Sauna can’t melt your fat

I often see people lining up outside the sauna/steam room in the gym waiting to ‘melt away’ their fat. Unlike a candle or a slab of butter, body fat cannot be ‘melted away’ by heat.

Well, technically, it can but the temperature required to melt it within your body against your body’s homeostasis would actually burn you. Plus, the fat will still remain in your body.

Long story short, hours in the sauna or steam bath won’t make you any less fatter. Sitting for a long time in the steam room may actually do the opposite — since you raise the external temperature, the body strives to return to a state of normalcy and therefore reduce the internal temperature of the body, causing a drop in the BMR (basal metabolic rate).

The times you may see a drop in weight, it’s not fat loss but water loss from your body caused by dehydration. Which is not only bad for your body in excessive amounts but the weight gets back to normal as soon as you drink water and electrolytes.

If there is a positive correlation between temperatures and fat loss, it is actually towards cold temperatures. In colder conditions, the brain signals the body to increase its BMR to generate heat. The brain also induces shivering as an automated exercise to spike the BMR and heat up the body to keep body temperature closer to normal despite the cold outside.

Scientists are currently studying fat loss by activating BAT or brown adipose tissue. BAT, unlike the flabby and metabolically inactive white adipose tissue, causes non-shivering thermogenesis and helps use fatty cells to produce energy/heat. It’s these BAT stores that allow animals to hibernate through the winter without food and use body fat for fuel. BAT stores are high in babies allowing them to withstand colder temperatures without shivering, but as we grow up, the BAT stores reduce and are too low to actually contribute to a high level of consumption of fat for energy.

For now, the best advice is to use sauna or steam at the spa for recreation, not for fat loss. Meanwhile, for results in fat loss, nothing beats the timelessly proven classics of exercise and a stringent, scientific diet plan.