Space heaters are fantastic! My partner and I have very different ideas of comfortable, and they make liberal use of blankets and space heaters. That’s waaaay better than turning the entire house into an oven! Plus I still make use of the space heaters, too – making the bathroom toasty so you’re not freezing when you step out of the shower is the best.
Women are biologically more susceptible to getting cold than men are (or conversely, men are more susceptible to getting hot than women are). Also most people in America need more cardio; it’s not a gender thing.
Boris Kingma from Maastricht University Medical Center decided to take a closer look. He found that women have significantly lower metabolic rates than men and need their offices 3°C (5.4F) warmer.
That’s a huge discrepancy! Obviously not something you can chalk up to individual factors like exercise rates or medical disorders.
I can say, without a doubt, being fat definitely makes the air feel warmer. I don’t even think it makes sense, since your skin senses it. But hot damn if my house goes above 72F I have to keep towels around when I’m heavy
Could it just be a weight thing? So not necessarily fat, muscle could also help.
If you’re body is heating your whole body, the amount of heat added will increase linearly with volume. But your surface area, i.e. the skin, increases sublinearly with volume. So you get more heat per surface unit?
It’s not just a fat or muscle thing. Those both contribute of course; fat insulates and muscle produces more heat. But the real player is the surface area to volume ratio.
A bigger person has a lot more volume than they have a bigger surface area, and since heat is lost through the skin this has a major impact.
I don’t even think it makes sense, since your skin senses it.
It makes sense when you learn that your skin doesn’t sense ambient temperature at all, but rather it senses the rate at which you are losing or gaining body heat. This is why metal can feel cold at room temperature while something like a blanket actually feels room temp, it’s a better heat conductor so it absorbs body heat from you faster.
Having more body mass means you produce more body heat at any given time, so the rate at which you lose body heat to the air is decreased, making you warmer.
Not really. Babies have brown fat as default. Adults have white fat which can turn brown in response to cold exposure (not as much as in babies, so it’s also called beige fat). Brown of beige though, it works the same - there’s a high count of mitochondria in the cells and the tissue can produce heat and make you feel (and be) warmer. It also helps with weight loss, stimulates the immune system and lowers inflammation.
There’s a lot of bullshit in this thread. People can wear shorts in cold weather either a) if it’s not that cold, or b) if it’s not for a long period of time. I’ve been in -50 and -60 degrees fahrenheit weather in Alaska and Montana and Wyoming and when it gets that cold any exposed skin is a huge liability and will become frostbitten and/or severely painful in a very short amount of time. Left untreated it will turn necrotic which is not good. You also, pretty much no matter what you’re wearing, can’t stop moving at those temps unless you are in some kind of shelter.
When I worked on The Slope in Alaska back in the 90s we used to do 20 minutes outside and then 20 minutes inside for full 16-hour shifts.
That said, it can be kind of invigorating and of course you do get used to it and learn to not let it bother you.
Edit: Also, if anyone cares, I’m not proud of having worked for Big Oil on The Slope back in the day. At the time I was young, it was a big adventure and it paid big money that allowed me to do a lot of other things that I otherwise would never have been able to do. Also, it was all union work through IUPAT DC5 which I am still an active member/activist of today.
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