Sweat is just fat cry­ing! Sounds great right? Gives the idea that the more you sweat, the more weight you can lose right? Well I re­al­ly don’t like to be the bear­er of not so good news but I have to be hon­est with you guys, this state­ment is not re­al­ly based on truth and serves as more of a men­tal / mo­ti­va­tion­al pitch, so let me try to break it down to you as best as I can.

Sweat or per­spi­ra­tion as it is oth­er­wise called is sim­ply a means by which the body reg­u­lates its tem­per­a­ture. It con­sists of wa­ter like flu­id and is in fact lit­er­al­ly ap­prox­i­mate­ly 99 per cent wa­ter with trace amounts of lac­tic acid, fat­ty acid and urea that se­cretes from our sweat glands which are present all over our bod­ies. The fact is, what we re­al­ly lose when we sweat is main­ly wa­ter, elec­trolytes and trace min­er­als and not tox­ins, since fat is burnt in­side cells for en­er­gy.

It is a fact that some peo­ple sweat way more than oth­ers how­ev­er this is not an in­di­ca­tion of one’s fit­ness lev­el since dif­fer­ent fac­tors can in­flu­ence how much a per­son sweats. Some of these fac­tors in­clude, age, weight, ge­net­ic in­her­i­tance, fit­ness lev­els, wa­ter re­ten­tion lev­els and en­vi­ron­men­tal fac­tors. When per­form­ing ex­er­cise rou­tines, more than any­thing else, your weight and lev­el of fit­ness will im­pact on the amount of sweat that is pro­duced since your body re­quires more en­er­gy to sat­is­fy more weight; the more body mass, the more sweat will be re­quired to reg­u­late the body tem­per­a­ture.

So it stands to rea­son that the bet­ter your fit­ness lev­el, the faster you will gen­er­ate sweat since the body will be more ef­fi­cient at reg­u­lat­ing its tem­per­a­ture which can al­low more rig­or­ous work­out rou­tines.

Now I am not say­ing that you won’t lose any fat from sweat­ing be­cause if you are en­gaged in very high in­ten­si­ty forms of ex­er­cise such as lift­ing heavy weights, run­ning a marathon or hik­ing, the like­li­hood of your body burn­ing some fat is very re­al. No, what I am say­ing is that sweat in and of it­self is no pre­cise mea­sure­ment of fat burn dur­ing ex­er­cise or oth­er forms of ac­tiv­i­ty. Be­lieve it or not the wa­ter weight will re­turn as soon as you re­plen­ish your wa­ter in­take. I am pret­ty con­fi­dent that many of us have en­gaged in ac­tiv­i­ties such as yo­ga, swim­ming and ex­er­cis­ing in an air-con­di­tioned en­vi­ron­ment where sweat­ing is min­i­mal at best yet our bod­ies still re­duce its fat con­tent and dare I say, in an even more ef­fec­tive man­ner than in ex­treme heat.

Through­out my life as a fit­ness ex­pert, I have seen peo­ple take many seem­ing­ly des­per­ate meth­ods to lose weight via sweat­ing in re­sponse to this myth. Peo­ple would wear lay­ers of clothes, ie jack­ets or even plas­tics while walk­ing, run­ning or ex­er­cis­ing in hot / hu­mid con­di­tions for the pur­pose of los­ing weight, or they would work out in a gym with­out air-con­di­tion. I am here to tell you that what these acts usu­al­ly do is sim­ply put your body un­der stress, in­duce ex­haus­tion and cause de­hy­dra­tion re­sult­ing in headaches, vom­it­ing, loss of elec­trolytes, or heat stroke which over­all ham­pers per­for­mance and does not pro­duce the de­sired re­sults.

Now you know that sweat­ing and los­ing weight are not si­mul­ta­ne­ous so im­prove the qual­i­ty of your food in­take, sup­ple­ments and ex­er­cise regime and your weight loss goals can be more re­al­is­ti­cal­ly achieved.

Don’t be­lieve the hype!