Want to lose weight? Just activate your ‘brown fat’

First off let me say that when I first heard that people had ‘brown fat’ my thoughts went straight to ‘dark meat.’ You know, like on a chicken. As in,

“Gimme another hank o’ that brown meat, Maw.”

“You wont the shoulder or the rump?”

"Naw! Gimme th’ armpit!"

But beyond the humor factor, it turns out that brown fat is pretty interesting, too. See, brown fat is the stuff that can turn into muscle. It eats doughy white fat. And–even more interesting–brown fat is activated by cold. So the best way to lose weight isn’t necessarily to go running in a jogging suit, sweating your ass off in the middle of summer. The best way to lose weight according to science (other than, you know, eating right and having a healthy lifestyle) is to get good and cold.

And all that means is that there’re still going to be a gazillion obese people. Why? Because we like being comfortable. We like our boilers and heat pumps and fireplaces and propane. We like to toast our rumps right up against the fire. We hate being cold (in general), and we want to crank the heat up so we’re sweating in the middle of winter. We are a species of heat misers, we are. 

But the whole idea of cold-activated thin people makes perfect sense if you think about it. In America, there are more obese people living in the South than anywhere else. I believe Oklahoma was #50 of 50 in the last poll I saw, with Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama dead on their heels, all with obesity rates right around (or right above) 30%. I know all you folks in the north would love to believe it’s just cause we’re so backerds we don’t know what not ta eat, and that’s partially true, but no more so than for ya’ll up yonder ;) Regardless, that’s a whole lot of fat folk. And let’s remind ourselves too that, though obesity means the same thing today as  it did in years past, on average we are all much larger than, say, 20 years ago. We just don’t see obesity in the same way. A mildly obese person 20 years ago might today be considered fit, even thin. Like me, for instance. I weigh 210lbs, and at 6′4″ you might think that’s not that bad. But I carry a lot of it in my gut, which makes me a prime candidate for diabetes (I’m told) and probably means that 20 years ago I would have been considered obese. OBESE, dammit. But–according to science!–all I need to do is turn off my heat pump and I’ll lose an extra 500 calories per day.

Adding to the drama and making things even more interesting, in my home my family and I have decided, in an attempt at saving money AND the planet, to turn the heater down this year. Last year we kept it up around 76F all winter long (yes, I cringe at my own wanton waste). But it would run almost all day long and still never crack 73. We haven’t turned the heat pump up past 70 this year. I’m thinking about 68, too, but my wife might kill me. She’s been wearing winter gear inside. Two pairs of socks, tee shirt, sweat shirt, robe, and she just sits there holding her nose and breathing through her mouth, trying to get some feeling back into her tiny little appendages.

My wife is not obese, though, so she’s really not going to benefit from the scientific brown fat activation she’s experiencing. Her discomfort is just going to leave her thin as she already was. But me, I’m wearing tee shirts and flip flops. I’m engaging those brown fat cells. I’m challenging them to do their job! I went outside tonight to hang some Christmas lights and sure, I came back in just as fat as I was when I went out, but I was cold, dammit, and that’s got to count for something. Discomfort is, well, uncomfortable.

But it’s not like we’ll freeze to death, right? It’s not like we’ll even get sick. When I was a kid it was thought that you didn’t want to leave your hair wet because it could make you sick. You didn’t want to be out in the rain and get wet cause that’d make you sick, too. Pretty much anything would make you get sick, or at least as far as we knew. But now we find out that the rain was probably the best, most germ-free environment we could have been in, and our hair would have dried just fine without all the worry. As it ends up, colds are caused by viruses and infections and not by wet heads. But what about freezing to death? As it turns out you’d have to get really, really cold to die from cold. Matter of fact, we could turn the heat pump off altogether and if the temp stays above freezing we’ll survive the winter just fine. If you’re not losing toes, there’s nothing wrong with cold other than discomfort. When the body gets cold it automatically begins to compensate by shivering. It wants you to put on more clothes and start moving, it drives you to get active. To die from cold exposure we would have to be wet or otherwise weakened in some significant way, such as if we were starving already. But at prime health, with food going in and energy to–literally–burn, and if we can manage to stay dry and clothed, we can survive at temperatures well below freezing. We did survive the last ice age, after all, and crossing the frozen Bering Straight into America to boot. And back then we didn’t have cashmere sweaters, goose down pillows, electric blankets and handwarmers. We didn’t even have gloves or toboggans or long johns. Wrap your head around that concept, my friend. Walk from Alaska to Florida or Mexico with nothing but an animal hide wrapped around your shoulders in the dead of winter. Of course, you probably only have three toes on one foot and only half a foot on the other leg, but you’re alive, and that’s got to count for something!

So here’s the goal: be cold. Spend the whole winter freezing your caboose off and maybe, just maybe, you’ll lose a few pounds in the process. Hey, it’s got to be better than exercising, right?