Does the Ice Diet Work Heres the Science

The Ice Diet is a proposed diet in which people say that eating ice causes your body to spend energy to heat the ice. Similarly, some diets suggest that drinking a lot of ice water can help you burn calories. While its true you need to drink water to metabolize fat and its also true energy is required in order to change the state of matter of ice into water, eating ice simply doesnt burn enough calories to matter.  Heres the science of why this diet doesnt work. The Ice Diet Premise The calorie is a measurement of heat energy which is defined as the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of a gram of water one degree. In the case of solid ice, it also takes 80 calories to turn a gram of ice into liquid water. Therefore, eating one gram of ice (0 degrees Celsius) will burn calories to heat it to body temperature (about 37 degrees Celsius), plus 80 calories for the actual melting process. Each gram of ice causes the expenditure of approximately 117 calories. Eating an ounce of ice therefore causes the burning of approximately 3,317 calories. Considering that losing a pound of weight requires the burning of 3,500 Calories, this sounds like a pretty good deal, doesnt it? Why the Ice Diet Doesn't Work The problem is that when talking about food, were talking about Calories (capital C - also called a kilogram calorie) instead of calories (lowercase c - also called a gram calorie), resulting in: 1,000 calories 1 Calorie Performing the above calculations for kilogram Calories, we find that a single kilogram of ice consumed takes 117 calories. To reach the 3,500 Calories required to lose a pound of weight, it would be necessary to consume about 30 kilograms of ice. This equates to consuming about 66 pounds of ice to lose a single pound of weight. Therefore, if you did everything else exactly the same, but consumed a pound of ice a day, you would lose a pound of weight every two months. Not exactly the most efficient diet plan. There are some other issues to consider, which are more biological. For example, some of the thermal energy involved may not actually be a result of biochemical metabolic processes.  In other words, melting ice into water may not really result in calories burned from the metabolic storehouse of energy. Ice Diet - The Bottom Line Yes, its important to drink water if youre trying to lose weight. Yes, if you eat ice youll burn slightly more calories than if you drank the equivalent amount of water. However, its not enough calories to aid your weight loss efforts, you could harm your teeth eating ice, and youll still need to drink water. Now, if you really want to use temperature to lose weight, just lower the temperature of the room or take cold showers. Then, your body has to expend energy to maintain your core temperature and youll actually burn calories! Ice diet? Not scientifically sound. Edited by Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D.