In our busier than bees lifestyle we would gladly give an arm and a leg to get a golden quick fix solution to our weight loss worries. Especially in times of desperate needs, we think of drastic measures like crash diets and unhealthy equipment which promise quick and easy weight loss. Be it the upcoming wedding season or a beach vacation, the urgent need to shed those few extra kilos seems pertinent but alas if somehow the effort involved can be reduced!- it is precisely this kind of thinking that the marketers of products like the slim sauna belt try to bank on.
The Claim: The slim sauna belt is basically a thermal belt which can be tied around your problem areas like belly, thighs, butt, etc. in order to make these areas sweat and thereby making you lose fat from these regions. The logic explained to you is that sweating makes you lose weight and this can make you spot reduce without moving a muscle in the body. Just by wearing it for 15-20 minutes during the day while at your work or catching up with home chores, this magical belt promises to make you lose weight by just heating up your body surface, making it sweat and thereby making you lose weight.
The Fact: There are several facts that you need to know before you go investing in something like the sauna belt. First, its results are not scientifically proven and hence its authenticity is left to customer experience and if you try and search the web, you will mostly find bad reviews and aggrieved customers who did not receive any results or worse got burnt while using the belt.
Second, the gadget promises spot reductions and it is a widely known fact that spot reductions are a myth. You cannot lose weight only from one side of your body, when you lose weight you lose from your entire body.
Now, to throw some light on what exactly does the sauna belt do? It electronically produces infrared rays which increases the temperature of the surface of the part of the body where it is tied and hence stimulates sweating and the maximum it can yield is make you lose some water weight which you lose due to sweating but beyond that it actually has no effect. Sweating is merely a mechanism to cool the body surface and allowing the heat to escape from the body. Imagine if high temperatures were a sure shot way of losing weight people living in tropical climates would never be overweight.
In short, it does not do anything to your fat cells. Fat cells cannot be melted away by mere application of heat. The reason you have fat cells is because you consumed more calories than you utilised and hence storing the extra calories as fat cells is your body’s way of preparing itself for stress situations when there is a shortage of calories in the body, for example when you work out and burn more calories, your body starts using the reserve energy stored in the fat cells. So the only way of melting away the fat underneath your skin is by indulging in either a low calorie diet to stimulate a calorie deficit in the body to make the body utilise its reserves or by working out causing the same reactions from our body. Mere sweating from a certain region is not going to make your body burn those fat cells. Whatever weight loss is there it is due to water being lost due to high temperature same way as you get dehydrated during summers.
Besides, the increase in temperature can be very dangerous for patients of heart diseases and high blood pressure. In many cases the uncontrolled temperature can lead to localized burns and in some cases can also lead to skin allergies.
So think logically before shedding out unnecessary amounts of money on a gadget which is very obviously a farce.