If you spend time on the internet, you probably see a lot of ads.
After a while, you might notice that some ads show up everywhere.
Like, you’ve probably seen something along the lines of this one:
Lose weight with this 1 weird old trick!
Doctors hate this!
Turns out that those kinds of ads are really old.
Like, older than the internet, even.
As far back as the nineteenth century, companies were advertising all sorts of strange ways
to shed fat.
And from so-called sauna pants to electric shockers to vibrating belts, you’ll sometimes
still see them presented as a way to lose weight.
They make tempting promises: just stand around!
Let the machine do the exercising for you!
But these methods… aren’t exactly effective, because the supposed science behind them isn’t
quite so scientific.
Take the sauna pants for example.
The idea was that you’d make some part of your body really, really hot, sweat a lot,
and somehow get skinnier in the process.
But all you were doing was dehydrating yourself.
There were a lot of different versions -- some, advertised in the 1970s, were like giant inflatable
balloons for your body.
Others were heated electrically -- and for some reason, you can still buy them, though
they aren’t generally marketed for weight loss anymore.
If you’ve ever imagined wearing pants made of an inflatable mattress, you can probably
imagine that it was, indeed, really hot in there.
You would sweat a lot.
And of course, if you weighed yourself before and after you tried this, the numbers would
totally go down on the scale.
According to the ads, that meant you were losing what they called “water weight.”
That was technically true.
Wearers of the pants lost some weight through sweat, and sweat is mostly water.
But that’s essentially the same thing as saying that peeing is an effective weight
loss method.
Which…
no.
Unless you plan on staying dehydrated forever, it comes right back the next time you drink.
Electric shocks were also once all the rage, and you’ll still see these electronic muscle
stimulation, or EMS devices for sale, claiming to give you rock-hard abs or whatever.
But, while they might be able to make your muscles firmer, they aren’t going to burn
much fat.
Normally, signals from your nerves release lots of charged ions in your muscles, making
them contract.
So when you apply an electric charge with an EMS machine, those muscles think your nerves
are sending them a signal, and they contract like crazy.
And that does exercise your muscles, which have to use energy as they contract and then
relax.
And in some cases the repeated contractions have been shown to make them firmer over time.
But since it’s just a few individual muscles moving, instead of your whole body working
together, they don’t use very much energy -- one study found that a 75 kilogram person
using an EMS device for an hour might be able to burn 76 calories total.
But if that person decided to walk around for an hour, they would’ve burned 326 calories.
Which is why, at least in the US, the FDA won’t approve any EMS devices that claim
to help with weight loss.
And even the approved versions can cause burns, so you might be better off just doing your
crunches manually.
And now we come to the fat jiggling belts.
They promised to loosen fat, which your body would then just flush away … though no one
ever explained exactly how.
And that’s not how fat works.
You might be able to shake it off, but only because you’re burning off fat as you shake.
And definitely not if something else is doing the shaking for you.
Movement takes energy, and normally, when you exercise, that comes from the energy stored
in your cells.
Eventually, your body starts breaking down the chemical bonds in fat molecules to get
that energy.
But in the case of the fat jiggling machines, the energy was coming from the electricity
powering the machine, not your fat cells
There are ways to make your body “flush away” fat, like a cosmetic procedure that
kills fat cells by freezing them.
And other body-shaking techniques, like chairs that swivel back and forth while you sit on
them, work by forcing your muscles to compensate for the movements.
But you can’t just detach your fat cells by moving them around a little bit.
Exercise only burns fat if your body’s breaking it down for energy.
So if that’s a thing you want to do, you have to put in the work yourself.
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