If you hit the right buttons in the sympathetic nervous system you activate a special population of fat cells that seems to thermalize fat without the fat cells fighting to get it back afterwards.
I don't think it's reproducible because the level of psychological stress required to make it happen is extreme so there would be ethical problems with any protocol to induce a psychogenic fever.
If I were you I'd consider going a week without eating anything. It is general advice to lift weights to put some muscle mass on to raise your metabolism. It's not fashionable to do cardio for weight loss today but if you can manage to do 2 hours a day for a while it will move the needle.
Many COVID-19 patients have experienced significant weight loss. Anecdotally that seems to be correlated with having a fever for several days. Patients aren't able to eat much, and seem to be burning a lot of calories just lying in bed.
What an interesting anecdote. I wonder if mentally-induced fever that is _not_ associated with high stress levels could do something similar, or if a certain level of mental anguish is a prerequisite in addition to the fever itself.
That is really interesting, thanks for sharing. I was thinking of something a little less impressive:
As a child I got very sick at one point and had to be in the hospital. After being discharged, my mother had to keep monitoring my temperature. She would measure it two or three times a day for weeks, and I _always_ had a fever, leading her and the doctor to think I wasn't fully recovered yet. At one of my post-sickness checkups, the doctor suggested my mother stop measuring for a few days. She did, and the next time she measured after this period my temperature was back to normal. The doctor's suspicion, and eventual conclusion, was that my fever was mentally induced; he said I was so used to being sick and having my temp measured all the time, and constantly having a fever, that my body just reacted to the measurement by developing an actual low grade fever.
I noticed a similar effect when pretending to be sick to avoid school over the years. I'd feel totally fine, but "playing" sick resulted in actually getting a fever when my temperature was checked.
I wonder if that kind of accidental temperature elevation could also have metabolism and weight effects. And if it could be harnessed without legitimate debilitating stress or long periods of meditation, since it seems to be pretty simple to induce.
In the end I don't think there's any real trick to weight loss - it's all about calories, in my opinion. But how our mind can impact our physical state is always a fascinating topic to me regardless!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27227051/
If you hit the right buttons in the sympathetic nervous system you activate a special population of fat cells that seems to thermalize fat without the fat cells fighting to get it back afterwards.
I don't think it's reproducible because the level of psychological stress required to make it happen is extreme so there would be ethical problems with any protocol to induce a psychogenic fever.
If I were you I'd consider going a week without eating anything. It is general advice to lift weights to put some muscle mass on to raise your metabolism. It's not fashionable to do cardio for weight loss today but if you can manage to do 2 hours a day for a while it will move the needle.