You might be sweating buckets, but that doesn’t mean you’re losing an ounce. That’s because how much you sweat has nothing to do with how much weight you’ll lose.
“Sweating is the way in which we cool the body during exercise or other heat stress,” Thad E. Wilson, Ph.D., a professor in the department of physiology at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, told Health. Wilson’s research focuses on sweat glands and skin blood flow.
Although it takes energy for your body to secrete sweat, it’s not enough energy to tip the scales.
“Sweat is only an indication that your body has lost water, not body fat,” exercise specialist Gabbi Berkow, a certified personal trainer with an MA in exercise physiology, told Health.
“Sweating buckets does not necessarily reflect a great workout,” she said. “Sweating a lot means your body became very hot from the workout and needs to cool off.”
For example, she said, if you go out at 2 p.m. on an unseasonably warm day, you’ll likely sweat more than that same walk in unseasonably cold, dark weather. However, you’ll burn about the same calories.
It’s not the exercise that produces sweat, Wilson said. Exercise raises your body’s temperature, which then then triggers perspiration to cool you down.
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