You been told that drinking cold water helps to burn calories, but how much? And even if you do lose weight, is it really worth the effort?
To better answer these questions, let's first establish a understanding of why exactly water burns calories.
First, all substances have what scientist call a specific heat capacity. This is just the energy needed to raise the temperature of a substance to a higher temperature.
For water, this value is 1 calorie/gram-Celsius. What this simply means is that it takes one calorie to raise a gram of water 1 degree Celsius.
What does this have to do with burning calories? Well your body's temperature is 37 Celsius or 98.6 Fahrenheit and as such, prefers its nutrients to be at that temperature. So when you drink cold water, your body must expend a certain amount of energy or calories to warm it up.
For instance, let's assume that you drink water that is cold as possible without freezing, which is around 0.556 Celsius or 33 Fahrenheit. To raise a typical 8 ounces or about 227 grams of water to body temperature, this is calculated out to be: (1 calorie/gram Celsius) x (227 grams) x (37 - 0.556 Celsius).
The solution to this equation gives us a whopping 8272.788 calories!
Just kidding. Actually the calories that you see on food labels represent kilocalories with a capital "C". The lowercase "c" represents the previous value.
So 8272.788 means that 8.272788 or around 8.3 calories are burned when drinking a glass of very cold water. But before you decide that it's to few calories to bother with, let's take a long-term view of what this could mean for you.
The recommended amount of glasses of water that you should drink a day is 8 to 10. For the sake of keeping the math simple, let's say you drink 10 ice cold glasses of water. That would mean you would burn about 83 calories for that day by just drinking water alone. Better, but still not that impressive.
Well if you did that for the entire week, that would mean that you burned 581 calories from just drinking water. For four weeks that would be 2324 and for the year, 27888 Calories. And since it requires you to expend 3500 calories to burn a pound of fat, that means in a year you could burn over 8.5 pounds of fat by just making a habit of drinking cold water. Cool!
Also, these 10 glasses of water come out to be 0.625 gallon or 2.37 liters. If you are physically active, you are almost guaranteed to drink more than that. So for instance if you drank a gallon a day for an entire year, that would mean you could burn off almost 14 pounds of fat!
So the potential of losing weight by drinking cold water is there, just don't go overboard. Drinking too much water messes with your electrolyte balance. And drinking several gallons a day is dangerous and could lead to death.
But at the very least and regardless of the amount, try making a habit of drinking nothing but ice-cold water. And since nuts, vegetables and fruits have high quantities of electrolytes, make sure that they are a part of your diet, as they should be anyway.
But remember this. Drinking cold water alone is not all you need to do to lose weight. Exercise and proper eating habits are the key. Cold water is just another weapon in your overall arsenal to help you lose weight more quickly.
Just some water for thought.
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