Can You Lose Weight in a Sauna
Have you ever used a sauna? If you are like most of us the answer is yes.
Saunas are all the rage these days – the hottest ticket lose-weight-without-the-work luxury item. And if you’ve ever spent a moment in one, you know they feel great! But do they work? In a word: yes. But read on for the fine print.
Saunas have been used by advanced cultures throughout the world for thousands of years for its health benefits. From Scandinavia to ancient Rome to Native North American’s, sweating has been used as a way to improve mental and physical health alike.
Sitting in a sauna relieve stress by helping you to relax. The heat is soothing, and makes it easy for us to momentarily shed our mental baggage relish in the moment. Shedding emotional baggage is one of the oft-overlooked ways to shed baggage of the more physical sort.
Relieving stress makes it easier to avoid those emotional triggers that cause us to succumb to temptations and consume our usual comfort foods.
The improvement to your state of mind will also help raise your mood, giving you more optimism and energy to face your life and all its incumbent challenges, not least of which is the challenge of sticking with your chosen weight management program.
A calmer mind and a better mood can only help you live an active and productive life, one so satisfying that you’re inspired to be as good and loving to yourself as you can possibly be.
In concord with relieving stress, a sauna helps lower blood pressure and aids in digestion, both of which make it easier for the body to maximize the nutritional benefits of the food you eat, processing and absorbing more of the nutrients and eliminating less of them as waste.
It should be noted that while you are in the sauna your blood pressure will rise so do not use one if you have high blood pressure.
The benefits of saunas in losing weight don’t stop at stress relief. In a hot, steamy sauna, the body produces sweat, an activity that requires the burning of calories. That’s right: sweating burns calories.
Another way sweating helps burn calories is by raising the heart rate. The steam and hot temperatures of a sauna prompt the heart to pump a bit faster in order to distribute more blood to all the body’s capillaries, giving the effect of a small cardiovascular workout. And as we all know, an increased heart rate burns more calories.
So yes, you can literally lose weight ( water weight) instantly just by sitting in a nice, hot sauna.
Saunas additionally benefit your health by helping boost your immune system. In a sauna, the body temperature raises to the point where the body is fooled into believing it has a fever. Upon making that realization, the body begins fighting off whatever caused the perceived illness, thereby giving your immune system a safe and healthy little boost.
Along the same lines, saunas also effectively help rid the body of harmful toxins, like sodium, lead, mercury, and sulphuric acid.
The one caution we offer about using saunas to lose weight, however, is that weight loss from dehydration (water weight-loss) must be regained. A considerable weight loss from sweating is not a healthy or sustainable weight loss. Drinking water should always be a part of a healthy session in a sauna – before, during, and after,
Instead of rushing to the scale after each session in the sauna to see how much you’ve lost, just allow the gradual and incremental weight loss from regular healthy and properly hydrated use of a sauna over time.
Two more things to remember
1. The weight loss that results from a sauna is water weight loss and you will regain it as soon as you drink water. So don’t look at a sauna as a way of losing weight but as a way of relaxing (so that you will be less stressed and will eat less “comfort foods”), and when you use a sauna you are taking care of yourself. Once you get in the habit of being good to yourself you will find that you will want to eat less junk food.
2. Since a sauna will raise your temperature, increase your hear rate and eliminate water from your body be sure to get the ok from your health care practitioner before using a sauna. If you take certain medications, or have any medical conditions (even being pregnant) you should not use a sauna. So again- be sure to check with your doctor first.
