Swimming for weight loss?

Yes, I'm down 87 pounds due to walking, swimming and counting calories. I under estimate my exercise calories and over estimate my calories consumed to ensure Im not eating more than I should to reach my goals.

I'm curious why you thought it was important to tell us the frequency of your swims and what stroke you're using, but no details about your calorie deficit. If it's because you're not tracking your food, um, you have to limit your food intake to lose weight: that means having at least some sense of how much you were eating before, and how much you are eating now.

Track your food. Eat a sensible number of calories but below your maintenance level with exercise. If you don't exercise, you have to eat even less, if you do exercise, yay you get a few hundred extra calories a week -- which is great for morale and helps fit treats in, but doesn't amount to enough of a difference that someone who wants to lose weight can afford to not limit total food intake overall.

I love swimming and it does help me to lose weight! Pretty much, it all comes down to eating right, eating less calories, and making right choices! More importantly, exercise! Strength Training/Resistance, Cardio. All of it helps!

Actually swimming is the best exercise it burns a lot of calories depends how fast your going though but it is legit because I do it for my workouts also

I did a quick Google search and the results are all over the map for weight loss vs temperature, both in water and out of water (cold weather vs warm weather, outside or even in a room). So, science has not definitively stated that colder water swimming will cause you to retain fat, because I've read the opposite. In fact this could cause some people to second guess whether swimming is a good cardio exercise to burn calories, when really it's all about CICO.

It's true that people who swim the English Channel have a higher body fat percentage, but they do that purposely, because the water is beyond cold, and they are swimming for days. Usually 25m community pools are kept between 84-85 degrees, and the "warm water" therapy pools are around 89ish. The competition pools are closer to 80-82 because you CAN'T push yourself to swim really hard in a warm therapy pool. You will overheat, so a long hard workout with high intensity intervals is not sustainable. It's why serious swimmers stay away from "warm" pools.

As for the studies, controlling factors such as diet and efficiency and speed of the swimmers is difficult to do, and from what I gathered - the sample sizes in the studies are small and the variables are not all controlled. You would need to compare like with like, and "recreational" swimmers can't be compared with each other very well since they are all at different levels of ability and speed. You'd need a huge sample population. Competitive speed swimmers would be the best population to compare with diet and calorie expenditure because they swim the same way - but you'd never get any to agree to swim in warm water.

My best advice to OP is to get that swimmers bloat under control - try to find out what is causing it (food or gulping air) because it must be interfering with your swim. No one likes to swim while feeling a bit sick in the stomach, and you can't swim as hard or as long if you're not feeling okay. My second piece of advice is to log it like a brisk walk, so that the calories aren't too inflated. Have a nice shower at the end, but don't worry too much about how hot it is. Just get the chlorine off. In fact, if you've had a really hard workout and you're red faced and your hair is "hot" under the cap, the last thing you'll want to do is step into a hot tub.

Good luck OP. Swimming is awesome!