The Problem: People struggle to lose weight, so need support to burn fat.
The Solution: Create cold gyms to burn more calories.
I was watching a re-run of a Top Gear episode recently, in which Jeremy Clarkson says that in the Arctic you have to eat 5,000 calories a day to survive (as he chomps into a Crunchie in a heated Toyota Hilux!).
There are many heated gyms and yoga studios, as well as more classic saunas, which all use excess heat to drive increased sweating and purported weight loss, however most of this is put back on once individuals replenish their fluids.
Spending time in the cold, in contrast, does burn more calories and crucially more fat, significantly aiding weight loss.
Therefore, with obesity a growing problem in the West, I suggest creating cold gyms – a combination of conventional gyms with running and weight equipment combined with facilities more resembling a spa, but which are refrigerated to close to zero temperatures.
These gyms would help people to burn more calories on each visit, and even for those not very fit and keen on a conventional ‘gym session’, merely going for a walk through the cold gym spa area would aid weight loss.
These cold gyms would be especially beneficial for boot camps, where the aim is to lose a lot of weight quickly.
Every facility would have warm showers and a café with hot drinks to warm visitors up after their sessions, enabling controlled exposure to the cold to maximise health and safety.
Indeed, there could also be a hot gym next to a cold gym, to provide a Scandinavian style experience similar to the sauna followed by cold lake swim enjoyed in that region.
The key for this idea is to make weight loss, especially fat burning, as easy as possible for people, and as quick as possible – if people see quick results, they are more likely to stick to their exercise routine.
Since we know being in the cold burns more fat, it makes sense to use that to our advantage in a controlled environment.
There is a clip in the Full Monty film where one of the characters wraps cling film around his stomach while eating a Snickers in a hot shed, trying to mimic a weight loss technique he’s been told about.
It doesn’t work, but it points towards a possible solution – instead of sitting in artificial heat, find somewhere cold and let your body burn through the calories to heat you.
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