Do Cold Showers Aid Weight Loss?

Ouch, we all know the feeling of a cold shower, sheer pain, right? But would you believe that taking a cold shower every day can help you lose a few extra pounds of weight every week? We are unsure we believe it too, but if it works its definitely worth a try if it can slim us down for our summer holiday and maybe even help us squeeze into the smaller Box men’s briefs size, we are happy!

We recently stumbled across a YouTube video from Gravity Transformation - Fat Loss Experts who had a little look into this claim of cold showers aiding to weight loss.

The experts state, “There have been claims that you could burn an extra 500 calories a day just by taking a cold shower. (500 calories are more than some people burn during an entire intense cardio session.) The theory typically goes like this, when you're born you're born with adipose tissue and this is what we generally all refer to as body fat. But there's another type of fat known as brown fat otherwise known as bat or brown adipose tissue. The main function of these brown fat cells is to generate heat. That's why these are overly abundant in babies. These cells are typically inactive but if you find yourself in a very cold environment that's below room temperature then these bad cells are supposed to activate in order to generate heat for your body.”

So eventually these brown fat cells will be burning the regular fat once activated in a cooler environment. Interesting we think, that by placing yourself in a cold shower you can essentially burn up to 500 calories.

The Gravity Transformation team scoured the internet looking for a study where they compared two groups of people with a control group and an experimental group right that's what goes into a study. However, there was not much hope, scrolling across one they found that, first of all, these experiments were set up to determine if subjects in cold exposed conditions would experience an increase in energy expenditure, and if they would activate more brown fat cells that's it.” They say that “the problem is that there's a big difference if your energy expenditure increases 25 calories versus 400 or 500 calories like many proponents of cold showers want you to believe.  The truth is that the results from the study showed that the difference in energy expenditure is there but, it's not really all that significant except in certain cases.”

Basically, it all depends on the amount of brown fat cells you have in the first place and how they react to coldness, one person could burn 70 calories per shower, which another could burn 400. So, we wouldn’t go ordering the smaller size of Box men’s boxers just yet as this method is a huge variation from person to person.

They continue to state, “on top of that these experiments aren't exactly applicable to a regular person taking a 30 second cold shower. Many of these studies were super particular about how they would keep their subjects whole body cold for hours.” Therefore, the longer that someone is freezing cold for the more calories they would burn. We think we would rather keep the calories than be freezing cold for hours on end.

By all means if your trying to trim down for a holiday or certain event, giving the cold shower technique a try is definitely worthwhile, however don’t count on it. We think hitting the gym or doing homework outs are much more beneficial for yourself and your body.  No matter what your body type, whatever the style you opt for, we think you look great in our Box Men’s Underwear ;)