Winter is over and many of us may have loosened the reigns on our healthy habits and hibernated more than we intended to? Perhaps our fat stores are a little over supplied and we’re only noticing it now we are taking some layers off?
Packing on a few extra kg’s over winter is a natural process to assist with thermal regulation but there is a fine line of what’s healthy and what type of fat is created.
Not all fat is the same! Just as when we are eating fats, there are healthy fats and not so healthy fats, same goes for fat that is stored on the body.
There are 2 main types of fat.
1.) Brown Fat
2.) White Fat
Brown Fat?
BROWN FAT is a Healthy lean type of fat tissues that is able to release energy when needed resulting in the production of heat. Our bodies were naturally designed to have good amounts of brown fat.
New born babies have a relatively high amount of brown fat, so they can regain any heat lost within a relatively short period.
Brown Fat is ESSENTIAL for Healthy Metabolism, healthy immune function, recovery and is activated and created with consistent exposure to the COLD.
Brown fat is usually located around areas of importance (neck, trunk and spinal cord) usually deeper than surface level fat.
WHITE FAT, is the type of fat that we generally try to avoid accumulating.
There is a large amount of new evidence suggesting that white fat is produced when we consume too many toxins. Toxins including but not limited to processed food e.g (trans fats, vegetable oils, preservatives etc), toxic self care products, tap water, cleaning products, smoking, pharmaceuticals etc. These are foreign to the body and therefore the body attempts to eliminate them, but generally the consumption and exposure of these toxins outweighs the elimination potential and so the safest places for toxins to be stored is in fat tissue. Our body stores these toxins as a protective mechanism. This prevents the toxins flowing around your blood stream which causes damage and illness.
Unfortunately when the toxic burden gets overwhelmingly high these toxins start to be stored on fatty organs such as our heart, brain, liver and kidneys and creates negative effects on our hormone production, hunger levels, increases our risk of cancer, depression and reduces our overall health.
White fat is found mostly below the skin and around the organs. It is much bulkier than brown fat.
How to Get More Brown and Less White Fat.
Get More Brown Fat
Brown fat is predominately produced and activated through consistent cold exposure.
Engaging in things like:
- Cold showers
- Ice baths
- Cryotherapy
- Winter ocean swims
All of these help produce and activate more brown fat.
Cryotherapy is the most efficient and effective way of getting your body to put on brown fat
Cryotherapy allows your body to be exposed to much lower temperatures than any other form of cold therapy and it is much more tolerable than all other forms of cold therapy.
E.g. -130ºc for 3mins in the Cryotherapy chamber vs. 8mins at 8-11ºc in the ice bath.
To learn more about cryotherapy click here
Avoid White Fat Accumulation
White fat is produced by the body in response to a high level of toxic exposure, so the best way to avoid its accumulation is to reduce your exposure to toxins.
I could probably talk about this all day and this topic probably deserves a blog on its own. However simply put:
- The water we drink needs to be filtered.
- Avoid consuming processed foods and drinks especially with refined sugar, preservatives, colours or additives.
- Replace unhealthy oils with healthy oils. E.g no vegetable/seed oils and use extra virgin coconut or olive oil, organic butter or grass finished ghee.
- Stay away from teflon and plastic foot containers.
- Read the ingredients on the back of your cosmetics, cleaning products, self care products and food packets. If it has things that sound like they are made in a lab, Stay away.
If you think you already have a high level of toxic white fat. The best and safest way to remove it is through the Niacin Detox Protocol using Infrared Sauna. Read more about that here.
