Category: sweating

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Sweating Is Not at All Detoxifying, FYI

It feels good to feel your muscles sweat and work, and something about feeling the sweat pop out on your skin makes me feel accomplished, like it might all be worth it in the end.

But of course, you don’t have to exercise to sweat. Hot yoga, saunas, and sweat lodges have become more and more popular, at least in part due to their claims that they help you “sweat out toxins.” But well…that’s not even a little bit true.

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Actually, your liver and kidneys do all of the heavy lifting when it comes to toxins, and exercise isn’t going to make them more or less functional.

Sweat is made up of mostly water, with a bit of sodium, chloride, potassium, and trace amounts of proteins, fatty acids, and maybe a stray “toxin” or two, says dermatologist Tsippora Shainhouse.

“Most of the ‘toxins’ that concern people include pesticides, residue from plastics, or from air pollution. These tend to be fat-soluble, and do not dissolve well in water, so they will not be removed from the body in any significant quantity, given that sweat is 99 percent water.”

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In fact, attempting to detox merely by sweating can backfire. If you don’t drink enough water to replace what you’ve sweated out, your kidneys have to work overtime while you’re dehydrated – and if your kidneys are working especially hard, they may not be as efficient at weeding out actual toxins in the meantime.

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Which is not to say sweating is bad, nor is exercise. Just don’t expect it to do what your kidneys and liver are already doing, and make sure to drink plenty of water when you’re done.

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This Is How You Can Deal with Excessive Sweating

I sweat a lot. Probably too much, but what can I do about it?

Turns out there actually are some steps I can take to try to prevent over sweating. That’ll teach me to give up!

One easy thing you can try is to put on an antiperspirant before you go to bed at night. You should also try to avoid certain foods and drinks during your daily routine—for instance too much coffee can have an effect on your central nervous system and cause you to sweat more than usual. Drinking hot coffee might even make it worse because the heat of the drink increases your body temperature, which might make you sweat even more.

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Other foods you might want to avoid: spicy foods. This one is tough for me because I love Indian food, Mexican food, and Vietnamese food, but if this is the price of less sweat, I suppose I can manage.

As Scientific American explains:

“Spicy foods excite the receptors in the skin that normally respond to heat. Those receptors are pain fibers, technically known as polymodal nociceptors… The central nervous system can be confused or fooled when these pain fibers are stimulated by a chemical, like that in chili peppers, which triggers an ambiguous neural response. The central nervous system reacts to whatever the sensory system tells it is going on. Therefore, the pattern of activity from pain and warm nerve fibers triggers both the sensations and the physical reactions of heat, including vasodilation, sweating and flushing”

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If your excessive sweat results in body odor, there are other things you can do to try to keep that under control. Besides using deodorant, you should avoid foods that cause people to stink, like cabbage, broccoli, onions, garlic, and cauliflower. Alcohol also smells when you sweat it out, so you might want to cut down on the booze (that’s really not a bad idea for any person).

If you’ve tried everything, but you still sweat all the time, you can wear certain colors to hide your sweat (it’s not idea, we know). Very dark clothes and very light clothes hide sweat pretty well, so you can wear black, dark blue, and even white. You should avoid grays and bright colors if you’re gonna be out in the sun or somewhere you know you’ll be sweating because those colors practically highlight sweat stains. You could also consider wearing more athleisure, as it tends to be made from sweat-wicking textiles.

Try these tips out and see if they do the trick for you. If all else fails, go see your doctor. There are some genuine medical issues associated with excess sweating, although they are rare.

Good luck out there and stay cool!

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This Is Why Humidity Make Us Feel Hotter

The actual temperature outside is around 91 degrees as I write this, but the “heat index” is about 106 degrees – but what is it about the extra water in the air that makes it feel (absolutely, one-hundred-percent) unbearable outside?

Well, part of that reason can be explained by our bodies natural cooling system – sweating.

Sweat works to cool us by evaporating from our skin, which wicks away heat in the process, but when the air outside is too moist, the sweat drips of us instead of evaporating.

It leaves you just as smelly, but not nearly as cool.

The National Weather Service has a handy chart to help weather people determine the relative humidity (the amount of water the air can hold, based on temperature) and compute the “heat index,” too.

In 1979, Robert G. Steadman, an academic textile researcher, wrote a paper that laid out the basic factors that affect how hot a person felt under a given set of conditions, and the resulting chart is basically being used to calculate heat index today.

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The research relies on the idea of a “typical” person – 5’7, 147 pounds, wearing long pants and a short-sleeved shirt, and walking over 3mph in the shade (enjoying a light breeze), so while it may vary slightly from person to person, probably not enough to make a huge difference on any given day.

The National Weather Service has a four-tiered system to tell people how dire the heat situation is out there, with days with a heat index over 130 classified as “extreme danger,” and “danger” days ranging from 105-130.

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Current perceived temperature: #romansigner #heatindex

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On those days, prolonged exposure to the heat and humidity can cause sunstroke, heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke, so you know. You probably want to stay inside.

I’ll be here on my couch, praying my air conditioner makes it through another six weeks of summer weather.

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