Achieving Weight Loss Through Thermogenesis: Dr. Wayne Hayes

This Week’s Guest:

Dr. Wayne Hayes is a true scientist holding positions such as professor at the University of California-Irvine and visiting scientist at Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. His background covers everything from astrophysics, biology, and computer science. His latest project and startup is called the Cold Shoulder. It’s a vest that helps with weight loss using thermogenesis.

Episode:

Significant calorie burn may be as easy as wearing a cold vest. Dr. Wayne Hayes explains what thermogenesis is, and how it has been scientifically proven to aid in weight loss. To reach your weight loss goals, maintaining a healthy lifestyle comes first and foremost, and Wayne explains how to begin the journey to a healthier, slimmer you.
We Discuss:

• How the Cold Shoulder burns calories.
• What to eat to live a healthy life and lose or maintain weight.
• The science behind the vest and cold exposure.
• The fad diets to avoid, and what may actually be good for you.

Here’s what I learned:

Thermogenesis

1. Thermogenesis is the generation of heat inside the body of a mammal.

• It also refers to the intentional generation of heat-if you are cold, you may start shivering, which is your body trying to produce heat.
• If your body is even the slightest bit cold, it needs to burn calories to stay warm.

• It’s not enough to generate goose bumps usually.
• Most users find the temperature comfortable, and they still burn a significant number of calories wearing the ice vest.

Creation of the Vest

1. Wayne got the idea by reading the book The 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferriss.

• One of the chapters chronicles a story of a NASA scientist named Ray Cronise.
• Ray read about the idea of burning calories through thermogenesis and started self-experimentation.
• He drank a gallon of ice water a day, took ice baths, slept without sheets in the winter time, went on winter chill walks, and took cold showers.
• Tim Ferriss also experimented with by putting ice on the back of his neck and found that it had a significant calorie-burning effect.

The Science

1. Scientists have been studying this idea since the 1960’s.

• It was first studied by Canadian scientists who were trying to figure out why hibernating rodents don’t freeze to death in the middle of winter.
• They’ve been studying it in the lab, with other mammals, for more than 50 years now, and they have done some experiments on humans.
• They put humans in a mildly cold room for 10 hours a day wearing shorts and a t-shirt for two weeks straight and have shown that this generally causes your body to respond by burning tons of extra calories and losing fat.

• In a test that they did with  eight participants they found that over a 2-week period, they lost about an extra pound of fat per week wearing the vest.

• You could wear it several hours in a stretch and more than once a day, and you would burn probably a lot more.
• They haven’t tested the calorie burn for wearing the vest different lengths of time formally, but believe that the longer you endure the cold, the more calories you’ll burn.

It’s Not the Magic Weight Loss Solution

1. The vest allows calorie burn. It doesn’t necessarily equate to weight loss.

• If somebody wore the vest, but ate a bunch of extra brownies to make up for the calories lost, they could not lose any weight, or actually gain more weight.

• The vest should be used in addition to a healthy diet and exercise regimen.

• Wearing an ice vest while you’re sitting in front of your computer or watching the Super Bowl is not really all that crazy.

• Also, when you have liposuction, it doesn’t change your blood numbers so you still have a lot of cholesterol floating around in your bloodstream-You still have to work on your health, no matter what.

How to Live a Healthy Lifestyle

1. You have to balance your calorie intake with the calories you expend.

• Wayne and his wife wrote a book called The Cold War on Fat, and the first half of the book is all about diet, then they go into cold exposure.

• Group A eats 90% fat, Group B eats 90% protein, and Group C eats 90% carbs.
• If all three of those meal choices have the same number of calories, the three groups will have the same weight-loss or weight-gain.
• The difference will be, the people who ate the protein and the fat will feel much more satiated, and the people eating fast carbs, get a huge calorie influx but it doesn’t make you feel full.
• The carb group will feel starving and they’ll start getting borderline diabetes or insulin spikes that are not healthy.
• If you eat a bag of potato chips, you could eat 1500 calories in one sitting, but if you had that same number of calories in a steak, you would be stuffed and wouldn’t even eat the whole thing.

Crazy Fad Diets

1. There are crazy diets like The Clay Diet, where people are ingesting clay just to make themselves feel full because it has zero calories.

• Clay has significant levels of arsenic in it, it’s sending people to the hospital because they get arsenic poisoning.
• Avoid all these crazy fad diets and just eat fresh food.

• Fruit juice is not a whole food because you’re just basically drinking sugar water.
• When you see a carton full of juice and it says ‘made with the juice of 16 oranges!’-when is the last time you tried to eat 16 oranges?
• Fruit juice is not fruit and Wayne recommends that you get your fructose from eating actual fruit because the fiber is really important and could be lost while making the juice.
• If you are doing a juice cleanse, a veggie juice is much better for your body and doesn’t spike your blood sugar.

• Ray Cronise also did an experiment with extreme fasting, he just drank water and nothing else for 21 days.
• Wayne tried it and went 3-and-a-half days.
• In the Paleo caveman days, you have to find your food before you can eat it-you might go days without food just because it wasn’t easily available.
• The Ancient Greeks only ate once a day. They only had one meal a day because they couldn’t be bothered having three meals a day.
• Wayne recommends mild fasting, possibly having one meal a day and fasting for the other 23 hours or so.
• A lot of people think you’ll lose energy by the 2nd or 3rd day of a fast, but you’ll wake up feeling terrific on the 3rd day.
• Your body has plenty of fat storage, you start burning fat and you become more alert.

• It could be eating all of your meals within an 8-hour window, and fasting the remaining 16 hours a day.
• Wayne only eats once a day, and doesn’t feel hungry in the morning because he eats huge meals in the evening.

• You eat normally for five days in a week and you fast two days a week.
• You’re allowed to have one small meal like a low-calorie salad in the evening on your fasting days.
• It has phenomenal effects on reducing diabetes-like reactions in your body, reducing obesity, and making your cholesterol and insulin-insensitivity number healthier.

• There have been studies on mice and even some evidence with humans to show that reducing calories is correlated with longer life.
• Wayne wonders if the reason is because with calorie restriction, the results are a very low body fat percentage.
• The question is, is it the restricted calories that are causing the longer life or is the restricted calories causing the low fat body percentage, and the low fat body percentage that is causing the long life?

• Wayne is careful with the vest to protect against this, they use a material that has been used for years for physical therapy and protects from the risk of frostbite.

The Lightning Round

1. The Paleo diet is a great starting point.

• It’s very close to a whole food diet.
• There are plenty of foods that are not Paleo that are perfectly healthy-such as olive oil.
• Paleo is not the whole story.

• Macronutrients are the ratio of fats, proteins, and carbs in your diet, and micronutrients refer to vitamins and minerals.
• Vitamins and minerals are possibly even more important than the macronutrient profile of  what you eat.
• Vegetables are carbohydrates so eating lots of carbohydrates is fine, but you want to avoid processed sugars and processed grains.
• Bread and potatoes are ‘borderline’, choose 100% whole wheat options.

• Vitamins are okay but the vast majority of fat-burning supplements don’t do what they claim and should be avoided.
• Garcinia Cambogia is fake, but supplements like Creatine work.
• Taking a good multivitamin is important, he recommends Vitamineral Green and Athletic Greens.

• If you take a breakfast cereal, it doesn’t naturally have a significant amount of  micronutrients in them.
• They fortify them, taking pure vitamin B, or K, or C, crushing it up into a dust and then they sprinkle it onto the food.
• The vitamins will not be absorbed as efficiently as natural sources.
• For example, celery is high in vitamin A or K and is not a crushed powder-it’s even smaller than powder and it’s molecular vitamins are easily absorbed into your bloodstream directly because it’s dissolved in the liquid in the cells of the celery.

• Eating lots of sugar locks fat into your fat cells because if insulin is high in your bloodstream, then the energy cannot get out of your fat cells, you are just burning sugar and not fat.
• If you keep your insulin low by avoiding sugars then it’s much easier for the fat to get out of your fat cells in order to be burned.

Links & Resources mentioned:

Cold Shoulder Vest

The 4 Hour Body

The Cold War on Fat

Fat Chance by Robert Lustig

Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead

Roman Fitness Systems

The 5:2 Diet

Man 2.0: Engineering the Alpha

Healbe GoBe

Vitamineral Green

Athletic Greens

Get Optimized!

1. Start grocery shopping on the outside perimeter of the store-that is generally where whole foods will be, like fresh fruits, veggies, and meats.
2. Read labels! If a pre-packaged food item has more than three ingredients or ingredients that you can’t pronounce, skip it.
3. Try the Cold Shoulder to start burning more calories today.

Thank you for listening!

As always, thank you for tuning in. Please feel free to contact me or leave a comment. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it!
-Stephan

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