Patrick Rensen, a professor of endocrinology at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, explains how to use the cold to lose fat.
Rensen studies the role of sugar and fat metabolism in diabetes and heart disease and has taken interest in what it’s known as “brown fat.” This is different from the familiar “white fat” that we collect as we do not burn calories for a period of time.
Rensen took less than 6 minutes to explain how to use the cold to lose fat in a TED Talk. Check out his findings below.
How to Use the Cold to Lose Fat
He begins by explaining how his mother was overweight since he was a kid and his father is not “particularly skinny.” Being overweight can turn into obesity which is a risk factor for diabetes and heart diseases.
Rensen goes on to explain the principle of how to lose weight. Simply burn more calories than what you are ingesting via food and drink combined. But that is easier said than done, as food is available in nearly every corner of big cities and the cheapest the food, the worse it is with lots of carbs and fatty acids.
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He then goes to his main point on how to use the cold to lose fat. He says you can simply lower your central heating at your house to lose body fat. How does it work? Because of the so-called brown fat.
The white fat is what you get to see when someone is doing liposuction, for example – the kind of fat that causes heart diseases and diabetes. The brown fat is located above the collarbone, he says. “There are tiny energy factories in there that are brown colours and they produce heat.”
The main function of the brown fat is to keep our body temperature constant. We just need to train the brown fat to grow and become more active.
Until recently, Rensen explains, researchers thought that only babies had brown fat to keep their bodies warm as they don’t have muscles to be able to shiver in case it is cold. But now it has been found that adults have body fat and are capable of getting bigger.
Depending on how much you tolerate the cold for a longer period, you can experience a fat loss of 3-5 kilos in a year without having to do anything extra. Also, you get to save money on heating your house.
Rensen continues to research how to use the cold to lose fat, but this is a nifty way to further improve your weight loss.
If you want to see his full speech, check out the video below.
VIDEO – How to Use the Cold to Lose Fat
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