by Jessica Bosari

Created on: April 08, 2009   Last Updated: June 29, 2009

Sweating as a therapy is an excellent way to lose weight, detoxify, boost your immunity, keep your heart healthy and promote faster healing.

Sweat is made of 99% water. The remainder is made primarily of potassium and sodium. You will also find traces of fat, oil and heavy metals in sweat. When your body temperature is raised, nerve endings in your skin tell your sweat glands to start secreting fluids in an effort to cool off. Sweat works its way towards your skin, picking up toxins and other unwanted elements along the way.

We pick up more toxins in today's every-growing industrial society than our ancestors did. While our bodies can naturally detoxify themselves to an extent, excessive toxins end up stored in our fatty tissues. Studies prove that sauna therapy helps to greatly reduce the level of fat-stored toxins in our bodies. It would take your kidneys 24 hours to excrete the same amount of toxins you lose by one hour of sweating. Sweating is an efficient way to rid your body of toxins and it gives your kidneys a much needed break.

Sweating is also a way of inducing artificial fever, a natural bodily process that kills dangerous germs and bacteria. The raised body temperature stimulates production of antibodies and white blood cells that fight infection and disease.

Your skin will also benefit from your sweating. The heat opens pores and the sweat flushes toxins and dead skins cells from the openings in your skin. The result is a healthy, youthful and radiant glow.

Sweating can burn about 300 calories in an hour, helping you to lose weight and maintain a healthy heart. This happens because the heart works harder, sending extra blood to the skin capillaries. The process lowers your blood pressure and dilates blood vessels, which helps to relieve pain and speed up healing.

There are lots of ways to sweat. Most people think of physical exercise, but simply exposing your body to high temperatures can do the trick. This is why saunas are so popular. In a sauna, you can get the healthy benefits of sweating while simply sitting back and relaxing.

While Both steam rooms and saunas can be beneficial, sweating in a dry sauna environment will burn more calories and make you sweat more. When the air is humid, sweat evaporates more slowly, so the body does not work as hard to release more fluid through the skin. Be careful to drink water before, during and after a sauna session, since you can lose 20% of your body's water in a one our sitting.

You might also try Bikram yoga, in which yoga poses are performed in a hot room, about 95-100 degrees for about 90 minutes. Your can gain the benefits of sweating in smaller doses by eating spicy foods and drinking hot beverages.

Learn more about this author, Jessica Bosari.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.