Think You’re Carrying around Extra Mass after the Holiday Feasts and Failed New Year’s Resolutions? There Might Be Another Reason.

As Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw point out in Why Does E = mc^2?, a hot cup of coffee is more massive than a seemingly similar cold cup (Yes, same size cup, filled as far as one can tell to the same level). *  Hotter things (masses) are more massive when they are, in fact, “hotter.” The reason is that energy really does equal mass times the speed of light squared. The “colder” cup of coffee has lost energy, and thus, mass. Seemingly strange to our macro-world eyes, but nevertheless true.


Maybe lack of will power and diet aren’t the problem. Maybe you’re carrying more mass because you’ve allowed yourself to become enflamed by all the inflammatory rhetoric to which you subject yourself. That lack of will power and diet apply as much to your consuming anger that is as easy to come by as a Big Mac or Whopper. Everywhere you look there’s a fast-anger outlet ready to serve you a diet that increases the inflammation, not in your body, but rather in your emotions and mind. You consume the ready-made anger fashioned by short order cooks eager to get you addicted to their menus. Your actual body temperature rises with the increase in adrenalin, and you thus become more massive—just like that hot cup of coffee.


Need to lose some mass? Start consuming cooler, more cerebral messages; change the menu, lower the mass.


* 2009, Da Capo Press (Perseus Books Group). p. 145.