Sauna

A sauna will make you sweat, so it may cause you to lose a small amount of water weight. It will not burn extra calories, and you'll gain the weight back as soon as you rehydrate.

jakeziskin1 wrote: »

Thanks Alyssa for the help. So you think you'd lose a few pounds in an hour of sauna use. I wouldn't stay in more then 12 mins a round

a few pounds.... of water.

Which is useless if youre trying to lose... fat.

Just water weight. Jockies and lots of other sports with competing groups based on weight (e.g. wrestlers, judo, etc....) use the saunas simply to lose the weight and be under their "cut off". Thus, it is not fat loss. If it were really a "useful" method of managing fitness, other athletes would use it. I love saunas for relaxing but don't fool yourself into thinking that weight lost from excessive sauna use is healthful.

Floridaman789 wrote: »

I use a far infered sauna it helps get the toxins out of your body. My doctor suggest I do it to help get rid of inflammation and it works. It's dry heat not stea

Which toxins?

You'll lose "weight" in the sense that you'll sweat out some water, which will temporarily (as in for an hour or two) make you weigh marginally less. As soon as you drink some more water, that "weight" will return. No effect on fat loss.

This is useful if you're an athlete hoping to meet the requirement for a weight class that day and don't care about the fact that it's just dehydration and will disappear as soon as you rehydrate. Not useful for fat loss.

It's very relaxing and I've certainly found the prospect of sitting in a sauna after to be an appealing aspect of getting myself to the gym for a workout, but the sauna itself won't affect your fat loss.

brower47 wrote: »

Floridaman789 wrote: »

I use a far infered sauna it helps get the toxins out of your body. My doctor suggest I do it to help get rid of inflammation and it works. It's dry heat not stea

Which toxins?

You sweat, but toxins likely stay

The products: We all carry the residue of modern living deep within our bodies. We get mercury from fish, pesticides from apples and polyvinyl chlorides from that "new-car smell." A 2005 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of more than 2,000 people across the country found traces of more than 60 toxic compounds, including such nasty stuff as dioxins and uranium, in the blood and urine of participants. As the CDC noted then, nobody really knows what -- if anything -- these substances are doing to our bodies. But plenty of people are eager to get rid of them.

Worries about toxins have spawned an industry of pills, tonics, diets -- and even absorbent foot pads -- that promise to flush away, suck out or otherwise banish the poisons in our lives.

If you're willing to spend several thousand dollars on your personal detox mission, Sunlight Saunas wants to make you sweat. A lot. Its home saunas bathe users in infrared heat that can reach 140 degrees, enough to open up anyone's pores.

...The bottom line: Sweat does contain trace amounts of toxins, says Dr. Dee Anna Glaser, a professor of dermatology at St. Louis University and founding member of the International Hyperhidrosis Society, a medical group dedicated to the study and treatment of heavy sweating.

But, Glaser, adds, in the big picture, sweat has only one function: Cooling you down when you overheat. "Sweating for the sake of sweating has no benefits," she says. "Sweating heavily is not going to release a lot of toxins."

In fact, Glaser says, heavy sweating can impair your body's natural detoxification system. As she explains, the liver and kidneys -- not the sweat glands -- are the organs we count on to filter toxins from our blood. If you don't drink enough water to compensate for a good sweat, dehydration could stress the kidneys and keep them from doing their job. "If you're not careful, heavy sweating can be a bad thing," she says.

Sweating definitely won't help clear the body of mercury or other metals, says Donald Smith, a professor of environmental toxicology at UC Santa Cruz, who studies treatments for metal poisoning. Almost all toxic metals in the body are excreted through urine or feces, he says. And less than 1% are lost through sweat. In other words, you'll do far more detoxifying in the bathroom than you ever could in a sauna.

Prescription-strength chelation drugs such as EDTA are the only products proven to remove significant amounts of metals from the body, Smith adds.

Read more: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/28/health/he-skeptic28