Crazy-sounding smart clothing line claims it will chill your fat away

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Thin Ice smart clothing
Alright, so it's super weird.
Photo: Evan Killham/Cult of Mac

A lot of products promise to help you lose weight without requiring you to do any extra work. And here’s another one.

Thin Ice is a line of smart clothing, and its creators say that it will melt fat by tricking your body into thinking it’s colder than it is. And that’s it; that’s how they say it works. You can learn more in the occasionally awkward video below.

https://vimeo.com/132201366

The idea behind Thin Ice is that when your body is cold, it works harder to pump heated blood throughout to keep you from freezing. It burns fat to do this, so when the specially designed insoles and vest apply cold to strategic areas, the creators claim that your body will stay in that holy-crap-winter mode and burn “between 500 and 1,000 calories a day.”

You can adjust the intensity of the cold using an included smartphone app, which will be available for both iOS and Android. It will also tell you how many calories you’ve burned “on a second by second basis,” if you’re crazy about numbers, and you can also set timers in case you don’t want the things on constantly.

Thin Ice creator Adam Paulin says that you don’t need to worry about feeling cold all the time, though.

“It actually doesn’t make your feet feel cold,” he says. “After a few seconds, your body is completely adapted to it, and it’s background noise. It’s the same concept as when people jump into a pool, and they feel cold at the very beginning, and then after a few seconds, it seems to magically disappear.”

Thin Ice is looking for some startup money from crowdfunding site Indiegogo, and it’s found it. In seven days, the campaign has raised 10 times its original goal, and it still has three weeks to go. By donating, you can also vote on the company’s next item of smart clothing; it will either be a pair of pants or a hat. That’s almost an entire outfit, so just think about that for a minute.

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