Although a few factors connect sweating and weight loss, sweating does not directly cause you to lose weight permanently. In other words, sweating doesn't expend calories or burn fat. For example, if you sit still in a very hot room, your body won't burn more calories than it would burn if you were sitting in a very cold room.
Sweating and Exercise
When you exercise, you burn calories, and you usually sweat. However, the sweat doesn't cause the weight loss; instead, the exercise causes both the calorie burn and the sweat. Sweating and losing weight both result from the exercise, but they have no direct or causal connection.
If you sweat solely because you're exercising -- not just because of the room's temperature -- then the sweat demonstrates that you have increased your heart rate. An increased heart rate is an essential element of a cardio workout; it means you're burning calories. In this sense, sweating can indicate that you're losing weight, even though it doesn't cause the weight loss.
What Does Sweating Do?
When you exercise or do strenuous work, your heart rate rises. Because your muscles work harder than usual, they need more oxygen, and your heart pumps faster to quickly spread oxygenated blood to all of your muscles. This raises the temperature of your body. As a result, your body begins to sweat, as a cooling mechanism; as the sweat evaporates from your skin, your body cools down. As you continue exercising, your body keeps sweating in an attempt to prevent overheating. Health experts term this process thermoregulation.
Temporary Weight Loss Through Dehydration
Sweating does provide a temporary sort of weight loss, but the weight loss doesn't last and doesn't mean that your body has lost fat. Because liquid, which has weight, leaves your body during the sweating process, you will weigh slightly less after sweating for a while. This water loss doesn't change your body permanently; it only makes you dehydrated. When you rehydrate, which you absolutely must do in order to remain healthy and avoid injury, you will regain the lost weight.
Misconceptions
Many weight-loss systems or gimmicks claim to promote weight loss through heat that provokes sweating, but none of these attempts burn any extra calories through sweating. For example, sitting in a sauna only stimulates weight loss through temporary dehydration. Wearing sauna suits, plastic pants or simply too much clothing also causes undue sweating and water loss, but you won't lose any real weight, and you may become dangerously dehydrated or overheated. Bikram yoga, which takes places in a hot room, burns calories through yoga poses, but the heat-induced sweating does not increase those calories.
Member Comments