Does temperature affect your mestabolism?

If your body is really hot or really cold, does the amount of calories you burn change??

when i was an inpatient in an eating disorders unit, we thought that if you were cold you burned more calories. picture twelve severely malnourished girls standing  in strap tops by the window (which only opened about an inch) 'shivering' away their 3000kcal a day diet. haha.

the nurses used to go crazy at us for doing that..

ummm in reality? i think your body does work harder to keep you warm when it's cold outside but to be honest i think the difference is minimal. xx

Thanks. I should point out that I am only asking out of curiousity since I was freezing all weekend and it got me thinking about how hard my body was working to keep warm. After the miserable shivering weekend that I had, I absolutely have no intentions of trying to freeze the pounds away. LOL

You do burn more calories when you are hot or cold. But only if you are actually physically uncomfortable.. and unless you are strictly monitoring your intake you would probably end up being hungrier and eating more to compensate.

My heart rate monitor tells me i burn WAY more calories walking my dog in the morning when it's cold. It makes sense- your heart has to beat faster to pump blood to maintain your body temperature. I don't think the same is true for when you're hot, but what do I know.

Original Post by emilyd22222:

My heart rate monitor tells me i burn WAY more calories walking my dog in the morning when it's cold. It makes sense- your heart has to beat faster to pump blood to maintain your body temperature. I don't think the same is true for when you're hot, but what do I know.

 The same is true when you are hot. Your heart beats faster to get blood to the surface of your skin where it can cool. You sweat so that the surface of your skin can cool and cool your blood. Of course, we can tolerate heat a lot less well than we can tolerate cold so it is not the best idea to deliberately overheat yourself!

Just so you know I graduated college with a corporate fitness degree and study stuff such as tempature related to your metabolism rate (how many calories your body burns just to function) and to answer this question without calling anyone names for them not knowing facts... you do burn more calories when your cold than when you are at your normal body heat in order to heat your body up, you do not burn nearly as many calories as if your body is hot. the reason for this is simple it takes more bodily functions to cool yourself off than it does to heat yourself up for example sweating. Being hot also causes your heart rate to speed up causing your body to use a lot more calories, lastly your bodies metabolism speeds up drastically when you are hot causing you to burn a lot more calories. good example of this is when you are running a fever you lose weight because your body works so hard to get your tempature to go down granted you lose more when u have a fever do to not being able to eat but its the same principle. so to answer everyone who doesnt know if u wanna burn more calories be hot not cold! so to be polite and help you all not be confused being cold will burn more calories than usual trying to warm yourself up but being hot causes a lot more.

Well skidawg just made me feel a little better about the fever I'm running.