Burning off the calories – in a pair of shiver pants
DIET aids are big business, which isn’t surprising. There are products or treatments that claim to boost weight loss without any major effort. But do they really work?
For the series, I turned guinea pig, testing a huge array of extreme methods from pills, carb-blockers and fat-burners to a pair of what I dubbed ‘shiver pants’.
I tried raspberry ketones, touted as a miracle weight-loss drug when tested on rats. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian is reported to have taken them to shift her baby weight.
They are supposed to suppress your appetite, but I took them for two days, noticed no difference and promptly gave up.
I discovered that some fat-burners, or radiowaves that literally cook your fat, can successfully kill off up to 60 per cent of unwanted fat cells permanently.
I tried the Vanquish machine that uses radiowaves to sculpt your body. While it didn’t work for me, it could possibly help people who are pretty slim with dietresistant fat they cannot shift.
What did work were the £1,500 Aqualyx fat-busting injections. These are used on stubborn pockets of fat that are hard to shift, like double chins and chubby knees. They work by changing the permeability of the fat-cell membrane, so that fat cells let in water and burst. But I don’t think they work on everyone, nor would I recommend them.
In the show, estate agent Jason McKenzie’s double chin disappeared within 12 weeks.
Then there’s the curious pair of BionicGYM calorie-crunching pants invented by a doctor called Louis Crow.
I nicknamed them ‘shiver pants’ because the inspiration for them is shivering – nature’s way of burning calories without doing anything.
BionicGYM makes people shiver through electrical impulses which cause the muscles to contract and then relax.
Known as an electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) device, it gives you genuine cardiovascular exercise. As my body mimicked being cold, my heart rate increased from 60 to 120 and I burned calories to try to warm up.
After shivering for only 17 minutes I burnt 100 calories – about four times as many than if I had just been sitting there doing nothing.
In a way, it’s sad that we live in a world where it’s preferable to eat too many calories, do too little exercise and wear some pants to fix the problem.
Ideally, we should all be walking or cycling to work, and eating lots of fruit and veg, but the reality is that if you are a single parent with three children, that may not work for you – and why should you feel guilty about doing something else?