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.
I have high testosterone levels and I am always warm. In the winter I get tired of scraping ice from my car and just use my hands to melt it off the windshield.
Is it? Because I’m a transwoman and my levels are all within cis woman ranges for going on a decade now, yet I’m basically full-time Chandra, Awakened Inferno unless it’s subzero temps outside.
This is me. Am white dad on vacation this week. It’s not that cold, like 70F, but there has been chilling rain all week. I’m the guy not only soaked in my shorts and t-shirt among a sea of ponchos, but still sticking my head into the fountains and stuff.
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.
And for us on the otherside, we see people bundled up like their going on an Artic expedition when its 50F out and they are walking 10 feet from their heated car to a heated store.
Being sweaty all the time sucks. Thats really what it is
That’s me as well. I typically don’t even start thinking about shorts until the triple digits.
On the other hand… I’m starting to layer up at about 65…
I do also have a higher than normal body temperature. I’m usually hovering around 99.3 and I always have to explain to the doctor that I’m not running a fever that’s just my normal temp.
The amount of fat required to provide significant insulation is not really feasible for humans with the addition that the feeling of being cold might even be increased.
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