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Do you enjoy a nice, freezing cold shower?
No? I didn’t think so.
Unfortunately for you, new published in the New England Journal of Medicine show that a cold shower could be just the thing for losing weight.
This is due to a naturally occurring, healthy fat in the body called “brown fat.”
There are two different types of fat in your body: white fat and brown fat. White fat is the fat we gain when we eat more and worse than we need to, and it’s the fat we try to get rid of.
Brown fat is the stuff that keeps you warm and encourages your metabolism. Babies use it to balance out their metabolism, but in adults it lies dormant, unless there’s something to start it up.
So when you take a cold shower, you force your brown fat to activate your metabolism, giving it an extra kick along with your metabolism.
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So what kind of a cold shower do you need?
The best technique is to start off your shower warm, and then make it gradually colder until you can withstand the coldest setting. Then, you stand under that temperature for 30 seconds to a minute. By this time, your brown fat will already have started activating.
If you repeat this two or three times a day, you’ll be on your way to activating your brown fat on a regular basis. Even though humans don’t have that much brown fat, even activating small amounts of it will give your metabolism a big kick.
Some people who adhere to this behavior can lose up to 9 pounds a year from this alone!
Of course, diet and exercise is the only real way to lose a significant amount of weight is with a balance of diet and exercise. But this can certainly help!