Fitness Myths: Excessive sweating = more weight loss

This is a fun one that can actually be quite dangerous if you understand why your body sweats. I think that most people are probably already aware that sweating is your body's natural defense against over-heating and that while this tactic is used for drastic weight cuts just before a weigh in for a professional fighter for example, it has no long standing effect on anyone, even elite athletes.

I don't think that this belief is very widely held in North America, but the time I have spent living in Korea and Thailand I noticed that a lot of people at the gyms wear excessive clothing despite the fact that it wasn't cold at all. There are also these metallic looking jackets that they sell in the fitness section that are specifically designed to make you sweat as much as possible.

There have been cases of people using this method for training and have died as a consequence. The fact of the matter is that this water that is coming out of your body is in-fact very useful in helping you be not dead.

When people use this method of training and do a "before and after" trip to the scales they will see that they actually do lose half a pound or something. However, if they were to drink a bottle of water and then wait a while, they would see that all that weight came back immediately.

Dehydration is no joke folks, and there is a reason why people stranded in the desert die from exactly this sort of thing.

When professional fighters don one of these suits and go for a run just before a weigh in I can assure you that they have minders that are making sure they don't die in the process. The weight that you lose while sweating like mad is almost certainly contained in your clothes in near the same quantity to that think you lost on the scale.

I get annoyed when I see products like this fooling people into something that is NOT true and is also potentially deadly if used incorrectly - which they almost certainly always are. If sweating were a method of truly losing weight, then why bother exercising at all? Just go sit in the sun and watch the pounds fall off... right?

There is no substitute for hard work and a dedicated diet, and that is exactly the sort of illusion these silly products are advertising. If you sweat a lot during a workout and then feel the need to celebrate your "weight loss" do so after you drink a glass of water.

I also see this same advertising gimmick in "hot yoga" classes but when the science is actually factored in it turns out that the heat in the room actually has zero effect on calories burned as that people who were doing a 3 mph walk in cold environments burned the same amount.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't do yoga, it's fantastic for you after all. A lot of people including myself skip flexibility when this is probably one of the most important aspects of fitness. I just don't like the lies that we are fed by these companies. The yoga sells itself, you don't need to make bogus weight loss claims as well.