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Can Red Light Therapy Help You Lose Weight?
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People in the US spent 2.5 billion dollars on weight loss services in 2020. That’s only the US and in the year of social distancing that prevented many weight loss services from being available to the public.
No quick schemes, tricks, or “magic pills” will help you lose some of those extra inches in a healthy way. However, there are strong indicators that you should explore red light therapy for weight loss. Red light therapy (RLT) can help you boost your weight loss efforts by increasing your overall wellness levels and promoting some of the crucial weight loss systems your body uses.
So, does red light therapy help lose weight? Yes, it does! Red light therapy weight loss works on many levels and here’s how:
Helps Spot Weight Loss
Spot weight loss seems to be the holy grail of the weight loss industry. You will find numerous articles and experts claiming that there is no such thing as selective or targeted weight loss. You are either losing weight or not.
Studying the effects red and near-infrared light has on our bodies, researchers noticed that these wavelengths might have interesting weight loss effects.
More precisely, it is possible that red light therapy fat loss can be targeted. In other words, red light therapy weight loss turns out to be the much-desired spot weight loss. The next logical step is to conduct an experiment.
An experiment included 40 healthy men and women with BMI less than 30kg/m2. All of the participants were between the ages of 18 and 56.
During a period of 4 weeks, the participants were treated with a photobiomodulation device, applied to their waist area. Their waist circumference was measured before and after the 4-week period. Also, photos were taken by a person who was not informed about the nature of the experiment.
The experiment participants were asked not to change anything in their diet or exercise routines, to make sure that all the changes to their waist circumference are due to the effects of RLT.
For the same reason, the study excluded all subjects that had weight fluctuations bigger than 1.5 kg during the 4 weeks.
Here are the results of the experiment, comparing red light therapy weight loss before and after, as listed in the research paper:
Girth loss over the course of the study was greater than 2 cm and statistically significant. The subjects in this study were not obese and an approximate 1 inch (2.54 cm) reduction in waist girth over the course of 8 treatments and 4 weeks was clinically significant and cosmetically relevant. The blinded ratings of the baseline pictures compared to treatment 8 (week 4) pictures taken in a standardized way demonstrated an improvement in appearance that was highly statistically significant. As expected, the improvement was greater when limiting the comparison to only those subjects that remained within 1.5 kg of their baseline weight.
Efficacy of low-level laser therapy for body contouring and spot fat reduction
It is difficult to achieve this targeted red light therapy weight loss at home with a red light panel or even an infrared sauna. You need a flexible, portable device that delivers red and near-infrared light directly where you need it.
Assists Cellulite Elimination
Besides asking “does red light therapy help you lose weight,” many people ask does red light therapy reduce cellulite. Even people who don’t need significant weight reduction can have cellulite. Cellulite is a subcutaneous fat tissue that represents a health and an esthetic problem for many people. Eliminating cellulite is challenging and requires dietary changes and exercise.
One study researched whether photobiomodulation can help exercise efforts in reducing the cellulite from thighs and diminishes the saddlebag effect.
The research included 20 women (25-55 of age) divided into two groups. The control group exercised on a treadmill for 45 minutes, 2 times a week at the intensity of 85%-90% of their maximal heart rate. The other group did the same, but they used near-infrared therapy device with a wavelength of 850 nm.
After three months, before and after measurements, photographs and thermal images were compared. The research showing red light therapy cellulite before and after measurements concluded significant cellulite reduction.
Makes the Exercise More Effective
To understand how red light therapy aids your training process, it is important to understand how building muscles works. When you exercise, your muscle breaks down and rebuilds itself, growing larger.
During this process, your fibers fuse together in order to form new myofibrils. They grow thicker and larger, and this means your muscles increase in size, as well.
Red light helps in a crucial phase of this process. Namely, when muscle fibers fuse together, they act as muscle stem cells. This is where red light therapy comes in, as it can facilitate and speed up this process.
More ways red light therapy helps your exercise efforts includes speeding up your recovery and improving your sleep. Red light therapy regulates your melatonin production and helps you sleep better.
Sleep is essential for the rest phase in your muscle building. Additionally, if you don’t get enough sleep, you will make fat burning an impossible task for your metabolism.
When your muscles are bigger, they consume more energy for exercise. Consequently, you burn more fat when exercising with strong muscles than with less muscle mass. So, one of the ways red light therapy weight loss works is by turning your body into a more efficient fat burning mechanism. That’s in addition to the direct red light therapy fat loss benefits.
Regulates Your Hormones
You should never underestimate the importance of hormonal balance on your weight. It is a well-known fact that low thyroid function directly correlates to weight gain.
There is research that showed that Low-level laser therapy (LLLT) doesn’t just help improve thyroid function, but it can also help relieve thyroid autoimmunity. This means that red light therapy using red and near-infrared light can help increase T4 levels – essential for weight regulation.
Thyroid function is not the only factor in weight regulation. Insulin resistance is a growing problem of the modern age. It involves our bodies becoming less sensitive to insulin, preventing it from regulating the glucose levels and storing fat in the body. Red light therapy can help regulate the pancreas function and improve insulin sensitivity.
Testosterone is another hormone that helps your weight loss. It is important for the success of your exercise efforts. Consequently, more efficient exercise means more efficient weight loss.
Tightens the Skin
Red light therapy boosts collagen which is directly responsible for the youthful appearance of your skin. It also makes the skin tighter. For the skin to regenerate, there are several cell types that need to contribute: mast cells, macrophages, keratinocytes, and fibroblasts, to name a few.
Red light therapy stimulates all of them. This means that your skin will look better and tighter even after significant weight loss.
The only question remains how to be sure you get the appropriate dose of red and near-infrared light to boost your red light therapy weight loss.
FlexBeam is an optimal choice because it allows you to apply it directly to the problematic areas and speed up red light therapy fat loss effects while boosting collagen production to tighten the skin.
As you can see in the research listed above, some of the experiments involve using RLT treatments during exercise. That would be quite easy to achieve using FlexBeam, as you could wear it during your training sessions and organize your red light therapy weight loss at home.