Fat-Burning Fat Cells

The last year has been a battle of the bulge for me, as I have been working hard to lose fat through diet and exercise. A large part of weight loss is self-knowledge, knowing how your own body works, so that you can know what behavioral changes will work for you.

Now, a new study is suggesting that there may actually be fat cells that burn calories by producing heat.

Their papers, appearing Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, indicate that nearly every adult has little blobs of brown fat that can burn huge numbers of calories when activated by the cold, like sitting in a chilly room that is between 61 and 66 degrees.

Thinner people appeared to have more brown fat than heavier people, younger people more than older people; people with higher metabolic rates had more than those whose metabolisms were more sluggish, and women had more than men. People taking beta blockers for high blood pressure or other medical indications had less brown fat.

It makes me wonder if winter training might actually burn more calories than we think, if this "brown fat" activates in the cold. Self-knowledge is power.