If fixing diet and exercise are number 1 and number 2 to being a happier human. I'd put fixing the person you're dating at number 3, the people you're friends with at number 4, and the temperatures of the showers you take at number 5. A+ / 5 star - would have my cofounder challenge me again.
But ultimately I stopped. Partly because my hair never washed right in the cold water, but mostly because the showers were making me grumpy & irritable for the rest of the day. I didn't enjoy that feeling, I didn't particularly enjoy the showers, and I didn't notice any productivity or health benefit.
I first heard about cold showers from Joel Runyon, so I'll give him a link [1]. But it quickly went from blogs about "here's a self-motivation idea I'm trying" to "here is my TEDx talk and Cold Shower Therapy™ email course and download the Cold Shower Therapy™ app on the App Store".
Cold showers are great and, as someone who's suffered from depression in the past, I go into each day thinking, "what's the worst that could happen"?*
*I realise that sounds flippant, but it's true...
Glad you tried it. For my part - I tried to build tools that helped people take action (rather than just read it and think "hey, that's a cool idea"). Pretty much all of them were free if that helps at all.
If the "tm" thing bothered ya, I apologize. Let's call that symptoms of a hangover from a trademark related lawsuit (story coming soon).
Let me know if you want to do pushups in the park anytime soon :)
I just use a house and spray nozzle off the back-yard tap ( winter in Ireland is quite mild! ) and the main benefit I feel is the warmth when entering the house afterwards, rather than the typical step-out-of-shower chill.
After a couple of weeks it becomes a routine and normal showers now feel weak and insufficiently cleansing.
I haven't noticed any particular health benefits, still susceptible to colds and flu.
But I haven't really seen it helping to get rid of belly fat; it helps sore muscles recovery after/during workout significantly though. For belly fat I still need to do all the aerobic exercises and proper diet until 6-pack shows up.
As winter ended in New England I wanted to up the stakes a bit. Where my wife and I live there is a lovely little waterfall where we go swimming in the summer. Decided to start swimming in Mid March while taking the dog on a walk next to it while she was gone on a trip. Max time in the water at first was maybe 90 seconds but doing it almost everyday since (combined with the changing of the seasons) means now I can stay in as long as I want without discomfort: on the order of 5 minutes.[1]
Side bonus: it has reset my internal thermometer for what is "cold". Most cold snaps are now, by comparison, "ehh this isn't so bad."
3 mins after stepping out of a cold shower I'm usually feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, as if I had just kicked some disgusting dog off my porch. (/s)
I've only been to such hot countries on vacation, and I think if asked, most people would confirm that they mostly don't use the hot water, except perhaps to sanitize hands with soap.
I didn't notice the difference and the cold showers are not something I could get used to. Guess it's different for each person.
Even if you do it for longer time, you can still catch horrible cold - I got deep sinusitis knocking me out for a month and am still have some mild symptoms (it was a combination of a bacterial infection, another virus and cold showers prior to catching it). Be careful!
I think it'd be easier to convince the readership of HN to lose weight and get fit by eating live maggots whilst suspended upside down in a vat of soylent than to just show up to the gym 3x a week.
The most important way to get fit is to show up and do work. The virtues of a programmer (laziness, impatience, hubris), are the opposite of what you need to succeed at physical fitness.
Also, "weight loss" is a lazy metric for fitness success. Body fat %, for most, would be better, just as one example.
Plus, in this case, taking cold showers could be completely supplemental to a real plan. If nothing else, you would increase your self-discipline.
I do agree with you in the sense that people (in general) are susceptible to exercise fads, but I don't think HN is more than average. Hackers are curious, though - and so you get the interest in the off-beat stuff.
If you subscribe to the theory of ego depletion, it could also weaken your resolve for some time.
Seriously. I shower at the gym pre-work, so I'm usually taking a cool shower as it is, but I hadn't heard of cold showers being a thing before this.
Of course, as with most factors other than sleep and nutrition, the magnitude of that effect will likely be unnoticeable to all but elite athletes striving for that 0.5% edge over the competition.
Exercise is great, but it can't fix a broken diet.
To be cute, diet is great but it can't fix a broken (nonexistent) exercise routine.
For example, the body cannot store in any large amounts carbohydrates. So those have to be converted into fat first. Yet compared with pigs humans luck efficient enzymes for that conversion and it takes up to 30% of calories to convert carbohydrates into body fat. Compare that with fat where a typical cost of storage is just 1% of energy.
It's different for everybody.
I walk about 2 hours per day and stretch whenever I can remember and I would consider my current state of physical fitness a success.
You don't have to hit the gym 3x a week to be fit.
Unfortunately, I am far more proficient in fitness & health than software development.
> Todd’s philosophy of Hormetism is the result of years of personal investigation into the role of moderate stress in adaptation, as applied to health, nutrition, rehabilitation and psychology.
Hormetism is the idea that a low dose of a chemical can induce a response that's the opposite of the response seen at a high dose [1].
Hormetism is, to say the least, very controversial. It is at best a seldom observed, poorly understood phenomena that's important for the biological role of nitric oxide and a few other chemicals. At worst, it's like homeopathy: quacktacular pseudoscience. So take this article with a grain of salt.
Most examples of hormesis, well, aren't examples of hormesis. e.g., a quick glance at Google shows "exercise" being given as an example. Exercise, traditionally, is not something considered harmful at all but the tiniest doses.
The peanut thing is just about ensuring that common antigens are presented while the body is still undergoing the creation of peripheral tolerance to foreign antigens. That is, while the body is still young and learning what is and isn't worth upsetting the immune system over, you should go ahead and introduce it to lots of things you don't want it to freak out on.
I would not call hormetism 'very controversial'.
Almost all of the energy we get from food is used to heat our bodies, mostly indirectly via our liver, spleen and brain. [ https://www.boundless.com/physics/textbooks/624/work-and-ene... ]
A 40 degC person exposed to 0 degC air would lose heat at twice the rate of normal (40 degC person in 20 degC air). That's because convective heat flow rate is roughly proportional to temperature difference. All that heat has to be made up for by the body's metabolism. So you would burn calories at nearly twice the rate you would normally. It doesn't matter if it comes from brown fat, shivering, waste heat from your brain, or some other process, as long as it's internal to your body, it's taking energy that would otherwise not have been used.
A shower in 0 degC water could be on the order of 100 times more effective than 0 degC air, so you could get the same value from a shorter exposure. [ http://www.engineersedge.com/heat_transfer/convective_heat_t... ]
A cold shower for a couple of minutes a day (0.1 % of your life) would be equivalent to cold air for a couple of hours (10% of your life). That's about 10% more energy used than otherwise. So it sounds like even from a simple heat transfer perspective, cold showers must be effective at losing weight, as long as you don't compensate for that some other way like feeling more hungry afterwards :P
Also I think you will find that returning your skin to a normal temperature after chilling in in any way (water, aircon, etc) temporarily decreases core temperature after which you expend energy to return it to normal.
We may have had thousands (if not millions) of years to evolve solutions to heat conservation but they aren't perfect, or people would never die in freezing water or conditions.
Agreed there will be a reduction in blood flow, but there will still be some warming up required. And I would imagine that the longer you're in the water, the longer you'll get cooling just from a pure conduction basis, irrespective of blood flow.
Not saying that I buy the whole "You'll lose weight based on physics alone!" in so much that it'll be significant, but the effect will be non-zero.
(notice the word 'jokes' in the URL, but it's pretty well done)
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617591 and marked it off-topic.
In my experience, it leaves me with a sense of calm and general body-relaxation similar to how I feel 30-60 minutes after cardio workouts.
I took a marine biology course in high school and we had an experiment to show braycardia that involved holding your breath and putting your face in a bowl of ice water. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't keep my body from panicking and pulling away.
I do wonder if actually being in such a phenylalanine-depleted state (which is then also a tyrosine-depleted, phenylethylamine-depleted, L-DOPA-depleted, dopamine-depleted, adrenaline-depleted, and norepinephrine-depleted state) has any long-term effects on the body, which might even be positive. Goodness knows it certainly makes you want to sleep for a week.
(Come to think of it, an interesting question would be whether people with phenylketonuria who grew up on a compensatory dietary-restriction regimen low in phenylalanine—thus causing such sustained deficiencies of all the above—have any physiological differences to people without phenylketonuria.)
It does take a little willpower to get in, but the 'cold' effect lasts about a second; I no longer even have the unrestrained strong shiver I use to have due to the thermal shock.
Oh, and even in really cold water, I can stay there for quite a while, wash my hair etc. The sign that I've been there too long is when the top of my feet start to hurt a little.
Once you get out, metabolism is at full speed and you'll pretty quickly feel very, very warm (while staying outwardly cold for a while).
Only downside I know of is that I'll sometime feel too warm when I get in the office, as the metabolism goes overboard a bit.
My wife doesn't understand how I do it, she calls me 'glaconman' (french version of iceman) since I'm definitely not getting any cuddles for the next 20 minutes or so -- but well, it does work very well for me...
This and picking the right shampoos and soaps at the beginning. It's hard to them "foamy" in cold water, especially during winters when tap water gets even colder. My usual 10 min baths went to 20 with cold water simply because of it.
Also this guy thinks he has the solution to back pain and bad vision as well, so I would take all of his solutions with a "not verified by actual scientific studies" grain of salt.
I think I found about the vision a few years back and then I made a bit more of research and then found this. Ebooks free to download as pdf on the website.
The guy was absolutely ripped so I'd believe what he says, and he usually backed it up with studies.
I've known horribly bad coaches with excellent physiques. And excellent ones who were quite literally paralysed.
Because there's no way he was on steroids, HGH, or EPO to get himself that way?
Not sure it's any more or less "bro science" then this article, but it's interesting and relevant enough to be worth talking about here I think.
[1] https://www.radboudumc.nl/Research/Pages/PNASIceman.aspx
I haven't started with his breathing exercise, just practice, attitude, and knowing what to expect count for a lot.
Best thing would be having a thermometer and showering with same temp water all year round.
However, even in summer it is usually quite invigorating, even though it might be 15-20°C. It can be a good deal colder in winter though.
It ended up being one of my favorite things about Japan, and I spent 2-3 hours there everyday during my week in Kyoto.
490 days later, I'm still using cold water only. Except for ears: switched to using warm water when experienced some buzzing in one ear during last winter. I've upped my game by adding snow/ice baths during the winter. Since last autumn I have added daily HIIT - 10-15 mins of advanced body-weight exercises with 20 sec. rest intervals.
Now, how it affects my weight. Since the last time I wrote about it, I've actually begun to follow my weight numbers. Back at the time I was about 84kg. Cold showers alone, with some gym here and there didn't do much for weight: it went down to 83 sometimes, but bounced back to 84 later. Yet, I must say, I was well into the practice by that time, and few years before I could weight as high as 88 kgs. So, perhaps, cold showers did lower my weight somewhat without my notice. Adding HIIT gave a steady weight loss, albeit a slow one: three months into I lost only 2-3kgs. It is possible that HIIT burned more fat yet balanced weight by adding lean mass: some muscles are bigger now. Mind you, all that time weight was of no concern to me: followed it just out of curiosity. Last January though, my old trauma reminded about itself and I needed to lose weight. Since I was already doing most of the recommended stuff, I just cut on calories by completely removing sugar and keeping 12 hour window for eating. In one month I lost about 6kgs going to 76-77kgs and decided to keep it their by increasing calories. TL;DR: Cutting calories is the fastest way to lose weight, neither cold-showers, nor HIIT can compete with it in short term.
On the upside, both cold showers and HIIT are downright pleasure to do once you get addicted to them. I do HIIT after the work before evening meal, at about 5 - 6PM, follow it with a cold shower and feel full and energetic as if I've just waken up in the morning.
For example his scientific research on suppressing immune response to an infection is sold as a medical revolution while it has absolutely no practical value - if you think about it - quite the opposite as an immune response is usually something rather useful.
Anyway - I think it is worth it for several obvious reasons:
- it's definitely very refreshing!
- it helps waking up a lot
- it is a simple way to train discipline
- it's less stressful to skin than hot water
- it's nice to know that I am not depending on hot water
I almost never feel cold, when I do i'm sick or very tired.
I do martial arts and I gain muscles very very easily, so maybe that's because of that?
And all my blood values have always been in the optimal range, except cholesterol which is always a bit too high (runs in the family).
I love my hot showers too much to give them up, so this seems preferable.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/?s=Irisin
Quotes Peter Attia? He isn't a researcher.
