What Does 23% Body Fat Look Like?
By: Thomas P Seager
Tags: Ice Bath, Cold Water Immersion, Brown Fat, Weight Loss, Wim Hof

Cold water immersion has reduced my body fat AND changed its composition from white fat to brown fat. Electronic body composition meters do not measure brown fat accurately. They said my body fat percentage was increasing, even though it was stable or going down.

What Does 23% Body Fat Look Like?

In my case, maybe it’s not what you expect.

I always knew I was a fat kid, who grew up to be a pudgy young man, who matured into an obese, middle-aged adult Dad. By mid-40’s, I was setting a bad example for my kids, my wife was unhappy, and I was embarrassed by the shape I was in.

So my daughter and I decided to do something about it. She wrote out a list of body weight, free weight, and yoga ball exercises for me, including little stick figures to demonstrate what each position looked like.

She called it The Fat Daddy Workout and she did it with me once a week.

Because my son has been Type 1 diabetic since he was six years old, I’d already learned a few things about the Atkin’s diet, low carb diets, blood glucose levels, insulin, and ketosis. So I eliminated carbs, took some of my son’s keto strips and started running my metabolism in and out of ketosis.

I dropped to 215, and people noticed.

To keep losing weight, I had to increase my exercise. So, I started experimenting with different classes at the gym.

Spin cycle was not for me. Yoga was better. Kickboxing was fun.

I finally settled into a co-ed weight training class that used a barbell, bench, and free weights. We did 60 minutes of lunges, cardio, and different presses to the thumpa-wumpa of a terrible gym class soundtrack. I made a friend and a couple of acquaintances.

I stuck with the fasting and I quit alcohol and I increased my caffeine intake about 3-fold.

I dropped to 185lb. My wife was buying my clothes at Goodwill. She’d take them back after a few weeks and buy me smaller clothes, because I was shrinking so fast. My waist went from 44 to 34 inches.

That was over three years ago and I’ve mostly kept the weight off, although the shirts I bought when I was 185lb don’t fit me now that I’m back up to 197lb.

As part of my journey, I’ve learned that most of what I thought I knew about diet, health, and nutrition is plain wrong. For example, much of the official, popular nutrition advice is full of outright lies

This scene from the 1980’s hit Beverly Hills Cop, featured Judge Reinhold improvising this scene about the health dangers of red meat. The whole thing was made up.

To learn what worked for me, I had to read things that didn’t come from official or popular sources, and run my own experiments on myself.

One of the things I read was Scott Carney’s What Doesn’t Kill Us, which described the incredible health benefits of hyper ventilation and immersion in freezing cold water.

Scott Carney is an investigative journalist who reported the remarkable truth of Wim Hof’s methods for controlling his own body.

In that book, Carney chronicles his own journey towards fitness under the tutelage of the brilliant Dutch eccentric Wim Hof, who pioneered cold immersion science and the benefits of maintaining brown fat.

As babies, we were all born with brown fat. Without regular cold exposure, we gradually lost our “baby fat.” Finally, by the time he time we reach adulthood, most of the fat in our body is white fat.

The white fat is a store of energy, but the brown fat contains extra mitochondria to burn that energy in a process called thermogenesis. In other words, brown fat helps burn off white fat to generate heat. With enough brown fat, a human body can withstand prolonged exposure to cold temperatures, including freezing water.Only regular exposure to cold will cause our bodies to build and maintain brown fat.