Sauna suits -- jogging suits made from rubber or latex -- work by trapping evaporated sweat near your body. This increases the apparent temperature for the person wearing the suit, encouraging an increasingly high level of perspiration. Although a popular tool for people trying to shed water weight for an athletic event, this kind of weight loss is at best useless for people trying to shed fat.
Losing Water Weight
Sauna suits make you sweat. As you sweat, your body loses water. At 8 lbs. per gallon, even water weighs enough that this lost sweat can make a difference on the bathroom scales. This is why wrestlers, boxers and other combat athletes sometimes manipulate their water weight before a match. However, wrestling coach Andy Brick advises that this water weight comes right back as soon as you restore a healthy level of hydration. In this way, it's not unlike losing weight by vomiting: you're really just temporarily ejecting cargo, not making your ship lighter.
Healthy Weight Loss
"Real" weight loss is a matter of applied physics. You must burn more calories through activity than you take in by eating. If you do so, your body burns off fat to get the extra energy it needs. Although running in a sauna suit will burn a few calories, it doesn't burn a significantly higher number of calories than running in a healthier environment. Losing weight by burning calories takes longer than shedding water weight, but those pounds will stay off once you drink a bottle of water after the workout.
Health Risks
Dehydration can kill you. Even mild dehydration from brief sessions in a sauna suit have been found to cause dizziness and irritability. Long sessions of water weight loss, or an extended habit of the practice, has produced organ damage and even death. According to Brick, the health risks associated with sauna suits and similar practices has led many high school wrestling authorities to ban their use, and even punish coaches whose athletes use them.
Long-Term Problems
Self-destructive weight loss is self-destructive weight loss, meaning that sauna-suit weight loss is in most meaningful ways no different from crash dieting and bulemia. In fact, a report by Vanderbilt University found that athletes who engage in sauna-suit workouts are likely to engage in other destructive weight-loss methods. Even more disturbing is a further finding that high school athletes who use this practice are likely to continue destructive weight-loss habits well into adulthood. In short, sauna suits for weight loss is bad news. Don't try it.
References
- Andy Brick; Wrestling Coach; Hillsboro, OR
- "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy"; Walter Willett M.D., et al.; 2006
- Vanderbilt University: Weight Issues in Wrestling
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