Does Cryotherapy Help You Lose Weight? What the Trials Actually Found

Probably not in any way you'd notice on the scale. The best trial we have, a 12-month study in adults with obesity, found that adding whole-body cryotherapy to a lifestyle program did not significantly increase weight loss compared with the same program without it.¹

You'll still see the claim all over the internet, usually as "burns up to 800 calories in three minutes." That number doesn't come from any study we could find, and the research that does exist is small, short, and a lot more modest. A few of the results are interesting, even if none of them make cryotherapy a weight loss tool.

Where the 800-Calorie Claim Comes From

The idea has a real-sounding mechanism behind it. When your skin gets very cold, your body works to keep your core warm, and that takes energy. Cryotherapy sellers stretch that into a promise that three minutes in a chamber can burn several hundred calories, which is roughly what an hour of running does.

We couldn't find a study that measured calories burned during a whole-body cryotherapy session and supports a figure anywhere near that. Cold does raise energy use, but the lab work that shows it, such as studies where people spent hours a day in a cool room for days, uses exposures that look nothing like a three-minute chamber visit. Treat any specific calorie number attached to a cryotherapy session as marketing until someone shows you the paper.

The 12-Month Trial

The most useful study here was published in the journal Obesity in 2025 by a Finland-based research group.¹ It enrolled 19 adults with obesity into a 12-month lifestyle-based weight management program. Ten of them also did whole-body cryotherapy, 28 sessions at −110°C for 3 to 4 minutes, about twice a week over the first five months. The other nine did the program alone.

Both groups lost a lot of weight, because the lifestyle program did the work. The cryotherapy group lost 11.9% of their body weight at five months and 9.9% at twelve. The comparison group lost 11.5% and 8.0%.¹ The difference between groups wasn't statistically significant, and the researchers found no meaningful difference in brown fat activity, the heat-generating tissue that cold exposure was supposed to wake up. Their conclusion was that whole-body cryotherapy did not significantly enhance weight loss, activate brown fat, or change most metabolic responses.¹

There was one small signal worth mentioning honestly. At five months the cryotherapy group had a larger drop in fasting glucose (0.41 mmol/L) and LDL cholesterol (0.44 mmol/L), and the authors said more research is needed to confirm whether that holds up.¹ With only 19 people, that's a lead for a bigger trial and not a reason to book a chamber for your cholesterol.

The Menopausal Women Study

A 2020 study in the Journal of Clinical Medicine looked at 37 women around age 60 who completed 20 daily cryotherapy sessions at −130°C, three minutes each. Nineteen of them had metabolic syndrome and eighteen were healthy.²

Waist circumference in the metabolic syndrome group fell from 96.24 to 94.27 cm, a drop of about 2 cm, and total body fat dropped about half a kilogram. Body mass fell by roughly half a kilogram too, and the confidence interval on that one touched zero.² The healthy women saw nearly the same small changes, which is a hint that this wasn't a metabolic syndrome effect at all.

The most important limit is that nobody in the study went untreated. Both groups got cryotherapy, so there is no way to know how much of the change came from the chamber and how much came from the passage of four weeks and the attention of being in a study. The authors noted that their conclusions apply only to menopausal women with low to moderate activity and unchanged diets.² A two-centimeter waist change over 20 sessions is real but small, and it's a long way from the headline.

What the Reviews Say

A 2022 scoping review in the Journal of Thermal Biology went looking for every study of whole-body cryostimulation in obesity. It found 856 records and only 8 that met the criteria.³ The authors wrote that the data fail to reach definitive conclusions about whether whole-body cryotherapy treats obesity, though they thought it could eventually widen the options, and they called for larger, higher-quality studies.³

That's a fair summary of the field. Almost nobody has tested cryotherapy for weight loss well, and the one controlled trial we do have came back flat.

Why Cold Exposure and Fat Loss Get Confused

Part of the confusion is that cold really does change your physiology. Shivering uses energy, and humans have brown fat that burns calories to make heat. Some of the research on prolonged cool-room exposure does show a rise in energy expenditure.

The gap is dose. Those effects show up with long exposures to moderately cold air, and a cryotherapy chamber is the opposite: extremely cold air for three minutes, with a short rewarming that follows. The 12-month trial above is what happened when someone measured the outcome properly.

The other source of confusion is the scale itself. A body that's cold and then rewarms doesn't lose fat in the process, and any day-to-day changes in weight are mostly water. If you want to know whether you're losing fat or just fluid, a Styku 3D body scan tells you far more than a bathroom scale. We wrote about how the methods compare in DEXA vs 3D body scan vs InBody.

What Cryotherapy Is Reasonable to Use For

Research suggests whole-body cryotherapy may support how you feel after hard training, and many clients describe feeling more alert after a session. We went through the recovery research in our whole-body cryotherapy guide and how often sessions make sense in how often to do cryotherapy. Those are reasonable reasons to use it. Weight loss is not one of them.

If weight is the goal, the things with solid trial evidence behind them are food, strength training, sleep, and for some people, medically supervised treatment. A cryotherapy session can sit on top of that routine as the part that feels good. If you're curious about the medical side, our medical weight loss program in Lisle starts with a consultation that looks at your history, labs, and what's already been tried.

Cryotherapy at Defiant in Lisle

Defiant uses an Everest CryoBuilt whole-body chamber at 5100 Lincoln Ave in Lisle, with a 3:30 maximum session. You step in wearing minimal clothing, listen to music through the session, and step out. Clients come from Naperville, Downers Grove, Wheaton, and Oak Brook.

A single session is $50, and unlimited monthly access is $299. New clients can try a first session for $25. Cryotherapy is also included as a Core Wellness credit in every Defiant membership tier. If you like cold paired with heat, contrast therapy alternates the infrared sauna with the chamber, and sauna or cryotherapy first covers the sequencing question.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated November 4, 2026.