lowering temperature and promoting fat burn. It is not feasible to spend 6 hours per day in a moderately cool pool. To get a similar effect the duration of immersion can be shortened if the temperature is also lowered. This means immersion into ice-cold water for several minutes. Most practical is to do this at home in your own bathtub. If you happen to live near a non-polluted lake and it is frozen, diving in it is even better. Always have a friend nearby to pull you out in case of an emergency. Sudden cold can be a shock, especially without experience.
Besides brown fat, such extreme exposure to cold can provide other benefits. When paired with Wim Hof breathing method, it has been shown to allow for conscious control of autonomous and immune system. This translates into miracle like improvements in some people with autoimmune disease (such as rheumatoid arthritis)or MS or Parkinson.
Research on immune control: Randomly recruited students were split into two groups. Intervention groups was trained in the breathing method and control group was not. Both groups were injected dead bacteria. Measurements showed intervention group had less inflammation and exhibited decreased symptoms than control. This constitutes the first scientific study proving the possibility of conscious control of immune system.
Please take into account this research is in the early stages. The above study is the first rigorous research to show a link between such methods and the immune system. There are account for miraculous effects on individuals, yet no research supporting them. Thus effect might, and most likely will vary. I do not claim that such methods can provide improvement for medical affections for everyone.
Method#3: Cryogenic chambers in the home
If you happen to be very wealthy, and don’t want to depend on nature, you can now buy your own cryogenic chamber to be installed in the home.
Cryo therapy initially appeared as a way to accelerate recovery for elite athletes. This usage has mostly petered out as it actually seems to be detrimental: it reduces the necessary break and repair involved in improving muscle performance.
However it is a great way to expose the body to extreme heat with lesser risks than conventional means. Because it can allow for the extremities to be kept warm, it is considered generally safer and more pleasant than an ice water dive. Celebrities like Tony Robbins swear by it, saying it provides them with a jolt of energy and clarity of mind. There is no conclusive research about such energy effects. However it is a convenient way to stimulate brown fat through cold exposure. This might secondarily result in feeling more energy because the body is producing more energy.
As homo sapiens we have conquered nature. Our stone age ancestors cowered in the cold and shivered miserably during winter. Now we have central heating and air conditioning. Most of us spend the coldest months of the year with no more than a few minutes worth of exposure to outside conditions. We wake up in our heated apartments, get into our air conditioned car and then disembark in the underground heated parking lot of our thermostat controlled office building. We do this every day of the cold period, with maybe some stops in heated malls, gyms, cafes. This life in an insulated artificial environment is markedly different than shivering in -20 degrees all day and night.
Our bodies have not yet caught up with this change. This constant heat is making our brown fat disappear. And with it, some of our ability to regulate our weight.
We need to be cold more often, to re-train our bodies to burn off excess fat.
Why Humans Rock at Physics but Suck at Psychology and Medicine
A story of Galapagos birds and silicon chips
Physics has changed human life a million times over. It regularly produces breakthroughs that seem science fiction: controlled star explosions, putting a lab on a comet, gravitational waves and things too complicated to understand. It’s amazing how scientists can unravel the mysteries of the universe.
One would expect the human body and mind, which we all are familiar with, would pose little challenge. Yet psychology is going through a replication crisis: less than 40% of tested research findings prove true. Then in medicine there is a marked lack of progress: the war on cancer is being lost despite incredibly large investments, medical error might be third leading cause of death. If you look at nutrition, it just a mess, with leading scientific research contradicting the official paradigm.
But why?
We intuitively understand more about our minds and bodies than about quarks and bosons. Why can’t we develop this into a reliable science? And what does it have to do with Galapagos?
There are 5 unavoidable causes for our incompetence is understanding ourselves:
Galileo studied gravitational acceleration by dropping stones from the Tower of Pisa. In the 1940s the U.S. studied syphilis by infecting prisoners and individuals with mental illnesses with syphilis. Both are experiments, one in physics, the other in medicine.
The gold standard of science is the experiment: a procedure undertaken to validate or refute a hypothesis. What Galileo did is admirable, while what the U.S. did is despicable. The inherent limitation of medicine and psychology: experiments can harm human beings. Because of this it is too costly to run most experiments for medicine and psychology. No potential finding is valuable enough to cost human lives.
So medicine and psychology turned to observational studies. Scientists look at groups of people considered to differ in one specific variable (the independent variable). Then they measure various outcomes for these groups. The differences in outcomes between groups are attributed to the independent variable. Observational studies produce uncertain findings. They constitute the reason for much of the uncertainty in human understanding.
But there are more basic limitations than the research design. They have a lot to do with the Galapagos and Darwin’s insights there.
“All our knowledge begins with the senses” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Despite the complex and abstract nature of modern physics, it is rooted in sensory perceptions. Our sensory organs evolved to be great at perceiving the outside world. It was a basic requirement for survival. Physics is creating a model of the world out of what our senses tell us.
When we turn our senses inward, the results are murky. You don’t know how fast your heart is beating. You cannot feel the health of your organs. You cannot even sense if you have foreign bodies inside (like parasites). Likewise we don’t perceive the processes in our minds, we can’t look at synapses or smell which areas of our brain are active. We can only feel the effects of our internal processes.
Why are we in the dark about our own inside? Nothing about us is random. Ever forget to do anything? Maybe an email, or a chore? What if you forgot to breathe? Or did not send the right antibodies to fight an infection?
We think of our conscious mind as our ultimate tool. But it cannot be trusted with the critical workings of our body. So they are automated. They are handled by an unconscious nervous system that does everything without our input.
If we don’t consciously control these inner workings, then we do not need to know what is going on. Our senses do not tell us much about our own body. Except for low-res signals to prompt us to take specific actions (e.g. pain to not walk into walls or touch barbed wire).
Without sensory input, we have to rely on indirect evidence of our own body’s processes. The first physics discovery might have been the intuitive understanding of gravity: objects fall. This is a repeatable, generalizable fact, e.g. all things fall, all the time, in any place on Earth. The first psychological discovery might have been that people get scared if you shout at them. But some people get more scared, some less, and others attack you. And all of them behave differently at different times. This does not fulfill any of the requirements for scientific fact.
Plus, even without the sensory handicap, the human body is harder to study because of:
“The first thing one learns about complex systems is that they are not a sum of body parts: a system is a collection of interactions, not an addition of individual responses.” Nassim Taleb
In the physical world, if a stone falls besides you, you are mostly unaffected. As is most of the rest of the Earth. All events are correlated, but often the interaction effects are small. Scientist can study specific effects in isolation to the rest of the universe.
In the human body, things are different. If you eat a bad egg, everything in your body is affected. Even your mood and thinking. The interaction effects are large and widespread.
And it’s not just temporary events: bacteria in your gut influence your emotions and behaviour, health correlates with happiness and your mind can cause illness. This means it’s impossible to study any one event or one variable in complete isolation. Anything and everything interacts and affects the whole system.
We don’t have the sensory organs to see these interaction effects. So we try to use math to model them. But our mathematical methods are quite bad at understanding interaction effects in general.
In physics scientists use math to describe the world. Math is precise, clear, objective. It’s really hard to misunderstand math without showing you are an idiot. But because math is hard, and math for interconnected systems is especially hard, psychologists and physicians use words instead. Words are much less useful than math. It’s really, really easy to misunderstand words. Often it even makes you look smart.
So:
Physics = testable — easily observable — math (clear)
Human body= not testable — hard to observe — words (unclear)
Already looks hard. But it gets worse, the unclear words compound our:
“Yet weren’t all human beings simply human beings no matter what name you applied to them[?]” Mind-reading robot Giskard, Robots and Empire, Isaac Asimov
When the rock falls, I see it fall. And you see it fall. We agree that the rock fell. Even when we use imprecise words.
When I eat a watermelon, I feel things (feelings, sensations, thoughts). When you eat the same watermelon, you feel different things. We also feel different things when someone shouts at us.
Each of us has a big complex baggage of experiences that shapes our perceptions, emotions and thoughts. When studying the human body and mind, we bring all this baggage with us. When I research depression, I cannot help but think of my own experiences of being depressed.
These biases cloud our judgements. I use poorly designed words to express my biased judgement. Your own biases then make you decode those words into something different than what I intended to express. Yet we might throw words at each other that make us believe we are in agreement.
Maybe we need to design an A.I. that is free of all these biases so it can understand us for us.
Did you see the connection with silicon chips yet? Hint: do our brains resemble computers?
An A.I. would also benefit from not going through our biggest obstacle: evolution
“Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.” Charles Darwin
Evolution is the root cause. We did not evolve to develop perfect medicine to live forever. We did not evolve to make ourselves happy and fulfilled. We evolved to survive and pass our DNA to offspring. That is it.
We did not need an understanding of ourselves for this purpose. It might actually be detrimental. It’s hard to deal with the fact that there is no meaning to life beyond living.
But it’s even more insidious. We tend to think of ourselves as brilliant minds trapped in flawed bodies. A popular metaphor is to think of the brain (and body) as hardware, and the mind as software running on top of this hardware. This is a bad metaphor. It confuses and obfuscates.
A better metaphor is to think of the brain+mind as our Operating System and accompanying hardware. The brain and mind are interconnected. They have a continuous two-way relationship. They have evolved along a very long period of time to fulfill the survival function.
On top of this O.S., we have the applications and files. The software. These are all the ideas, thoughts, models, emotions, concepts that we acquire and integrate in our own lifetime. They make up our individuality, our growth and our self.
Files and applications can be added or erased. But we cannot change the O.S. (we don’t have admin). We cannot see the code behind it or go beyond it, to the BIOS. We have to work with what we have. Trying to create complex abstract theories without taking into account the specifics of the O.S. is akin to playing the latest videogame at high-res on Windows 3.1. It will crash and freeze.
What I’m saying with my metaphor poorly constructed out of imprecise words is that the only clear fact about the human body and mind is it evolved for survival. If we can build a new model of ourselves, starting from that, then we might learn to improve our lives. We cannot have the science of physics, but we can have clarity.
I am creating Avantgarde Savage: a radical new model to create a Better Life for everyone.
We live in a world where most of us are unhappy, in meaningless jobs, lost, complacently unhealthy, lonely and alone. All because we do not understand ourselves.
Avantgarde Savage is born from a multitude of sciences about human mind and brain and body. Based on how Homo Sapiens evolved in nature, we uncover how we can make our lives in the modern world better.
