Damek.

For a long time I stopped drinking ice water. I preferred room temperature water. (Or wine or beer, but that’s another story).

But I resumed drinking ice water all the time back in March when I started exercising 5-6 days a week. It doesn’t just taste good, it’s helpful if you’re trying to get in shape!

Consider: at room temperature (let’s say 68 °F or 20 °C), 1 cup of water (236.588238 ml) has a density of 0.998 g/ml, and thus a mass of 236 g.

Now let’s say you have this quantity of water with excess ice in it, and heat transfer has equalized so that the water and the ice are both at melting temperature and the ice is only melting as more energy comes in from the surroundings.

So you have your cup of water (236 g) at 0 °C.

You drink it.

Now your body has to heat that water to your body temperature, roughly 36.8°C. Since the awesome specific heat capacity of water is basically the definition of calories and Calories, with just a little more math we conclude your body will burn 8.68 Calories to raise 1 cup of water to body temperature.

Doesn’t sound like much, but if you drink your 8 cups a day, you’re burning 69.4 Calories a day this way, which can add up over time, particularly when coupled with regular exercise and healthy eating. If you’re working on that stuff anyway, why not take the extra bonus by drinking ice water? (I’m happy to see that howstuffworks.com agrees with my math and conclusion, which is nice.)

Also it tastes better!

Keep in mind I’m not a health nut. I’m not trying to be Mr. Hotness or anything, it’s just that I haven’t taken very good care of myself most of my life, and finally started to do so for a good stretch this spring. I’d never felt better. Now that the last three months’ vacations and nightly classes are finally all over and I can try to get back on a regular exercise schedule and eat better (and drink less liquor), I’m looking forward to feeling better again.

I want to see how long I can keep this up.

To that end, I find the ice water thing also serves a psychological purpose. The conscious choice throughout the day to obtain and drink ice water serves as a constant reminder of my goals.

BTW, the ice water math up above should hold true for plain ice coffee (without cream or sugar), minus a couple of Calories per cup. Coffee can also make you feel full, putting off eating. But I wouldn’t advise this strategy from any sort of health perspective…

As for ice cold beer, or other cold alcoholic beverages, it gets pretty complex. One would think that not only does the alcohol give you empty Calories, but since the specific heat capacity of ethanol is roughly half that of water, you burn fewer calories to raise its temperature. However, it doesn’t seem to be so direct — there seems to be some strange mojo that ethanol does in the body to affect its metabolism causing actual weight loss. Except, of course, that most drunk people develop quite the craving for high carb foods (or at least that’s basically Beer Advocate’s hypothesis), so, along with the other negatives of high alcohol consumption, it’s really a net negative for weight loss and getting in shape. Drinking doesn’t make you fat, but what most people do when they’re drinking generally does, and it’s certainly not particularly healthy in the first place. So even if you can manage to curb your appetite whilst drinking, it’s still advisable to curb your drinking instead. Dems brain cells is precious!

Luckily, exercise builds brain cells!

But I digress.

Drink ice water! And love yourself.