I tried out cryotherapy to see if it can really blitz the blubber (and live up to its celebrity status) – and the results are inconclusive, says SAMANTHA REA

Some of us struggle to shed the pounds we gain from our gluttony over Christmas, and I’m definitely in this camp. 

However, on top of that, I’m still striving to blitz the blubber I built up over lockdown, when I stockpiled reduced Easter eggs and made them a staple of my daily diet.

So when I hear that cryotherapy could reduce my body’s resemblance to badly mashed potato, I’m up for it!

What is cryotherapy? Well, it’s basically standing in a very cold shower cubicle (or ‘cryo chamber’) in pretty much just your underwear, while actual snowflakes flutter about and massacre your mascara, leaving you looking like Alice Cooper.

Celebs including Jennifer Aniston, Daniel Craig, Gary Barlow and Cristiano Ronaldo are all reportedly fans of cryotherapy, and it’s said to improve physical and mental health.

If you filled a top hat with the names of medical conditions, then picked one out, the odds are that cryotherapy has been said to help with it.

It’s a relatively new treatment that’s still being researched, however benefits are thought to include pain relief, muscle recovery, treatment of eczema symptoms, migraine relief, and reduced inflammation, which in itself decreases the likelihood of developing numerous conditions.

Then of course there are the weight loss benefits, and I find my interest piqued by a study claiming that cryotherapy can reduce waist size by more than 5%.

YES!

According to the New York Post, a study by Dr. Jacopo Fontana, of Italy’s Istituto Auxologico Piancavallo, has shown that having cryotherapy five times a week, over two weeks, resulted in a 5.6% decrease in waist measurement and a 20.2% drop in cholesterol, compared to a control group on the same diet and exercise regime (but no cryo), which saw a waist measurement decrease of 1.4% and a cholesterol drop of 9.4%.

Could cryotherapy be the secret to looking less like I’m smuggling a lumpy mattress under my clothes? And could it eliminate the Niagara Falls of fat spilling over my waistband?

There’s only way to find out, so I book myself in for a fortnight of cryotherapy at 111Cryo on the fourth floor of Harvey Nichols, in London’s Knightsbridge.

Arriving for my first session, I change into 111Cryo’s branded kit of sports-style bra and shorts, with matching headband, mask, gloves and puffa slippers – like a puffa jacket, but to keep my feet warm.

I spend three minutes in the cryo chamber, bopping about to East 17’s Steam which plays from frost-coated speakers. Then as the countdown clock hits zero, 111Cryo’s Isaac opens the door and points a little portable temperature gun at me.

‘We’re checking the skin temperature,’ he explains. ‘We check the stomach, arms, thighs and calves, looking for a drop in temperature of about 10C in each part of the body. The stomach stays the warmest, so it’s a fine line, getting your stomach below 17°C without the temperature of your arms and legs dropping too low. That’s why we keep an eye on the smaller extremities, because they get the coldest.’

The cryo chamber is kept at a temperature of -85C to -90C and Isaac tells me that some people scarper after the first 10-15 seconds.

I find the experience surprisingly OK and I suspect I may have built up a tolerance to the cold during long periods with no heating and no hot water in the flat I rent. Who knew that living in deeply unpleasant conditions could be the key to biohacking? Clearly I am the winner here!

On my second visit to 111Cryo I bump into celebrity chef Aldo Zilli who presides over the swish Lucarelli restaurant on Harvey Nichols’ Fifth Floor.

I have interviewed Aldo about 64 times, and when I last saw him, at the Lucarelli launch, I feared he might feed me into his meat grinder over an erroneous headline claiming he’d spent £XXK on a shopping trip.

Luckily this seems to be forgotten, and Aldo tells me he often pops downstairs for a cryo session. Hoisting up his chef’s top to flash his tummy at me, he declares: ‘How else do you think I look this good?!’

Wishing I had brushed my hair and put some lipstick on, I realise I shall have to raise my game when I visit 111Cryo because, who knows who I might bump into!

I tell the team I’ll be expecting them to line up celebs for all my appointments, and when I return the next day for my third session, I ask who they’ve got for me.

Sadly, they are disappointingly discreet about their celeb clients whose appointments they’ve probably now rescheduled well away from mine. However, I do hear a whisper that a certain world champion F1 driver (YES LEWIS HAMILTON!!!!!) has regularly frozen his bits in the exact same spot as me…

Ahead of my fourth session, I use the loo on the Fifth Floor, where they’re offering whisky samples. It takes all my will power to WALK AWAY FROM THE WHISKY, but I triumph. I’m committed to the cryo and I’m not sure how well it would mix with whisky, I tell Max, who’s manning the cryo chamber today.

Max says cryo is excellent for hangovers, and I make a note of this in my notepad for Very Important News.

Having started off with three minutes in the cryo chamber for my first two sessions, I increase this to three and a half minutes for my next three sessions.

The team checks my skin temperature each time I come out, and as my numbers are A-OK they give me the green light to go up to four minutes for my sixth session, at the start of my second week.

By my eighth session I am up to four and a half minutes in the cryo chamber and I’m actually OK with the cold, I’m just getting a bit bored watching the countdown clock and I tell the team they should replace it with a TV screen playing music videos. They thank me for this helpful feedback but unfortunately they’re unable to implement it in time for my next sessions.

Five minutes is the maximum anyone is allowed in the cryo chamber and Isaac tells me he’s been offered bribes by clients who are desperate to stay in longer. ‘It becomes an ego thing, but staying in too long is counterproductive,’ says Isaac, explaining that this can cause skin soreness and muscle fatigue.

He adds: ‘We have clients who come every day. We require a six hour gap between sessions, but with our opening hours, you can do it twice a day. Some clients come morning and evening.’

I ask Isaac if he’s surprised by the results of the study I’m hoping to replicate. A huge fan of cryo himself, Isaac has been freezing people since 2018 and sees clients’ fitness journeys first hand. 

He tells me that 111Cryo positions cryotherapy as a wellness treatment that complements a healthy lifestyle, and they don’t make any claims about cholesterol or waist measurements. However, he does confirm that cryo can result in burning an extra 500 to 800 calories in a day.

During my fortnight in the cryo chamber, I listen to the Arctic Monkeys and Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer (it would indeed be a cruel summer at -90C, but not much worse than usual).

M People’s Moving On Up keeps me dancing, so much so I choose it twice, and Dire Straits’ Romeo And Juliet is usefully long enough to see me through an entire session without it looping back to the beginning.

The most popular music choices are apparently Frozen and Ice Ice Baby. This Vanilla Ice classic is too much of a treat to pass up, so I choose it for my 10th and final session at the end of week two.

So having done five cryo sessions a week, for two weeks, have I replicated the results of Dr. Jacopo Fontana’s study, and managed to decrease my waist size by 5% and lower my cholesterol by 20%?

Well, I have lost 2cm off my waist. This isn’t a 5% decrease, but it does mean the waist bands of my clothes feel less like they’re crushing my internal organs, so I’m pretty happy with that. I haven’t measured anywhere else, but according to the scales I have lost 3lb, and I think my thighs are rubbing less when I walk, so presumably the weight loss is fairly evenly spread.

Unfortunately it’s a different story for my cholesterol. Instead of decreasing by 20%, it has increased by 50%.

I had my ‘before’ cholesterol test at the Harley Street Health Centre, a private clinic just off Harley Street, a few days ahead of my first cryotherapy session.

My cholesterol was measured as part of the clinic’s Silver blood test package which also measures various other things including iron and a full blood count.

According to my results, which I receive the next day, my iron and everything-to-do-with-my-red-blood-cells is so low that it’s a wonder I’ve been walking around without falling over.

As these results have been normal in the past, and the only change has been a fizzling out of red meat, I decide to reintroduce red meat into my diet, in the hope of increasing my iron (and hopefully making it less likely that I’ll fall down a man hole as a result of a dizzy spell).

After my final cryo session, I return to the Harley Street Health Centre for my ‘after’ cholesterol test, and the results show that my LDL cholesterol (the bad stuff that clogs up your arteries) has increased by 50%.

Chatting through my results, Harley Street Health Centre’s Dr. Mohseyni explains that the normal range for LDL cholesterol is less than 3 mmo1/L.

In my ‘before’ blood test, my LDL cholesterol was within this normal range, at a safe 2.6 mmo1/L.

However, in my ‘after’ blood test, following 17 days of eating red meat, my LDL cholesterol has rocketed to 3.9 mmo1/L which is no longer within the normal range.

By reintroducing red meat into my diet, I’ve thrown a spanner into the works, as there’s now no way of knowing whether the cryotherapy would have reduced my cholesterol had I continued eating normally.

There’s also no way of knowing if my cholesterol would have shot up even higher if I hadn’t been having cryo.

If the opportunity arises in the future to have a second go at the study (without throwing any extra variables into the mix) then I’d interested to see what happens.

However, for now I’ll be putting the cryotherapy on ice as I give my body a break from blood tests and get everything back on an even keel with a return to my fish based diet – supplemented by iron tablets.