The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [55]
The spreadsheet was designed to fix this by comparing all the human activities he could isolate, each correlated to its caloric expenditure per hour for his weight. He was tired of being fat and hoped the numbers would provide a faster solution. Instead, they painted a futile picture: even if he ran a 26.2-mile marathon he would only burn around 2,600 calories, or approximately ¾ of a pound of fat.
How could Phelps eat an extra 9,000 calories per day? Ray scanned his finger through the columns, jotted down a few notes, and defaulted to the calculator. It made no sense.
“In order for Phelps to burn those kinds of calories above and beyond what his resting metabolic rate [RMR] was,” Ray recalls, “keeping in mind that I had the calculations in front of me, and it’s about 860 calories an hour at competitive swimming rates, he would have to sustain more than 10 hours of continuous butterfly every day. Not even he can do that.”
So what was going on? Was Phelps misinforming journalists during his Olympic quest? Sabotaging competitors foolish enough to mimic him based on interviews?
The physics didn’t work.
Then, in an instant, paused over the spreadsheet, after 15 years of frustration, it all became crystal clear:
“It was the thermal load of the water. Water is 24 times more thermally conductive than air. Phelps spends three or four hours a day in the water.”
The effect was the same as pouring hot coffee into a metal cup instead of a ceramic mug; the former loses calories (heat) much faster. Ray did the math with this new variable, and, amazingly, it seemed to add up.
In the six weeks that followed, from the weekend of October 27 to December 5, he would lose 28.6 pounds of fat and never regain them.
The game had changed.
The first 12 weeks without cold exposure vs. the second 6 weeks with cold exposure.
From NASA to Everest: Correcting the Metabolism Equation
It seemed too good to be true. So, as any good scientist would, Ray tried to disprove himself.
In the studies and science he reviewed, what struck him most was not evidence that contradicted his conclusions, but rather the near-complete omission of heat as a factor in fat-loss.
The common equation in the literature was simple: weight loss or gain = calories-in – calories-out. △Wt = kcal in – kcal out.
This wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that every table for calories-out (caloric expenditure) immediately fixated on activity level. Thermodynamics—thermodynamics—had somehow been robbed of heat. In Ray’s world of space shuttles and atmospheric reentry, heat was king. The laws of thermodynamics were being cited by people who didn’t understand them. Take the first law as an example. In simple terms:
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.
The misquoters were limiting the ways ingested calories could change form. They treated exercise and storage as the only two options. In fact, the human body is an open thermodynamic system and has a number of other options. Ray’s then-209-pound meat-frame could exchange energy with his environment in the form of work (exercise), heat, or matter (excretion).
Running a marathon might burn 2,600 calories, but working out in an 82°F pool for four hours could burn up to an extra 4,000 calories, if one considered thermal load.
How else could people like Scott Parazynski, a friend of Ray’s, eat can after can of Spam and other high-fat foods? Scott was an MD and former astronaut who had attempted to summit Everest twice, losing about 25 pounds on each attempt. He was successful on his second ascent. His troupe ate lard and sticks of butter to prevent excessive weight loss. The workload of the climb alone could not account for the caloric expenditure, a 5,000-calorie deficit. It was the cold. Lots of cold.
So Ray began to treat himself like a human space heater.
He tried everything: he drank a gallon of ice water between waking