Many Are Cold; Few Are Frozen

Many of those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are getting hit with a cold spell around now. How severe that may be depends on more precisely where we are, but it’s affecting a lot of people. So, with apologies to our readers in Australia, we’re going to do a special on that today.

Acute cold is, for most people, good for the health:

A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away?

Persistent cold, not so much. Let’s look at the risks, and what can be done about them…

Hypothermia

It kills. Don’t let it kill you or your loved ones.

And, this is really important: it doesn’t care whether you’re on a mountain or not.

In other words: a lot of people understand (correctly!) that hypothermia is a big risk to hikers, climbers, and the like. But if the heating goes out in your house and the temperature drops for long enough before the heating is fixed, you can get hypothermia there too just the same if you’re not careful.

How cold is too cold? It doesn’t even have to be sub-zero. According to the CDC, temperatures of 4℃ (40℉) can be low enough to cause hypothermia if other factors combine:

CDC | Prevent Hypothermia & Frostbite ← you can also see the list of symptoms to watch out for, there!

Skin health

Not generally an existential risk, but we may as well stay healthy as not!

Cold air often means dry air, so use a moisturizer with an oil base (if you don’t care for fancy beauty products, ordinary coconut oil is top-tier).

Bonus if you do it after a warming bath/shower!

Heart health

Cold has a vasconstricting effect; that is to say, it causes the body’s vasculature to shrink, increasing localized blood pressure. If it’s a cold shower as above, that can be very invigorating. If it’s a week of sub-zero temperatures, it can become a problem.

❝Shoveling a little snow off your sidewalk may not seem like hard work. However, […] combined with the fact that the exposure to cold air can constrict blood vessels throughout the body, you’re asking your heart to do a lot more work in conditions that are diminishing the heart’s ability to function at its best.❞

Source: Snow shoveling, cold temperatures combine for perfect storm of heart health hazards

If you have a heart condition, please do not shovel snow. Let someone else do it, or stay put.

And if you are normally able to exercise safely? Unless you’re sure your heart is in good order, exercising in the warmth, not the cold, seems to be the best bet.

See also: Heart Attack: His & Hers (Be Prepared!) ← can you remember which symptoms are for which sex? If not, now’s a good time to refresh that knowledge.

Immune health

We recently discussed how cold weather indirectly increases the risk of respiratory viral infection:

The Cold Truth About Respiratory Infections

So, now’s the time to be extra on-guard about that.

See also: Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!

Balance

Icy weather increases the risk of falling. If you think “having a fall” is something that happens to other/older people, please remember that there’s a first time for everything. Some tips:

• Walk across icy patches with small steps in a flat-footed fashion like a penguin.
  • It may not be glamorous, but neither is going A-over-T and breaking (or even just spraining) things.
• Use a handrail if available, even if you don’t think you need to.

You can also check out our previous article about falling (avoiding falling, minimizing the damage of falling, etc):

Fall Special: Some Fall-Themed Advice

Take care!

The famous answer: no

The truthful answer: yes, and we are doing it all the time whether we want to or not, so we might as well know what things affect our fat distribution in various body parts.

There’s a kernel of truth in the “no”, though, and where that comes from is that we cannot exclusively put fat on in a certain area only, and nor can we do “spot reduction”, i.e., intentionally lose fat from only one place.

How, then, do we do fat redistribution?

Your body is a living organism, not a statue

It’s easy to think “I’ve been carrying this fat in this place for 20 years”, but during that time the fat has been replaced several times and moved often; in fact, the cells containing the fat have even been replaced. Because: fat can seem like a substance that’s alien to your body because it doesn’t respond like muscles, isn’t controllable like muscles, doesn’t have the same sensibility as muscles, etc. But, every bit of fat stored in your body is stored inside a fat cell; it’s not one big unit of fat; it’s lots of tiny ones.

In reality, any given bit of fat on your body has probably been there for 18–24 months at most:

Fat turnover in obese slower than average

…and there are assorted factors that can modify the rate at which our body deals with fat storage:

Human white adipose tissue: A highly dynamic metabolic organ

So, how do I get rid of this tummy?

There are plenty of stories of people who try to lose weight from one part of their body, and lose it from somewhere else instead. Say, a person wants to lose weight from her hips, and with careful diet and exercise, she loses weight—by dropping a couple of bra cup sizes while keeping the hips.

So, we must figure out: why is fat stored in certain places? And the main driving factors are:

• hormones
• metabolic health
• stress

Hormones affect fat distribution insofar as estrogen and progesterone will favor the hips, thighs, butt, breasts, and testosterone will favor a more central (but still subcutaneous, not visceral) distribution. Additionally, estrogen and progesterone will favor a higher body fat percentage, while testosterone will favor a lower one.

This is particularly relevant later in life, when suddenly the hormone(s) you’ve been relying on to keep your shape, are now declining, meaning your shape does too. This goes for everyone regardless of sex.

See:

• What You Should Have Been Told About The Menopause Beforehand
• The BAT-pause! ← this is about the conversion of white adipose tissue to brown adipose tissue, and how estrogen helps this happen
• Topping Up Testosterone?

Metabolic health affects fat distribution insofar as poor metabolic health will result in more fat being stored in the viscera, rather than in the usual subcutaneous places. This is a serious health risk.

See: Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It

Stress affects fat distribution insofar as chronically elevated cortisol levels see more fat sent to the stomach, face, and neck. This fat redistribution isn’t dangerous itself, but it can be indicative of the chronic stress, which does pose more of a general threat to health.

See: Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)

What this means in practical terms

Assuming that you would like the fat distribution that says “this is a healthy woman” or “this is a healthy man”, respectively, then you might want to:

• Check your sex hormone levels and get them adjusted if appropriate
• Improve your overall metabolic health—without necessarily trying to lose weight, just, take care of your blood sugars for example, and they will take care of you in terms of fat storage.
• Manage your stress (which includes any stress you are experiencing about your body not being how you’d like it to be).

If you are doing these things, and you don’t have any major untreated medical abnormalities that affect these things, then your fat will go to the places generally considered healthiest.

Can we speed it up?

Yes, we can! Firstly, we can speed up our overall metabolism:

Let’s Burn! Metabolic Tweaks And Hacks

Secondly, we can encourage our body to “move” fat by intentionally “yo-yoing”, something usually considered bad in dieting when people just want to lose weight and instead are going up and down, but: if you lose weight healthily, it comes off everywhere evenly, and if you gain weight healthily, it goes mostly to the places where it should be.

So, a sequence of lose-gain-lose-gain might look like “lose a bit from everywhere, put it back in the good place, lose a bit more from everywhere, put it back in the good place”, etc.

So, you might want to gently cycle these a few months apart, for example:

How To Lose Fat (Healthily!) | How To Gain Fat (Healthily!)

You can also cheat a little, if it suits your purpose! By this we mean: if you’d like a little extra where you already have a little fat, then you can put muscle on underneath it, it will pad it up, and (because of the layer of actual fat on top) nobody will know the difference unless you flex it with their hand on it.

Let’s put it this way: people doing squats for a bubble-butt aren’t doing it to put on fat; they’re putting muscle on under the fat they have.

So, check out: How To Gain Muscle (Healthily!)

And finally, for all your body-sculpting needs, we present these excellent books:

Women’s Strength Training Anatomy Workouts – by Frédéric Delavier

Strength Training Anatomy (For Men) – by Frédéric Delavier

Enjoy!