A Cool Way to Lose Weight

Feeling Chilly……?

Well before you turn up the central heating, you might want to read on…

We all know the basics of losing weight right?

Eat less food, do more exercise – simple!

But it’s not that simple is it?

First of all, let me give you some scary facts:

64% of the UK population (41 million) are overweight or obese, leading to a huge rise in diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers. Food in this country is cheap and plentiful but cheap food is generally unhealthy, full of carbs and unhealthy fats.

Most people are couch potatoes spending little time exercising but lots of time sitting down with the most exercise being using a keyboard, remote control, tablet, phone or other electronic device.

So it turns out there are two kinds of body fat: brown and white.

White fat is the bad and unhealthy kind – think muffin top, cellulite, flab etc. that stuff we all want to be rid of. and white fat encourages diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

Brown fat is healthy because it burns energy. It is located just above our collarbones and along our aorta and is activated by cold. Its main function is to keep our body temperature constant.

Babies are born with lots of brown fat in order to keep them warm and up until recent years it was thought that brown fat disappeared as we grew into adults.

We now know this is untrue, adults do have brown fat and the good thing is we can easily grow it and make it more active, therefore burning more calories. It has also been proven that subjecting your body to lower temperatures for just a few hours a day will burn more calories so that in just a few weeks you will lose body fat. Studies have shown our bodies can burn 10mg fat per minute or 3-5kg fat per year, just by being a bit cooler!

So my advice? Well try to resist turning up the heating and let brown fat be your calorie burner.