Question regarding sweat and burning calories

[Draperchique]

I've heard that the simple act of sweating does not burn calories, but I've never quite understood that. If you get hot, your body sweats in order to keep your core temperature stable, right? Well doesn't that require energy, i.e. calories?

Wouldn't this be the same physical process as drinking an ice cold glass of water? To raise 1 gram of water 1 degree celsius, you expend 1 calorie. And I'm not talking the calories used to describe energy in food, but the energy it takes to raise the temperature of water. These are two different types of calories. So to say you drink 10 8oz. glasses of water (at 0 degrees celsius) a day which equates to about 2,365 grams, raise that to a normal body temp of 37 degrees celsius and you have burned 87,505 calories. But then to convert that number to the calories we all think of and relate to weight loss, you gotta divide that by 1000 and you get 87.5.

Is this the same thing? If so, then sweating WOULD burn calories. Can somone explain?

 

[dswithers]

Your body burns calories just laying in bed: BMR (Base Metabolism Rate). Yes, sweating like any body process does burn more calories, but the vast majority of the apparent weight loss from sweating is in the form of water, which is replaced next time you intake liquids of any kind, so it is not premanant loss.

I assume what you are trying to get at with the cold water thing is that if you drank that much cold water every day you would loose weight if you did nothing else different? I think the problem with this, besides the fact that water at 0C is frozen if I remember correctly and it is very hard to drink water that cold let alone 10 glasses, 87 calories is not very many. One bite more or less of something can be 87 calories and your body tends to adjust your BMR (base metabolism rate) to maintain bodyweight steady, so doing that every day would have little effect. Just like running for 60 minutes burns only a few hundred calories (and less as you become more accoustomed to it), however the number of calories burned after exercise, EPOC, is much more (used in the recovery and rebuilding processes), and even more from resistance exercise than from endurance exercise. Also, remember, a caloric deficit tends to lead to weight loss (both fat AND lean body mass, in proportions determined by your genetics); a caloric deficit with resistance exercise tends to lead to fat loss.