Cold Water and Fat Loss

[BendtheBar]

I was reading a random book yesterday and stumbled upon this little OCD gem:

for every one ounce of ice cold water you consume, you burn one calorie

Being the curious mathematical dork, I decided to do a few calculations. What if, I wondered, I drank 32 ounces of cold water per day?

32 ounces x 365 days = 32 calories burned x 365 = 11,680 calories burned per year, or rounding about 3 pounds per year.

I have about 30 years left to live, so by drinking this amount of cold water per day I will lose over 90 pounds by the time I pass on.

then I stop and realize all the cold drinks I've consumed over the year and wonder just how fat i would be if beer was served warm. Scary!

[musclewannabe]

LOL I too have heard that cold ice water will burn a calorie or two since you need to warm it up when it hits your system.

[ricka182]

The energy used to warm it up is negligible, at best. But who the hell sits back to enjoy hot water in a cup. Coffe or tea is one thing, but just a glass of 150 degree plain water? That just sounds awful.

And as for warm beer; there is a saying.. "Real men drink real ale." Real ale is also called cask ale, fermented and served right out of the cask, served room temp warm. I can only agree on a few beers that can be warm-ish, the rest have to be between 35-45 degrees. I keep my kegs at about 40 degrees.

[Off Road]

Dr. Darden was big on drinking cold water throughout the day. Do a search and you can probably still find some articles floating around. I always thought it was quackery myself.

[BendtheBar]

I actually like to do this with ice cream

[Off Road]

From Dr. Darden of HIT Jedi fame...

Originally Posted by Dr. Darden

When you drink chilled water, which is about 40-degrees Fahrenheit, your system has to heat the fluid to a core body temperature of 98.6 degrees. This process requires almost 1 calorie to warm each ounce of cold water to body temperature. Thus, an 8-ounce glass of cold water burns approximately 8 calories, or 7.69 to be exact. Extend that over 16 glasses, 128 ounces, or one gallon — and you’ve generated 123 calories of heat energy, which is significant. There’s real calorie-burning power in cold water.

[BendtheBar]

Makes me feel somewhat better about all the Kool-aid and Mountain Dew I drank early in life.

I better start drinking cold coffee.

[big valsalva]

Well, yes. Of course your body warms the cold water up to the core temperature. It doesn't NEED to, but it happens anyway. And of course, it does require a certain amount of energy to do so. I see nothing Bro Science about that claim. The figures may be a bit off though. The talk of drinking cold beer, Kool-Aid, Mountain Dew, etc. and accomplishing the same results is flawed in that those beverages contain calories, and the calories your body needs to bring those beverages up to body temperature is more than offset by the caloric content of the beverage itself. Iced black tea and iced black coffee (especially when used to wash down an asprin and ephedra tablet) would accomplish the same result as chilled water. I wouldn't want to rely on the ice water technique as my sole method of burning up excess calories, but to help bust through a plateau, or in conjunction with a serious diet and exercise regimine, it couldn't hurt at all.

[5kgLifter]

I've often wondered why people bother with this cold water drinking for fat loss, other than because they actually enjoy cold water which would be my only reason to drink the stuff, wouldn't it just be easier to have a very hot curry...instant loss of a few pounds and in less than a year, or just have an enema

[bruteforce]

Now to compute how much energy would be expended standing outside naked for an hour a day during the winter to keep warm.

The other thing (more serious) is that when you eat or drink something hot, the body must expend energy to regulate its temperature. Not sure what the numbers on that are though.