20/12/2025
Another good post for unusual weight gain
Sleeping in a warm room hinders weight loss and worsens insulin sensitivity by reducing the activation of brown adipose tissue (brown fat), which burns calories for heat, and by disrupting metabolic processes that cool temperatures promote. In a warm environment, your body’s energy demands for thermoregulation (staying warm) are also minimized, reducing overall daily energy/calories expenditure.
To elaborate:
📑Suppressed Brown Fat Activity: The body contains two main types of fat: white fat, which stores calories, and brown fat (brown adipose tissue), which is metabolically active and burns calories to produce heat. Warm sleeping environments suppress the activation and growth of brown fat. Conversely, cooler temperatures (less than 66 degrees F) stimulate brown fat production and activity, increasing your metabolic rate and calorie burn even while you sleep.
📑Lowered Calorie Expenditure: When the ambient temperature is cool, your body has to work harder to maintain its crucial 98.6 degree internal temperature. This process of heat generation, or thermogenesis, requires energy, leading to an increased resting metabolic rate (SMR) and greater total energy expenditure. In a warm room, this additional calorie-burning mechanism is not triggered.
📑Potential for Disrupted Sleep: Sleeping in a room that is too warm typically disrupts your natural sleep cycle, causing increased wakefulness and reduced deep, restorative sleep. Poor sleep quality is linked to hormonal imbalances (such as higher cortisol levels) that can increase appetite, promote junk food cravings, and make it harder to make healthy eating choices, all of which hinder weight management efforts.
📑Increased Insulin Resistance: Increased brown fat, stimulated by cold, improves insulin sensitivity and helps manage blood sugar. However, in warm sleeping conditions, the brown fat activity decreases, and the associated metabolic improvements, including better insulin sensitivity, are reversed. Cold exposure can also raise thyroid hormones (T3/T4) and adiponectin, hormones that boost insulin sensitivity; warm temperatures undo these beneficial hormonal shifts.
PMID: 35837014
