Keep Cold, It'll Make You Lean
I came across this article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/low_concept/2015/01/turn_down_your_heat_don_t_do_it_for_the_planet_do_it_for_you.html
a couple of years ago. The essence of the article is that by keeping your environment cool enough to make you shiver, your body will start to convert the fat in your body from inert white fat to metabolically-active brown fat.
I read the Atkins Diet premise a long time ago and his claim was that it takes a lot fewer calories to keep white fat cells alive than muscle, something in the order of 8x more calories for muscle over fat. The implication of this is that if you go on a drastic calorie reduction diet, it'll starve (and kill) muscle cells while white fat cells happily live on.
Back to brown fat. It is metabolically active, and thus burns energy to keep you warm. Babies have it but it's quickly lost in the modern environment. It uses less calories than muscle but reportedly 5x more than white fat.
I didn't quite go into full shiver mode but I tend to wear a t-shirt and running shorts, even when the house is only heated to 20C (68F) or at times even lower. I feel a bit uncomfortably cold at times inside the house but I have to say that overall, I am slimmer.
Whenever I go out to walk the dogs as I did for the first 3 months of this year, I wore shorts and the barest amount of layers to keep being too cold, whenever the temperatures were at least 2-3C (4-6F) above freezing, The bonus is you don't have any wet pants on a rainy day.
Remember the cyclist's dictum about clothing. If you're comfortable for the first 5 minutes of your ride, you're wearing too much.
The other thing that helped me with being cold is very cold showers. I admit that I was helped into this by having a dry sauna to use and taking cold showers to cool down. One can get used to the shock - that's the only way to put it - of being doused by cold water but it help you shiver and you feel warm when you get out and dry off. What has helped is that I don't shampoo my hair or use much soap - all without sacrificing personal hygiene in any way, which minimizes shower time. Long showers, especially warm or hot ones, are totally unnecessary for the lifestlye of most people in the modern world and also dries out your skin.
More about brown fat here:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supercharging-brown-fat-to-battle-obesity/
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/low_concept/2015/01/turn_down_your_heat_don_t_do_it_for_the_planet_do_it_for_you.html
a couple of years ago. The essence of the article is that by keeping your environment cool enough to make you shiver, your body will start to convert the fat in your body from inert white fat to metabolically-active brown fat.
I read the Atkins Diet premise a long time ago and his claim was that it takes a lot fewer calories to keep white fat cells alive than muscle, something in the order of 8x more calories for muscle over fat. The implication of this is that if you go on a drastic calorie reduction diet, it'll starve (and kill) muscle cells while white fat cells happily live on.
Back to brown fat. It is metabolically active, and thus burns energy to keep you warm. Babies have it but it's quickly lost in the modern environment. It uses less calories than muscle but reportedly 5x more than white fat.
I didn't quite go into full shiver mode but I tend to wear a t-shirt and running shorts, even when the house is only heated to 20C (68F) or at times even lower. I feel a bit uncomfortably cold at times inside the house but I have to say that overall, I am slimmer.
Whenever I go out to walk the dogs as I did for the first 3 months of this year, I wore shorts and the barest amount of layers to keep being too cold, whenever the temperatures were at least 2-3C (4-6F) above freezing, The bonus is you don't have any wet pants on a rainy day.
Remember the cyclist's dictum about clothing. If you're comfortable for the first 5 minutes of your ride, you're wearing too much.
The other thing that helped me with being cold is very cold showers. I admit that I was helped into this by having a dry sauna to use and taking cold showers to cool down. One can get used to the shock - that's the only way to put it - of being doused by cold water but it help you shiver and you feel warm when you get out and dry off. What has helped is that I don't shampoo my hair or use much soap - all without sacrificing personal hygiene in any way, which minimizes shower time. Long showers, especially warm or hot ones, are totally unnecessary for the lifestlye of most people in the modern world and also dries out your skin.
More about brown fat here:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supercharging-brown-fat-to-battle-obesity/
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