Just because it’s winter doesn’t mean you can’t continue to enjoy the outdoors. There’s still plenty of things to do: snowshoeing, skiing (both downhill and cross-country), winter camping and ice climbing, to name a few. There’s only one problem with winter activities -- you have to do them when it’s cold outside.
Women tend to have more body fat than men. Fat is a great insulator. So you’d think that women would be less affected by cold weather than men are. Unfortunately, for most women, things don’t quite work out that way.
A woman’s fat is usually concentrated in her breasts and buttocks, but that doesn’t help protect the rest of the body (although after a few tumbles on the ski slopes, I’m glad for “bottom padding”!) In fact, the insulating effect may mean that the heat generated in a woman’s body has a harder time making its way to the skin, making her “feel” colder.
Body fat is also burned by the metabolism for energy and warmth. Women face a double whammy here. Men usually have more muscle mass, and muscle mass is what drives the metabolism. So women need less energy to feed their fewer muscles, and thus generate less heat. In addition, a woman’s typically higher estrogen (female hormone) levels inhibit the fat-burning process.
Another heat-helper is vascularity -- the size of the blood vessels. A woman’s smaller blood vessels mean a poorer circulation, which can’t efficiently warm body parts far from the heart. The classic symptom of this is cold feet; if you’re a woman (or ever shared a bed with one) you probably know this very well!
It’s not just our physiology that conspires to keep us shivering. Physics works against us, too. Animals lose heat through their skin, which covers their surface. The more surface area, the faster the heat loss, so at first it would seem that size would be a disadvantage. But heat is generated by muscle mass, which increases with size. As a person (or animal) gets bigger, his body volume increases as the cube of his dimensions (height and width), while surface area increases only as the square of his dimensions.
This means that bigger is better when it comes to staying warm in cold weather. (Think of polar bears and woolly mammoths.) And as men tend to be bigger than women, they tend to be more efficient at heating their bodies faster than they lose heat through their skin. In summer this works against them, as they must sweat harder to dissipate the heat they’re generating, but in the winter it means they can get by with only a sweater while you’re shivering under a down parka.
Guys may have all the advantages in the cold, but before you resolve to stay inside all winter, remember this: unlike animals, we *do* have sweaters and down parkas. So if you get chilly, just throw another layer on, and keep on skiing while it’s still cold enough to do it. After all, spring is only a few months away.
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