If your Christmas period is anything like mine it looks a bit like this – eat, drink, snuggle up, stay inside, eat and drink some more, watch some telly, eat a bit more, drink a bit more and get as warm as possible.

This is clearly a recipe for waistline disaster, so this year I have a plan to solve this problem with nothing more than a little wrist action and some science.

The gloom and grizzle of winter may have one massive silver lining. Forget calorie counting and get cold!

That’s right people new research shows that dropping the temperature will help you to drop pounds. With as little as a one degree reduction in your living room temperature you could increase your metabolic rate!

Forget fad diets and spending loads of money on so-called fat burning pills, get to your thermostat and turn it down.

The science behind this cool revelation comes down to the two types of fat you have in your body. White fat, the stuff that makes your trousers too tight and is designed to store energy, saving it up for a rainy day when famine hits.

The other type of fat is brown fat that does the opposite – a bit like a wood-fired stove they are fat-fuelled machines that burn energy to heat you up.

You can tell where you have brown fat because it is the stuff that makes you shiver and it is the act of shivering that heats you up.

We have long thought that humans can’t generate brown fat but in fact it seems we can. And we do it when we are in an environment that is just a little cooler than the balmy 19 degrees the average person sets their thermostat to.

Interestingly increasing production of brown fat cells seems to be reliant on the immune system rather than the brain. A particular type of immune cell called a macrophage can cause the browning of a white fat cell therefore converting it from a chubby fat storage machine to that raging fat-burning stove.

Doctor Ajay Chawla, from UC San Francisco who has been leading the research said that in the mice they tested they saw calorie burning equivalent to about 30 minutes of exercise per day. Humans are not expected to benefit to quite that extent but Dr Chawla suggests that even an increase in metabolism of a few per cent would make a big difference.

The temperature at which this weight loss wonder kick in is thought to be around 17.2 degree centigrade although tests in humans will be the only way to know how to make the most of the chill.

Of course this doesn’t mean that you can eat brandy butter straight from the tub, drink an entire bottle of port and watch back-to-back Christmas films and still lose weight.

Just think of it as a chilly turbo boost for all your hard work eating mini portions of Christmas pud!

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