The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [56]
He later found less painful options, but the results were undeniable. He lost almost six pounds in the first week.
It Gets Better—The Devil’s in the Details
This was not the first time Ray had tried to lose weight.
In 2006, he lost a respectable 20 pounds following the Body-for-Life (BFL) exercise and diet plan, designed by Bill Phillips. BFL performed as advertised, and Ray lost 17.8 pounds of fat in 12 weeks, for an average weekly fat-loss of 1.48 pounds. This was, by all conventional measures, a huge success. Unfortunately, in a pattern familiar to millions, he then gained it all back, plus interest.
In the second experiment, however, repeating BFL with intermittent cold exposure, Ray lost 28.6 pounds in six weeks, for an average weekly fat-loss of 4.77 pounds. The addition of cold exposure alone increased fat-loss per week more than three times. This added up to 61% more total fat lost in half the time.
I found Ray’s results both incredible and believable. But something seemed to be missing.
First of all, he had also gained more muscle with cold exposure. Losing more heat couldn’t account for that. Though the muscle gain could have been accounted for by the slight inaccuracies of home-use calipers (plus or minus two pounds), I suspected there was more to the story.
Second, looking at the research, the math didn’t add up quite as neatly as I’d hoped.
It’s been shown that you can burn almost four times more fat than usual with two hours of cold exposure15 (176.5 milligrams per minute instead of 46.9 milligrams per minute). This is great, but percentage changes can be deceptive. If there are nine calories in one gram of fat, and assuming the effect lasts for the time you are in the water, then this exposure would burn an extra 139 calories,16 or 15.5 grams of fat.
15.5 grams?! That’s about 11 paper clips … for two hours of torture.
Ray was losing more than three additional pounds (approximately 1,350 grams) of fat per week with cold exposure. To achieve that with water immersion alone, looking at the same studies, he’d need to spend 174.2 hours per week in 50° water. It seems unlikely that Ray spent more than 24 hours per day in water. In fact, he didn’t spend two hours per day swimming in, or consuming, 50° water.
Ray Cronise’s fat-loss spreadsheet. 12 weeks without cold vs. 6 weeks with cold.
Something else needed to be happening. It could have been the other thermic loads he experimented with: cold walks, sleeping without sheets, etc.
Digging deeper still, I now believe that the “something else” involves two players you’ll hear much more about in the next few years: adiponectin and BAT.
Adiponectin is a cool little hormone, secreted by fat cells, that can both increase the oxidation (“burning”) of fatty acids in mitochondria and increase uptake of glucose by muscle tissue. I believe adiponectin is largely to thank for Ray’s muscle gain.17 Speculation notwithstanding, the research is in its early stages, so I’ll reserve adiponectin as an intellectual dessert for the geeks. My forays into its potential can be found in the online resources.
BAT and my related torture experiments, on the other hand, are worth taking a closer look at.
If the science gets too dense and you want the index card version, skip to “Ice Age Revisited—Four Places to Start” on this page. I won’t be offended.
Fat-Burning Fat
Not all fat is equal. There are at least two distinct types: white adipose tissue (WAT) and brown adipose tissue (BAT).
WAT is what we usually think of as fat, like the marbling on a steak. A WAT cell—an adipocyte—is composed of a single large fat droplet with a single nucleus.
BAT, in contrast, is sometimes referred to as “fat-burning fat” and appears to be derived from the same stem cells as muscle tissue. A BAT cell is composed of multiple droplets that are brown in color because of a much higher volume of iron-containing mitochondria. Normally