I have been reading the articles in this blog: http://hypothermics.com/. It is an excellent blog that chronicles many of the findings and the author performs a lot of these tests on himself.
Of course, that's no magic bullet: I've probably put on something like 20lb in that timeframe. I definitely need to get more exercise and eat better.
I'm only a moderate caver, so the longest I've been exposed to cold in that context is something like 16hrs straight, or maybe 32hrs total in a 3-4 day period; most of my exposure caving is much less than that, more like a few hours at a time spaced apart by at least a week.
These hypothetical cold fat burning technqiues, that I've seen, suggest inducing very mild hypothermia (shivering). That only happens rarely in the north.
Are you certain of that? It gets really cold here and everyone wears jeans. Only children wear winter pants casually. Sometime the air itself is cold enough to get you shivering.
The only time I see people correctly dressed against the cold is when they do winter sports or go hiking in the woods.
You seem to have never visited warm and cold climates...
The problem with such blogs is that there's one for all kinds of kooky theories. The hypothermics, the epsom-salters, the music-therapies, the low-carbers, the paleos, the whatevers...
Some theories might turn out validated by scientific research with control groups and everything, but it's hardly worth it trusting such sources until that happens.
But THE low-carb dies tons of people follow (from specific books, websites, etc.) are just fad diets based on kooky theories that selectively pick partial scientific results, add some cargo cult and personal opinion (e.g. from the late Atkins) as opposed to peer reviewed and agreed upon medical consensus, and promote it as the ultimate solution to weight loss.
Many promoters of dietary schemes would have us believe that a special substance or combination of foods will automatically result in weight reduction. That's simply not true. To lose weight, you must eat less, or exercise more, or do both.
http://www.quackwatch.com/06ResearchProjects/lcd.html
(I follow a low carb diet myself, in the sense of avoiding sugar and white flour etc, but not with the proper scientific adjustments and balances -- e.g. fruit are fine--, not because some late 70s doctor said so, or because some health guru promotes a specific version of it).
Take orange juice with or without pulp. Same basic caloric values, but the pulp version carries much of the sugars away.
Many of the details people focus on are second order effects, and I have yet evidence to see that calorie in minus calorie out is a bad model for estimating weight gain.
If you have evidence for the calories being missleading by more than 10% I'd love to see it!
It's difficult for me to find nutritional data for grass clippings; but let's take your example and compare coke to alfalfa sprouts for grass clippings:
* 100g alfalfa sprouts is ~23 calories and would occupy a volume of ~3 cups [0]
* 100g of coke is ~38 calories and occupies a volume of ~.4 cup [1,2,3]
If you wanted to eat enough alpha sprouts to be equivalent to that .4 cup of coke, you would need to eat almost 5 cups worth, ~12x more volume! I can't imagine eating 5 cups of alfalfa sprouts, but half a cup of coke is trivial to guzzle.
Relative energy density seems to limit caloric consumption far before we need to model undigested bits.
[1] http://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/coca-cola-products/c...
[2] http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/121Adensitycoke.html
[3] http://depts.washington.edu/chem/facilserv/lecturedemo/Densi...
No, but it is kooky to suggest it as a standalone diet, complete with various invalid assumptions, outside of scientific dietary consensus.
Plus, you'd be surprised how far the "calories in/out" goes: http://www.fitmole.org/twinkie-diet/
The question though is can this impact abdominal fat or not.
Even if they used to be "ex scientists" themselves (lots of people that oversell some cure without verification usually are -- Heck, Linus Pauling had 2 Nobels).