Does drinking ice water burn up to 1000 extra calories per day?
Possible Duplicate:
Does being cold help lose weight?
I read this comment on a YouTube video showing body builders having breakfast:
Ice water. That's the key. Not just plain water - you gotta put
ice in it. Otherwise your gains in the gym just go kaput. It's the
secret of the pros. Especially during contest prep. Burns an extra
1000 cals a day of pure fat.
Obviously YouTube comments by random people who most of the time are just spewing nonsense is not to be trusted but this one really caught my attention because of the ramifications if it's true. So I rather ask the experts, is there any truth to this and if so why?
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NO. A calorie is defined as the amount of energy needed to warm 1 gram of water by 1 degree C. Lets imagine an extreme implementation of this advice - someone who eats a gallon of ice slush per day. That's about 4000 grams or 4 liters. If the H2O goes from freezing temp (0) to body temp (37), the energy consumed is 14800 calories. Since one metabolic "calorie" is actually a kilocalorie in physics terms, the amount (148 calories) is negligible, hardly close to the 1000 calories claimed. More like a couple eggs or apples.
Cold food would affect the homeostasis of your body, requiring more heat to be produced to bring it back to 37 degrees, so there's probably some truth to it, but not to the extent suggested.
A much more likely reason that bodybuilders drink so much water for contest prep is cutting weight. If you drink a ton of water and then stop 12-24 hours before the contest, you'll cut anywhere from 10-30lbs by pissing it out and sitting in a sauna in a sweat suit. I've cut 8% of my bodyweight in water doing that. Ice water might factor in there as well, as people in hot countries drink spicy tea to deal with the outward heat, whereas drinking ice water or slushies leaves you still sweating just as much.
Cutting water weight leads to much better muscle definition, so it's quite understandable that someone might confuse 30lbs of water weight with 1000 calories worth of fat.
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