With summer over, fall and winter are bringing the perfect fat loss tool – low temperatures.
That activates your brown fat, so it warms your body by burning off the white fat you want to lose.
Fortunately, cold exposure is not the only way to activate your brown fat, which I’ll explain in a moment.
Until a few years ago, scientists believed only newborn babies had brown fat. They need it to stay warm because they’re too young to shiver.
But adults lost their brown fat when they grew up.
Then PET scans of cancer patients revealed they still had some brown fat, and now we know nearly all adults still have some. However, like most other good things, it decreases with age.
But we can increase it.
What Does Brown Fat Do?
Also known as Brown Adipose Tissue (BAT), activated brown fat burns white fat (WAT) to generate heat or nonshivering thermogenesis.
Your white fat stores energy. BAT burns it.
The mainstream media wants you to believe you can “burn” white fat only through exercise, but activated BAT keeps feeding your metabolic furnace 24/7.
BAT contains a large number of mitochondria. Those are the power plants of your cells. Your mitochondria combine oxygen and food to create ATP, which your cells use for energy.
The mitochondria in BAT cells also contain an uncoupling protein. This allows them to produce heat directly from burning white fat, bypassing ATP.
The heat goes into your blood, helping to warm your body.
What is Beige Fat
You’re born with a certain amount of regular brown fat, which grows smaller as you age.
However, you can encourage mitochondria to grow in your white fat. By adding color, they turn it beige. And those mitochondria also burn the surrounding white fat.
Therefore, for the practical purposes of this article, I’ll just refer to both original BAT and beige fat as brown fat.
We’ve all lost a lot of brown fat since we were born. Younger people have more of it than seniors. Obese people have a lot less brown fat than slim people.
What’s important about beige fat is that we can create more of it – and so increase how much white fat it burns.
How Much White Fat Will Brown Fat Burn?
Some claim brown fat can stimulate your metabolism into burning up to 300% more energy – which comes from your white fat. In the real world, that probably varies a lot depending on how much brown fat you have and how activated it is.
Brown fat generates up to 300X more heat than any other tissue in your body. Just two ounces can burn several hundred calories per day.
Another cool thing about brown fat – it doesn’t slow down your metabolism. Normally, when you go on a diet and lose weight, your metabolic “set point” adjusts to the new reality of eating fewer calories. This makes it harder to keep burning more calories. It’s a major reason why long term fat loss is so hard to sustain.
The Most Well-Known Way to Increase and Activate Brown Fat
That’s to expose yourself to cold temperatures. In one study, scientists had volunteers wear summer clothing in a 58-degree room for two hours a day, so it doesn’t take extreme cold.
In his book What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength, Scott Carney tells of a man who lost a lot of weight by walking an hour a day in cold weather without a heavy coat.
Exposing your torso area works best, so you can increase your brown fat without endangering your extremities. If you go out in winter weather, wear wool socks, gloves, a hat, and a scarf.
Some people stand in cold showers for a few minutes or sit in ice up to their waist. Others wear freezer packs around their bellies and chest.
What to Eat to Increase Brown Fat
Arginine: Foods high in this amino acid include soy, nuts, seeds, beans, and peanuts.
Ursolic acid: Apple peels contain high amounts of this phytonutrient. Other sources include plums, cranberries, blueberries, oregano, prunes, hawthorn, thyme, holy basil, lavender, devil’s claw, bilberry, periwinkle, and peppermint.
Hot and Sweet Peppers: The capsaicin in hot peppers increases your brown fat just as it generates heat in your mouth. If you can’t eat hot foods, the capsinoids (capsiate, dihydrocapsiate, and nordihydrocapsiate) in sweet peppers also increase your brown fat.
Radiologists advise their PET scan patients to eat a high fat, low carbohydrate diet so their brown fat won’t show up on the scan. (Which they give to patients to detect cancer, not brown fat, so when activated brown shows up on a PET scan, it just makes their job harder). Therefore, a low fat, high carbohydrate diet appears to increase and activate brown fat.
Other Ways to Increase Brown Fat
High-Intensity Exercise: This produces irisin, which turns your white fat beige.
Intermittent fasting: This means going without food for short periods, from missing one meal to not eating for 24 hours.
Melatonin: Your body releases this hormone when you’re in a deep sleep. Therefore, it’s one more reason people who sleep 7-8 hours nightly are at lower risk of obesity than people who sleep less. It’s also available as a supplement.
At this time, there are no drugs on the market which increase brown fat.
Cold exposure also strengthens your immune system, increases your insulin sensitivity, decreases inflammation, and lowers your blood sugar levels – all great for your health and longevity.
DISCLAIMER: Check with your doctor before exposing yourself to low temperatures.
