Student Davy’s wizard weight-loss wheeze

Someone just reminded me of the idea that, as a doctoral student, I thought would bring me fame and glory – a dead-easy method of losing weight. You can ask your doctor about this and they should be clued-up enough to know it would work, even if they don’t know precisely how effective it would be – but I DID!

My plan will get you even slimmer!I looked up the numbers, drew graphs, devised algorithms and it was a corker! The only problem with relating this now is that when I went insane and my life transformed into a screaming horror show I incinerated all of the material associated with my brilliant-but-now-defunct academic career in a ceremonial fire. So I can no-longer quote the quantitative details, but my mind retains qualitative information that is worth recounting.

It’s based on a really simple piece of knowledge: when we get colder our metabolic rates increase in order to produce more heat to keep our bodies at the correct temperature. Increased metabolic rates mean increased burning of calories and so stored fat gets metabolised. Consequently, being cold will make you lose weight! Cracking!

Get cold, burn fat!Your metabolic rate climbs at quite impressive rates the lower the external temperature is so if you get colder and colder you’ll burn more and more calories and so lose ever increasing amounts of weight. No need for flavour-free food, slimmers’ clubs or gym memberships: just turn off the heating, open the windows and throw all your warm clothes out of them!

Of course, if you get cold and burn more calories you’ll get hungrier and want to eat more to replace that lost energy. So for my cunning scheme to work you must be cold but not eat any extra food; that’s not so much fun. But it’s one hell of a lot easier to sit naked on your balcony at 3am for a couple of hours rather than go for a piss-boring, uncomfortable run and make everyone hate you for being so sodding keen!

As I said I cannot quote the figures, but I assure you that getting as cold as you can manage (and not eating extra) is a sure-fire method of losing lard, so why didn’t I make my fortune out of this?

The answer is bleeding obvious: saying “Get cold!” to people isn’t worth much money. Even if they believe you, and it has always surprised me that hardly any do, not many people would pay for such simple, stark and apparently obvious (well, to me anyway) advice.

I thought of writing an inch-thick book detailing, in words of one syllable, the idea with various holistic, macrobiotic, leftist-shite embellishments. However, I considered those sort of books to only be purchased by simpering dunderheads who think that large and regular bowel movements are more important than regularly eating large, rare steaks with fried eggs on them. I couldn’t face having such a readership so I couldn’t write the book. Similarly, marketing a range of ‘weight-loss-promoting winter clothing’ offended my high (but non-remunerable) intellectual standards and that didn’t go any further.

So after a mere 18-odd months of boundless optimism my enthusiasm waned and the idea would only be used to bemuse drunk people at cocktail parties when they complained about the windows being left open too long into the night.

But it is a great idea that really works! If anyone wants to do the enthusiastic calculations I did as a rapier-thin student about external temperature, metabolic rate and consequent calorie burning potential for people of various sizes in various temperatures then go for it. I will happily publish them on Elitistreview, if you like, just so my cracking caper gets the quantitative publicity it deserves. But since I didn’t get any money for it neither will you.

Thank you and goodnight!

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