Let’s face it, 2020 was a hard year that challenged all of us. Gyms closed for an extended amount of time, many of you became homeschool teachers, and amidst all the chaos, still had a full-time job to balance. Being healthy was hard to prioritize, but we want to help you get back on track in 2021.
Cryotherapy and red light therapy are fantastic options to support and sustain your weight loss goals naturally. Let’s break down each treatment further.
Cryotherapy and Weight Loss
To understand why cryotherapy helps you lose weight, it’s important to understand the two different types of fat in your body, white fat and brown fat.
White fat is the type of fat we try to avoid accumulating as it comes from consuming a surplus of calories. White fat cells store energy in the form of a single, oily droplet below the skin and around our organs. White fat can impact hormone production and our hunger levels, and it does very little to help you burn calories.1
Brown fat cells contain mitochondria and are made of a larger number of oily droplets (although still smaller than those that make up white fat). Brown fat generates heat and helps regulate your internal body temperature depending on your environment. Creating this body heat requires a lot of energy and uses your body’s excess fat stores for fuel. Because brown fat is known to be metabolically active, it’s been proven to help you burn fat.2
Thus, if you want to lose weight, you want to convert your white fat into brown fat! This conversion will increase your energy levels and metabolism and help you get more lean. So where does cryotherapy come into play? Cryotherapy has been proven to help convert your white fat into brown fat and support weight loss goals.
Cryotherapy increases your body’s leptin production. Leptin is a hormone produced by fat which regulates appetite – the more fat you have, the more leptin you produce. Leptin should communicate to your brain that you are full and that you should stop eating.3
The weight loss conundrum? As you lose weight, your leptin production decreases, which can increase your appetite and cause you to gain weight back. This is why cryotherapy is so incredibly helpful! As you lose weight, cryotherapy helps your body continue to produce leptin, convert white fat to brown fat, and continue to lose and keep the weight off.
Red Light Therapy and Weight Loss
Diet and exercise, while important factors, are not the only factors that play into weight loss. Other factors that are less talked about include your cellular environments, circadian rhythms, and lifestyle habits like sleep, hydration, and stress. Imbalances in your body play a significant role in weight gain and obesity and it’s important to talk about them too.4
Your body works better when your cells are in balance, and making and using energy efficiently. However, when your cells are out of balance from issues like inflammation, lack of sleep, or poor gut health, your metabolism and digestive system can be thrown out of whack. Let’s dive a little deeper into these body stressors.
While inflammation is natural and helps your body recover from injury and strain, chronic inflammation can lead to an overproduction of cytokines, which impacts your insulin response. Ultimately, this issue will cause your body to store more fat and lead to weight gain.
Sleep quality affects nearly all areas of your life, and weight and fat loss are no exception. Lack of sleep knocks your body and cells out of balance, which can lead to issues with digestion, metabolism, and weight. Why? Because poor sleep habits impact two hormones, ghrelin (stimulates appetite) and leptin (decreases appetite).5 Poor sleep increases your ghrelin production, which can lead to overeating.
Poor gut health is finally starting to be researched more because it really is crucial to your overall wellness. The gut microbiome is a delicate balance of microorganisms that live in the digestive tract and help you digest food. Emerging studies have found that changes in the makeup of the gut microbiome are linked to obesity and metabolic disorders.6
If any of these factors are at play in your life and you’re struggling to lose weight, it’s time to get to the root cause of it. Red light therapy is a way to get to the root of your weight struggle and fix it. Red light therapy can pull your body back into balance because it helps to pull your cells back into balance, regulate your circadian rhythms, and increase circulation.7
Many of us, especially this time of year, do not get enough natural light exposure, which is a main cause of cellular imbalance. Red light therapy helps you to get that natural light exposure to help fix inflammation, poor sleep, and gut health.
Book your appointment to give cryotherapy or red light therapy a try and start working towards a healthier you this year!