Feel the Freezer Burn: Losing Weight by Chilling the Body

Oct. 29, 2010— -- When popular diet plans failed, Ray Cronise, former NASA scientist and founder of Zero G Corp., says he found an extraordinary way to lose weight by tapping into the laws of thermodynamics: he was going to literally freeze his butt off.

"The current paradigm of losing weight is diet versus exercise, calories in, calories out. I was able to do was figure out that another big part is the environment we're in. Our body temperature remains constant and it takes a lot of energy to keep it that way, no different than heating your house," Cronise says.

By exposing his body to cold in the right ways, he theorized, he could boost his weight loss. In fact, he doubled how fast he lost weight using these techniques, losing 30 pounds in six weeks.

"I treated my body like a thermostat…to see if I could run up the utility bill and get the furnace, [my metabolism,] running at full blast," he explained in a presentation on his weight loss given at Wednesday's TEDMED conference.

Cronise's inspiration came when, desperate to find a more efficient way to lose weight, he heard that Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps ate 12,000 calories worth of food a day. Even with all the athlete's physical activity, it didn't make sense to Cronise why he would need that much.

"Then I found out it was the water," he says, because the cool water forced Phelp's body to constantly fight to maintain its temperature.

It turns out, this phenomenon was well-studied by the military and the space program in the 1950s and 1960s, only in the context of keeping weight on soldiers in cold, harsh environments, not on weight loss.

Using swimming and something called thermal loading, where the body is exposed to cold in various ways, Cronise applied this decades-old research and found that he could lose up to four pounds a week.

"You really think you're burning all these calories because you're sweating [when you work out], but when you're cold you burn way more calories," he said in his presentation.

"People usually have a problem losing the last 10 pounds on diets but it would get easier to lose that last 10 pounds with these techniques. The cool thing about this method is that the thinner you are the less insulated you are so it gets easier," he adds.