The idea of the 5:2 Diet is to lower your intake of calories, which then means that fewer calories can turn into fat.

Calories are essentially the energy your body needs and uses in daily life. So when you are burning calories, this means your body is using calories as energy to do a task.

So while on the 5:2 Diet, you may want to go beyond just limiting the intake of calories, and start burning more calories. This can obviously be done by staying active, walking, and exercising, but what else can you do to burn more calories?  Imagine burning more calories without even thinking about it! How do you do this? The answer is to cool yourself down.

Burn more calories by keeping cool

More specifically, keep your surroundings cool, which makes your body need to heat up. One of the main byproducts of burning calories is that they give off heat, meaning you get warmer. This is what happens when you go for a run – you get hotter and sweat. Your body also starts burning calories if it needs to warm itself up when you are cool. This is because it needs to burn fuel (or calories) to regulate your body temperature. This is called increasing your metabolic rate.

So what this means is that the cooler your surroundings are, the more calories your body burns. How do we purposefully keep cool to burn calories without hurting ourselves, and without being too inconvenienced?

Ways to burn calories by keeping cool

Here are three ways to burn more calories by cooling yourself down (without hurting yourself):

1. Sleep with fewer sheets or lighter clothes. Many people sleep bundled up, or wearing pajama pants and a sweatshirt and get very warm while they sleep. If you’re one of these people, try sleeping with only a light blanket, or wear lighter clothing while sleeping. The cooler you are, the more your body will burn calories throughout the night. Now if your room is cold to begin with, we don’t want you to catch a cold, so make sure you’re not freezing all night. Just a few degrees lower than normal.
2. Take cold showers/baths. This can mean just cooling down your normal hot shower so that your body has to produce heat, or going to the extreme of having an ice bath. Submerging yourself in ice cold water for a number of minutes can really push your body to start producing a lot of heat, meaning burning calories. Just be careful you don’t slip!
3. Turn down your home’s heat a few degrees. During cooler months, don’t turn your heat up as high as normal. This doesn’t mean keep it at an uncomfortably low level, but just lower so that you don’t feel warm.

In all this, never do anything that could really hurt yourself. If something doesn’t feel right, try something else.

What other tips do you have to burn more calories while on the 5:2 diet plan? Please share in the comments section below…