The Cold Room Diet

I have lost 20 pounds this past year. I am healthy as far as I know and have made no changes to my diet, but it has been an unusually cold and windy year on the Coastside. Now it seems that there is a relationship between being cold and losing weight.

The New England Journal of Medicine, quoted in today's New York Times, says the answer is brown fat. Nearly every adult, the paper says, has blobs of brown fat, so called because it is filled with iron-rich mitochondria, our cells' little energy sources. PET-CT scans show that brown fat burns glucose when activated by the cold.

In other words, you can lose weight by sitting in what the paper calls a chilly room, 61 to 66 degrees (the average temperature in my historic but uninsulated redwood house).

We have insulated curtains, vinyl film on the windows, draft-stoppers on the windowsills, sheets of styrofoam glued to the walls, a thick rug on the tile floor. I have caulked everything caulkable, and still we have to wear heavy sweaters indoors. I won't even tell you what we wear to bed, but you might think of eskimos.

I suppose it is some consolation that we can keep on slathering butter on everything and still button our jeans, but it's, well, cold comfort at best.