ABC News / Health - October 29, 2010
Feel the Freezer Burn: Losing Weight by Chilling the Body
NASA Scientist Uses Cold to Burn Calories, But This Diet Isn't For Everybody
By COURTNEY HUTCHISON, ABC News Medical Unit
When popular diet plans failed, Ray Cronise, former
NASA scientist and founder of Zero G Corp., says he
found an extraordinary way to lose weight by tapping
into the laws of thermodynamics: he was going to
literally freeze his butt off.
"The current paradigm of losing weight is diet versus
exercise, calories in, calories out. I was able to do
was figure out that another big part is the
environment we're in. Our body temperature remains
constant and it takes a lot of energy to keep it that
way, no different than heating your house," Cronise
says.
By exposing his body to cold in the right ways, he
theorized, he could boost his weight loss. In fact, he
doubled how fast he lost weight using these
techniques, losing 30 pounds in six weeks.
"I treated my body like a thermostatÉto see if I could
run up the utility bill and get the furnace, [my
metabolism,] running at full blast," he explained in a
presentation on his weight loss given at Wednesday's
TEDMED conference.
Cronise's inspiration came when, desperate to find a
more efficient way to lose weight, he heard that
Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps ate 12,000 calories
worth of food a day. Even with all the athlete's
physical activity, it didn't make sense to Cronise why
he would need that much.
"Then I found out it was the water," he says, because
the cool water forced Phelp's body to constantly fight
to maintain its temperature.
It turns out, this phenomenon was well-studied by
the military and the space program in the 1950s and
1960s, only in the context of keeping weight on
soldiers in cold, harsh environments, not on weight
loss.
Using swimming and something called thermal
loading, where the body is exposed to cold in
various ways, Cronise applied this decades-old
research and found that he could lose up to four
pounds a week.
"You really think you're burning all these calories
because you're sweating [when you work out], but
when you're cold you burn way more calories," he
said in his presentation.
"People usually have a problem losing the last 10
pounds on diets but it would get easier to lose that
last 10 pounds with these techniques. The cool thing
about this method is that the thinner you are the less
insulated you are so it gets easier," he adds.
Chilling Your Way to a Thinner
Physique
A more well-known use of these principles is the
"ice water diet" where dieters drink eight or more
classes of freezing cold water a day to force their
body to work to warm up the beverage in order to
digest it.
The body burns about seven to 10 calories in order
to warm an 8-oz glass of ice water, so drinking large
enough quantities of water can add some extra
oomph to weight loss, according to the logic of the
diet.
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By COURTNEY HUTCHISON, ABC News Medical Unit
Feel the Freezer Burn: Losing Weight by Chilling the Body
NASA Scientist Uses Cold to Burn Calories, But This Diet Isn't For Everybody
This principle gets taken to a whole new level with
thermal loading. Cronise's experience and other tips
on how to use this potential weight loss will be
published in the upcoming work of Tim Ferriss,
author of "The 4-Hour Workweek".
The new book, "The 4-hour Body", comes out Dec.
14 and will include a chapter written by Cronise.
"Ray was a case study within the book and a scientific
fact-checker," Ferris says. The book will cover much
more than weight-loss methods, however. It is what
Ferriss calls a "minimalist cookbook for rapid body
transformation."
"I spent the last three years doing hundreds of
experiments on myself and on hundreds of other
people testing what should be most effective for
everything from rapid fat loss, muscular gain, ultra-
endurance, sleep reduction, sex," he says.
The search took Ferris from the U.S. to South Africa ,
Olympic training centers to black market chemists
while he tried to find the smallest changes that
produces the biggest results. And one of them was
how to use temperature manipulation to improve fat
loss by 300 percent, he says.
Taking ice baths, chugging ice water, exposing the
body to cold in various ways all come up as ways of
challenging the body to burn more calories, but are
these strategies that the common dieter is likely to
adopt?
Safety and Adherence
Dr. David Katz, director and founder of the
Integrative Medicine Center and professor at Yale
University, was dubious that capitalizing on these
laws of physics would be dieter-friendly: "Being cold
is uncomfortable. Frankly, if people are willing to be
that miserable to lose weight they might as well try
eating well and exercising."
But Ferris argues that it depends on the person: "If
your job was to eat 15 percent less calories is a lot
harder for some people to comply with than to do a
couple cold baths a week. The decent diet you follow
is better than the perfect diet you don't follow."
But shocking the body with cold can be taken too far
or done too fast, Ferriss notes and Katz warns that for
those at cardiovascular risk especially should think
twice about ice baths.
Exposure to extreme cold could lead to a cardiac
event in those at risk, Katz says, and it can affect
blood flow to vital organs, blood pressure, or induce
cardiac arrhythmias. Ice baths specifically, Katz says,
puts stress on the body that has the potential to
cause a number of health problems for certain
individuals.
Ferriss' "cold diet" doesn't mean freezing your body
into hypothermia however, and there are milder, more
manageable ways of using thermal loading to boost
the body's furnace.
Cronise, for one, says he could never go neck-deep
in an ice-bath, but he has been able to keep off his
50 pounds using other, more tolerable cooling
techniques and a commitment to a healthier lifestyle.
TEDMED is a yearly conference dedicated to
increasing innovation in the medical realm: "from
personal health to public health, devices to design
and Hollywood to the hospital," the website explains.
