Cold Way To Lose Weight

[From article]
During the swimmer Michael Phelps’s 2008 Olympic gold-medal streak, Cronise heard the widely circulated claim that Phelps was eating 12,000 calories a day. Having been fastidiously trying to lose weight, he was incredulous. Phelps’s intake was more than five times what the average American eats daily, and many thousands of calories more than what most elite athletes in training need. Running a marathon burns only about 2,500 calories. Phelps would have to be aggressively swimming during every waking hour to keep from gaining weight. But then Cronise—who knows enough about heat transfer to have been employed keeping astronauts alive in the sub-zero depths of space—figured it out: Phelps must be burning extra calories simply by being immersed in cool water.
Seven million years of evolution were dominated by two challenges: food scarcity and cold.
Fascinated, Cronise began a regimen of cold showers and shirtless walks in winter, and he lost 26.7 pounds in six weeks.
[. . .]
Many of us live almost constantly, year-round, in 70-something-degree environments. And when we are caught somewhere colder than that, most of us quickly put on a sweater or turn up the thermostat.
In that sense, we don’t really experience seasonal variations in temperature the way our ancestors did.
[. . .]
Cronise, Bremer, and Sinclair propose what they call the “Metabolic Winter” hypothesis: that obesity is only in small part due to lack of exercise, and mostly due to a combination of chronic overnutrition and chronic warmth. Seven million years of human evolution were dominated by two challenges: food scarcity and cold.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/does-global-warming-make-me-look-fat/383509/?single_page=true

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015
The Benefits of Being Cold
Year-round warmth is a modern luxury, and one that could be affecting body weight and health.
JAMES HAMBLIN
DEC 28 2014, 7:44 PM ET