Ultimate Weight Loss Plan

I just read an article where I learned about the next best ultimate weight loss plan. According to this article on How Stuff Works, drinking 64oz of ice cold water a day burns 70 Calories just from your body warming the water up.

That’s all well and good. An extra 70 Calories just from making your water cold adds up eventually. But it takes 3500 Calories to burn off a pound, so this will take 50 days. Who has that kind of time?

No, what we need to do is take this up a notch. Your kidneys can process approximately 30oz of water per hour. If you drank 30oz of ice cold water every hour for 14 hours, let’s stop a few hrs before bed so you’re not peeing all night, you could use your well-insulated meat-oven to heat up 420oz of water a day.

64oz ~ 70 Calories equates to approximately 0.914 Calories per oz. That 420oz brings us up to 384 Calories in a day. Now we’re burning a pound in only  9.11 days.

But that’s not good enough. We can bleed this miracle cure for even more. Those 420fl.oz of water are about 3.28 gallons. A gallon of water weighs approximately 8.35lbs. So carrying that water around amounts to 27.39lbs.

Now, apparently calculating how many calories you burn based on the weight you lift is pretty tricky. I couldn’t find a clear, scientifically reliable answer. But this is the internet so I did find an answer that used math. That’s good enough right?

So lifting 36lbs one foot burns about 0.04 Calories. And once we add some insulation to keep things ice cold, and a storage container, our 27.39lbs of water should be pretty close to 36lbs. Doing a quick, highly scientific test, I lifted a thing that I guess weighs close to 36lbs. I could do ten lifts in ten seconds. We don’t want to exert ourselves too much so we’ll assume you can do 50 per minute. That’s 3000 in an hour. At 0.04 Calories per lift, it comes out to 120 Calories burned in an hour.

If you do that for the first hour when the water is full, we’re now burning 500 Calories in a day. We’re up to a pound a week!

I bet we can do better though. Let’s go running while we do this. Running burns approximately 100 Calories per mile. Now, you’re trying to get weight loss advice from an overweight science fiction writer so let’s assume you’re not the fastest runner. We’ll assume a pace of 3mph.

Adding 1 to 3 lbs adds about 10% more Calories burned. But we’re adding 36lbs. That’s 12x more weight. Now, that won’t equate to 120% more burned so we’ll stick with the 10%. This is science after all, not random assumptions and made up figures.

Walking 3 miles with the extra weight, lifting it up and down the whole time, will burn an extra 330 Calories. We’re now up to 830 Calories per day. That’s a pound every 4.2 days.

And that’s how you can lose 85lbs a year by just drinking ice cold water. Truly the ultimate weight loss plan.