Calories & Cold Plunge
- Thomas P Seager, PhD
- Jun 4, 2022
- 21 min read
Updated: Sep 23
What controls body composition?
Summary
Cold plunge therapy supports metabolic health by improving insulin sensitivity, boosting sex hormones, regulating thyroid function, and remodeling fat stores. It can reduce inflammation and help initiate a weight loss program. However, cold plunge is unlikely to modify overall energy balance in the long term.
Losing weight and maintaining lean body composition is more complex than the clinical trials supporting the Calories-IN-Calories-Out (CICO) hypothesis suggests.
To improve your diet, avoid refined sugar and grains, eliminate seed oils, and minimize plant stems, leaves and roots. Prioritize fish, animal-based foods, and seasonal fruits, as your ancestors would have.
Use cold plunge therapy to help manage your thoughts, because your brain is the most powerful mechanism for managing your body.
The fallacy of the calorie
The dominant theory of dieting is the calories-in-calories-out (CICO) hypothesis. According to this theory, fat volumes in the body are governed by a thermodynamic energy balance such that when energy intake from food exceeds energy expenditure from base metabolism and exercise, the surplus is stored as increased lipid droplets in our fat cells. It follows that the converse should also be true -- that is, to lose weight, a body must burn more calories than it eats.
The simplicity of the CICO hypothesis is very appealing. Moreover, short-term controlled clinical trials support the hypothesis by demonstrating that human subjects in caloric deficit will lost body fat, regardless of the macronutrient mix of protein, carbohydrate, and fat intake (e.g. Howell & Kones 2017). Nonetheless, the simplicity of the CICO hypothesis disguises the complexity of human physiology and encourages overconfidence that results in poor weight management outcomes.
The CICO hypothesis has its scientific origins in engineering thermodynamics. To better describe the quality of fuels used to power steam engines, a French chemist named Nicolas Clément invented a unit for measuring heat called the calorie. He popularized the measure in a series of lectures and publications he delivered in the mid-1820's, and his ideas eventually informed Sadi Carnot's original formulation of the second law of thermodynamics.
The French system of energetic analysis was adapted to human metabolism and popularized in the United States by a chemist named Wilbur O Atwater, who published his seminal works on caloric value of foods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Remarkably, Atwater's original estimates have been carried forward largely unchallenged for more than 120 years, despite inconsistencies and irregularities that demonstrate current methods for estimating food calories are incorrect (Sánchez-Peña et al. 2017).
Writing at the zenith of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, Atwater's work positioned the human body as a machine. His principal concern was to describe the economy of fueling human workers to perform manual labor, in much the same way that French engineers were concerned with the more economical operation of steam engine.
Nevertheless, the human body is not a machine.
There are several misconceptions embedded in the CICO hypothesis that, when corrected, cause re-examination of existing data. The most obvious of these is the difficulty of measurement. For example, the precision with which nutrition information (e.g., food calories) and calorie-burning calculators purport to provide CICO data misrepresents their accuracy. In fact, nutrition labels and calorie counters are at best rough approximations. For example, the laboratory equipment used to measure the energy content of food is called a bomb calorimeter. It works by incinerating food, measuring the heat of combustion, and correcting the thermal measurements to estimate "metabolizable" energy to account for caloric loss via "obligatory losses in feces and urine" (Urban et al. 2011).
Estimates of calories burned via digestion and metabolism are inaccurate, because their accounting for human complexities and variabilities are inadequate. It should be obvious that human digestion does not work like bomb calorimetry. The timing of meals, the extent of chewing, the state of the microbiome, the presence of alcohol in the diet, the age or life stage of the human subject, the degree of stress, and the exercise or activity patterns of the individual all influence the calories obtainable from foods. Additionally, careful studies of human energy expenditure acknowledge that when the body is in caloric deficit for more than several days, metabolism slows to reduce in resting energy expenditure (REE), making further energetic deficits more difficult to maintain.
Most importantly, calories are the crudest of all thermodynamic measures. They measure only energetic quantity. They do not capture food quality. Even if the quantitative measurements of intake and expenditure were exactly correct, they'd be insufficient to explain the relationship between food and body composition because bomb calorimetry destroys the complexity of food. For example, calorimetry cannot distinguish between amino acids and complex proteins. It treats saturated and unsaturated fats as practically identical, and it makes no allowances for variations in digestive microbiome or lactose tolerance.
Calories cannot distinguish between food and food poisoning. As such, they are adequate for only the most rudimentary understanding of the complex human relationship with food.
Cold thermogenesis for burning calories
Resting energy expenditure typically accounts for 60-70% of total human energy expenditure. Strenuous exercise increases energy demands. However, one of the fastest and most effective ways to increase energy expenditure is cold thermogenesis--i.e., activation of muscles for shivering and brown fat for non-shivering thermogenesis, or the production of heat to defend core body temperature against the cold.
Continuous ketone monitoring data sent to me by readers confirms that an ice bath will stimulate almost instantaneous fat burning, and a corresponding elevation of blood ketone bodies. Because the increased energy expenditure initiated by cold plunge and/or cryotherapy lasts for hours even after the exposure, cold therapies have been the subject of intense research targeting obesity. In theory, the increased energy expenditures associated with cold therapy should tip the body into caloric deficit and result in fat loss, assuming appetite and diet and other variables remain constant.
The problem is that in the human body, other variables are never constant. For example, there is evidence in mice that suggests increased energy expenditure during cold exposure is compensated for by reduced energy expenditure at other times (e.g., Presby et al 2019). in this way, cold thermogenesis is no different than exercise or fasting, for which similar compensatory mechanisms have been observed (e.g., King et al. 2012). Moreover, a recent study suggested that cold plunge therapy stimulates appetite in ways that result in increased food consumption--even to the extent that the overall energy budget could tip into surplus despite the fat stores consumed during thermogenesis (Grigg et al. 2025). Nevertheless, the dominant theory of cold plunge therapy for weight loss all focus on the fact that cold thermogenesis is effective for energy expenditure.
While the logic of the CICO hypothesis sounds convincing, the cold thermogenesis theory of weight loss is unlikely to achieve results. That might explain why regular practitioners of cold plunge therapy like me fail to see dramatic weight loss during a regular, documented, and intense ice bath practice. It is possible that the increased energy expenditure measured during and after cold exposure is compensated for by decreased energy expenditure while sleeping at night. That is, despite the effectiveness of caloric deficit for weight loss, and despite the increased metabolic expenditure of calories during cold exposure, it is now evident that:
Ice baths alone are not a reliable strategy for weight loss -- even though they do result in reliable improvements in metabolic and cardiovascular health.
Metabolism vs weight
According to Mike Mutzel, weight is an unreliable indicator of metabolic health. For example, on a calorie-restricted, high carb diet, even extremely thin people can develop Type 2 diabetes. Conversely, a person with high body fat percentage can nevertheless show all the markers of metabolic health -- especially when they maintain active brown fat (e.g., Herz et al. 2022).
I probably fit into that latter category.
When I finally decided to get serious about my weight, I dropped from a high of 249lbs down to less than 195lbs. Although I was still overweight for my nearly 6ft height, I enjoyed compliments from people who said how much better I looked.
When I started ice baths, my health, my energy, and my testosterone levels all jumped to levels I hadn't experienced in decades -- so there's no doubt I was getting healthier.
Nonetheless, I doubt ice baths are helping me keep the weight off. I've gained more back than I expected, and I now bounce around at about 210lbs.
What's going on?
Your body responds to information
The problem with the CICO hypothesis is that it ignores information signaling. As Dr. Bruce Lipton (Biology of Belief 2005) points out, the cells in your body have no choice but to respond to their biochemical and electromagnetic environment. Because simple cells, including those in your gut microbiome, do not have their own consciousness, they must respond to chemical and electrical exposures in accordance with material laws of physics.
Thus, every chemical, sensory, and electromagnetic exposure creates a signal to which the body must respond. Food, medicine, and poison are all chemical signals. Temperature, taste, sound, and touch are a sensory signals. Light, electricity, magnetism, are electromagnetic signals. (There are even quantum signals that transcend the conventional electromagnetic spectrum, e.g., Hunt 2020).
For example, it is well known that weight lifting results in increased muscles mass.
By what mechanisms does this happen?
When muscles are fatigued, a constellation of biochemical responses take place that signal the body to repair, replace, and rebuild new muscle tissue. Thus, body composition is not controlled by energetic balance, but by the information signals that guide energy into synthesis of protein, bone, fat, or water. Because it is body composition (Steinach & Gunda 2020) that we are really seeking to manage, not weight, we must master the practices that signal the body to guide more food energy to building muscles, and less to maintaining fat.
To this end, food plays three critical roles in controlling body composition. They are:
Food as information, signaling the body and its microbiome (Yong 2016) how to adapt to the environment for better survival and reproduction.
Food as material, providing the body with the building blocks necessary to synthesize essential components, including structural cell membranes, internal organs, organelles like mitochondria, bones, muscles, and connective tissues.
Lastly, food as energy for fueling the metabolic processes on which life depends.
Food is best understood as information first, material second, and energy last.
The molecules in food dictate the response of your gut microbiome and the cells in your body in the same way that you expect medicine or poison to create reliable physiological responses. In other words, the food you eat instructs your body in different ways -- including what level of hormones to produce to build muscle for hunting versus fat (to prepare for periods of starvation).
Thinking beyond macronutrients
When ignoring alcohol, traditional dietitians recognize three basic macronutrients: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.
Carbohydrates are the simplest foods and contain little information value. Digestible carbohydrates like sugar and starches are used by the body almost exclusively as energy, while non-digestible fibers pass through the body into the feces. Contrary to conventional diet advice, there is no minimum required dietary intake of carbohydrates necessary to support human health, because the liver is capable of synthesizing glucose for all metabolic processes that require it. In fact, the liver uses amino acids and glycerol obtained from fat cells to synthesize glucose, suggesting: The need for gluconeogenic substrate (during very low carbohydrate diets) may explain how lipolysis can continue when caloric intake exceeds caloric expenditure. -- Westman et al. (2003).
Fats are more complex. They come in a dizzying array of varieties, including saturated, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and trans fats, all of which signal different metabolic and informational pathways within the body.
Proteins are the most complex. At their most basic, proteins are constituted by a long string of amino acids that make up the chemical formula of the protein molecule. However, information is also contained in the secondary structure of protein molecules (folding patterns along the length the amino acid chain), tertiary structure (three dimensional structure of the protein) and quaternary structures (combinations of proteins that fit together).
Ketone esters and salts (i.e., exogenous ketones) can serve as an additional category of macronutrient (Christofferson 2020), although these exist as only supplements, rather than in natural foods.
Within each macro-category of nutrients, there are subcategories that can have different effects on health and body composition. No one has popularized this realization better than Paul Saladino MD, who has experimented with vegan, carnivore, and what he calls "animal-based" diets. Rather than make complicated chemical distinctions to identify nutritional subcategories, Saladino separates macronutrients into simpler general categories:
Seeds, roots, leaves, and stems are not well-suited for human consumption, because plants incorporate chemical defenses into these parts of their organism to discourage predation. Animals that forage on these foods (e.g., cows, gorillas) need extensive digestive tracts to detoxify them. Human beings, with our comparative small stomachs, are ill-equipped to digest these macronutrients.
Beans, nuts, grains, and the flours ground from them are seeds, so they belong in this category of foods to use only as a last resort, or as medicines. This category also includes seed oils (i.e., so-called vegetable oils like corn, cottonseed, soy, peanut, and sunflower oils). Not only are these oils extracted from seeds -- which plants are adapted to defend from predation -- but their production from some crops such as cotton and rapeseed requires chemical processing to detoxify and preserve them. The result of mass seed oil extraction is a barely edible fat poorly suited as building blocks for cell membranes, and vulnerable to toxic cross-linking during heating.
Some studies researching the health effects of the ketogenic diet have achieved a state of ketosis by substituting seed oils for carbohydrates. The unfortunate effect is that the seed oils disrupt mitochondrial function, and are consequently not consistent with good metabolic health. That is, despite the fact that seed oils are technically consistent with a ketogenic diet, they must be avoided. Unfortunately, they're cheap, have long shelf lives, and are consequently ubiquitous in highly processed and fast foods.
Fruits and berries package their seeds with an energy-rich layer of food called the endocarp that offers foragers a nutritional reward when eaten. Fruit seeds are typically well-defended against digestion, so that the animal or human who eats the entire fruit may pass the seeds in their nitrogen-rich feces, where it will germinate into a new fruit plant. In this way, fruit and berry plants are evolutionarily adapted for a mutualistic relationship with their predators.
This may also explain why fruit oils, like olive, coconut, and palm oils, can be healthy dietary supplements, even though seed oils remain toxic. Fruit oils are extracted from the parts of the plant that are evolutionarily advantageous for eating. Thus, grapeseed oil (extracted from the pit of the grape) is tasteless and lacking in nutritional value, while olive oil (extracted from the endocarp of the olive, not the pit) is delicious and healthy. Saladino includes fruits, berries, and fruit oils in his "animal-based" diet, presumably because these foods are healthy for animals, if not derived from them.
Animal fats, in contrast to seed oils, are healthy for human consumption. The best animal fats are from wild animals and fish, compared with farm-raised. For example, cod-liver oil is extracted from cold water fish that roam the north Atlantic. It is especially rich in omega-3 fatty acids that make good the structural basis of cell membranes and brain tissues.
Animal proteins are nutrient-dense foods that could be further divided into skeletal muscle and organ meats. The most popular of these as the skeletal muscles that are cut into steaks, chops, and roasts. The organ meats (liver, kidney, heart, tongue, brain) may be preferable as sources of nutrients, but many people find their taste or texture unpalatable.
What signals changes in body composition?
Food is just one signaling mechanism for the body. Other signaling mechanisms include light, temperature, other biochemical exposures, and exercise. When these signals are discordant -- for example, light signaling and food signaling are pushing energy into different compartments of the body -- disease can persist within the body.
Exercise In my article How To Use Cold Plunge Therapy to Boost Testosterone, I explained how exercising after your ice bath is effective for boosting testosterone. By contrast, an ice bath without exercise afterwards can suppress testosterone in men. Because increased testosterone is associated with increased muscle mass, decreased visceral fat, overall improvement in energy levels and body composition, one of the most important signals you can send your body is to use exercise to recover from your cold exposure, rather than the other way around.
Temperature, Light, Diet Seasonality Perhaps the key to improving body composition further is to align the remaining signals to result in healthier outcomes. Most people assume that light, food, and temperature are all moving together in seasonal rhythm. As days get shorter, plants die (or go dormant), while temperatures drop, thus fruits are less plentiful and ancestral human diets must have switched from complex carbohydrates to fat and protein.
That assumption might suggests that a daily practice of cold plunge therapy does not accord with seasonal variations, and would put temperature out of alignment with food and light signaling. However, in How Cold Water Immersion Shaped Human Evolution, I explained that our ancient ancestors likely emerged from a semi-aquatic cold water existence. For example, the so-called Aquatic Ape Hypothesis explains why humans walk upright, have subcutaneous fat (like whales and dolphins), downward-facing nostrils, and less hair and more webbing between their fingers and toes than other primates to whom we are closely related. These anatomical advantages would make it easier for early Homo Sapiens to wade, swim, and dive through the cold, glacier-fed streams of East Africa in search of water-based prey like fish, shellfish, and waterfowl. That means that in even in the equatorial climates, ancient humans would have experienced acute cold water exposure -- a pattern that must have persisted among my North Sea ancestors, who would have no doubt experienced cold water immersion regularly during their summers.
Although eating keto or carnivore all of the time is now in fashion, it's hard to imagine a Grandma Seager from 10,000 years ago eschewing the delicious fruits and berries that were plentiful in the summer, when temperatures are warm and solar energy is plentiful. Therefore, adding fruits berries back into my diet this summer when days are long and I'm getting plenty of light exposure might improve my evolutionary alignment. By contrast, eating air freighting Chilean blueberries to Arizona in the winter is an ancestral abomination.
While the carbohydrate content of seasonal fruits will shift my body to glucose metabolism (out of ketosis) in the summer, according to Saladino, that shift is part of the natural seasonality to which I am evolutionarily adapted. I agree.
But what about the risks of insulin spike associated with high carbohydrate foods like fruit?
Continuing my summertime ice bath practice will prevent the premature mitochondrial ageing associated with high carbohydrate diets by maintaining high insulin sensitivity and clearing glucose from my bloodstream. Therefore, an ice bath practice during the summer is consistent with my evolutionary biology and essential to my metabolic and mitochondrial health.
Dairy fat vs fruit oils Another peculiar trait specific to people of Northern European descent is very important. About 7,500 years ago, my ancient ancestors developed a unique mutation allowing them to digest lactose (a carbohydrate) in milk as adults (Curry 2013). While the old Vikings had zero dietary contact with coconuts, avocados, and oily fruits, the dairy mutation would have allowed them to continue to drink milk all winter -- as long as they had stored enough hay for their cows to make it.
Therefore, despite dietary advice professing the health of the fruit oils that grow around the Mediterranean, for me it may be that use of tropical fruit oils is discordant with the diet our bodies have been evolutionarily adapted to expect. For those descendant from warmer climates where olives, avocados, and coconuts are available, fruit oils may be a good choice in the winter.
And seafood, according to Jack Kruse MD, "is always a good choice no matter what season we are in."
The ultimate signal?
Finally, there is one additional mechanism for signaling body composition: our thoughts.
Joe Dispenza DC is one of the most popular experts on the importance effects thoughts have on our health. In You Are the Placebo (Dispenza 2014), he describes the placebo and nocebo effect, in which he demonstrates that positive (placebo) and negative (nocebo) thoughts have corresponding health effects. Nonetheless, one of the most dramatic illustrations of the power of thoughts to signal bodily reactions was published in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis.
Bennett G Braun MD reviewed several case studies of patients exhibiting multiple personality disorders, and reported that some personalities exhibited severe allergies, while others in the same patient do not (Braun 2011). For example,
A male multiple was allergic to citrus juices in all personalities except one. If this personality ate an orange and remained in control of the body for a sufficient period of time to digest and metabolize the orange, no ill effects would be experienced by the system. Conversely, if he switched executive control too soon, a rash which itched and blistered would often be the result. If the personality that was not allergic to citrus resumed control, the itching would cease, “. . . as if I had taken an antihistamine.” -- Braun (2011).
The case studies reviewed in Braun's article demonstrate that immune system responses are subject to beliefs. As it turns out, so are bodily responses that relate to metabolism, healing, growth, and almost anything else the body does.
The Milkshake Study
At Morozko, I often say "The story you tell yourself is more important than the experience you have," and a decade-old study from researchers at Yale and Arizona State Universities confirms it (Crum et al. 2011).
Researchers gave participants identical milkshakes, with different labels. The first was labeled as a high-fat, high-calorie, dessert shake made with vanilla ice cream. The second was labeled non-fat, zero-sugar, low calorie yogurt dessert substitute.
Both shakes were exactly the same and participants reported no subjective difference in their feelings of "fullness" after drinking them (as we might expect).
However, their bodies responded differently.
When participants first saw the labels, their blood serum levels of an appetite-stimulating hormone called ghrelin spiked in response to the "high calorie" label, and remained flat in response to the "low calorie".
Elevated ghrelin levels signal the body to eat more food, decrease metabolic energy expenditure, increase energy stores, resist insulin, and shift the body from fat- to glucose-burning metabolism (Müller et al. 2015). In other words, increased ghrelin is the last thing that someone trying to lose fat and build muscle wants in their bloodstream, and simply looking at the label of a dessert shake can stimulate endogenous ghrelin production.
Ghrelin has other effects inside the body, too -- like stimulating memory. If there's an evolutionary advantage to ghrelin, it may be that it prepares the body to gorge on rich foods and remember the source of those foods.
You might think that, although ghrelin levels were primed by different packaging, after the participants drank the identical shakes, their ghrelin levels would stabilize at similar levels, as their bodies responded to the biochemical signals in the shake.
That's not what happened.
When participants drank the shake labeled "high calorie," their ghrelin levels declined significantly more than when they drank the shake labeled "low calorie."
Believing that they had consumed a high-calorie drink crashed their appetite from elevated to far below the levels they experienced when they believed they had consumed a low-calorie drink. That is, the hormonal signals of appetite were satisfied by the belief that they should be satisfied, but not satisfied by a drink they believed could not satisfy their hunger -- even though the drinks were the same.
It would be no surprise if people who believe they are "dieting" remain in a constant state of ghrelin dysregulation that convinces them they are still hungry, no matter what they've eaten.
The results of the Milkshake Study are consistent with separate studies that relate mental imagery to strength gains. For example, subjects who imagine lifting heavy objects gain strength, compared with subjects who imagine lifting lighter objects (Slimani et al. 2016) -- a finding reinforced by studies that show thinking about strength training can serve as an effective partial substitute for doing strength training (e.g., Pearson 2011). what each of these studies helps us understand, is that our body composition is controlled not only by what we eat, and what we do, but how we think.
What worked for me and how I got away from it
For my part, the key to my weight loss was not my ice bath so much as it was a new food mantra. When I was about 245lb and determined to lose the excess weight, I told myself"
I eat what I want, when I want, however much I want.
If that sounds like the opposite of a diet, then that's probably because it is. I lost more than 50lb on an anti-diet.
The key for me was to decide I only wanted great food.
If it wasn't great, I didn't want it. I'd rather fast.
I skipped a lot of free faculty lunches after I decided that I didn't want to eat that garbage anymore. And when I stopped think about what I couldn't eat, and instead started thinking about the how I wanted to live my life, the pounds started coming off fast.
When I had my prostate scare, I would cycle in and out of keto, to discourage cancer growth. But I also instituted what I call "carb confusion days," when I would go to the bakery and order one of each and gorge myself on fantastic baked goods. I can only imagine the hormetic shock to my gut microbiome, the digestive inefficiencies, and whatever adaptive stress response my body underwent.
And it worked well for me.
I started getting away from my "eat great," diet as I read more books about what I should eat, and should not eat, and the reading changed my mentality from positive thoughts that were working well to negative thoughts about what I really should be doing (but wasn't).
I read about carnivore, omnivore, seed oils, fasting, grass fed, and lots of thing in social media that said I should never eat this or that our the other thing. As my thoughts and feelings about what I ate changed, so did my body.
According to an increasing body of scientific evidence, I should not be surprised.
Although often ignored, one’s mindset (thoughts, beliefs, and expectations) is a key component in various domains of health. The mere expectation to heal even in the absence of active pharmaceutical or chemical substances enhances the effect of medication; one’s interpretation of events despite their objective characteristics determines the impact of stress and illness on the body; and identifying housework as a good source of exercise can elicit corresponding physiological benefits without any changes in actual activity. Evidence continues to point to the idea that one’s state of mind influences the body, and we cannot easily separate the interdependence of mind and body. -- Crum et al. (2011).
What comes next?
One night I took a date to a new sushi restaurant that opened in my neighborhood. It looked like a good place, inside a major hotel, and I was curious.
She hates seafood, so we skipped straight to the dessert menu. We got crème brûlée, because that's one of her favorites, and something called "honey toast" that you can probably imagine is straight-up sugar poison.
The physicians I respect would probably tell me, "Don't ever eat that!" and I would deny myself the pleasure of the experience. The problem is that whatever I ate instead, some part of me would feel like the people how ate the "low calorie" milkshake, with brains that told them they had been denied food and so they must still be hungry.
So I decided we were going to order the desserts, because maybe they would be great, and my brain would tell my body I wasn't going to need food for long while.
It turned out the crème brûlée was too runny and the honey toast was nothing great. We didn't finish them, and I didn't feel like I was missing anything.
To set my brain and body back on the course that benefited me in the first place, I'm discarding all the "shoulds," and the "nevers" from my vocabulary. I'm going back to my mantra of eating what I want, doing what I want, when I want -- and reminding myself that what I want is a long, healthy, life that allows me to keep learning and teaching well past an age that most people would consider geriatric.
References
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About the Author
Thomas P Seager, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. Seager co-founded the Morozko Forge ice bath company and is an expert in the use of ice baths for building metabolic and psychological resilience.