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Fitness Files: What to do when you’re wilting?

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Way back in the days before air-conditioned cars, my family had a joke that wasn’t funny.

We’d be off on a summer outing with me, brother and sis in the back seat.

“Carrie’s wilting,” they’d say, laughing merrily as I glared at them from my sweaty misery.

Wilting again in the past steamy weeks, I searched the web for heat info.

What happens to people in hot weather?

Lacy Holowatz, a professor at Penn State, says humans are tropical animals with “an amazing ability to thermoregulate during heat.”

So how does thermoregulation work…or fail?

Matt Soniak of mentalfloss.com explains it this way: “Pretty much everything your body does, whether physical (like muscle contractions) or chemical (like some stages of digestion), produces heat as a byproduct. You’re constantly generating it, and constantly losing it to the environment. The hypothalamus, an almond-sized chunk of the brain…acts as the body’s thermostat and tries to keep the amount of heat created and the amount lost close to each other and maintain normal body temperature.”

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When the temperature around you is cooler than your body, your thermostat can dump the excess heat with a thermoregulatory process like sweating. Sweat doesn’t automatically cool the body. Cool air evaporates moisture on the skin, causing a cooling effect.

But hot and humid air reduces the vaporization of sweat. Sweat just drips off the skin, making “your internal temperature skyrocket,” said Matthew Ganio, a researcher at the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at UT, Texas, Presbyterian Hospital.

What effects do heatwaves have on us?

Judy Deardorff’s 2011 Chicago Tribune articles says, “Heatwaves do more than make us cross and sluggish. Searing temperatures kill more people in the U.S. than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes combined. People over age 60 are most vulnerable to suffocatingly hot conditions. But if you’re not fit, if you’re overweight or if you suffer heart disease, diabetes or respiratory problems, you’re also at high risk because these conditions can hamper the body’s ability to regulate its core temperatures in extreme heat.”

Healthinaging.org says medications for heart, diabetes as well as water pills, allergy pills and nerve medications, may increase heat-related illness.

So, what do we do?

WebMD archive says, “When exposed to direct sunlight and temperatures higher than 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the body can lose as much as half a gallon of water every 10 minutes.”

Howard Rosenberg of UC Cooperative Extension gives this hint:

“The single best way to reduce your heat stress risks while working is to steadily replenish the water you lose as sweat. Drink small amounts frequently, such as six to eight ounces every 15 minutes.”

Whoops — in hot weather, I’m addicted to iced coffee, which I gulp quickly from 20-ounce tumblers. And every article says to avoid caffeine or alcoholic drinks, which dehydrate.

After spending three days reading about heat and the human species, I find no magic antidote.

I must say, when I embarked on the Internet search for the answers to my “hot-weather-horror,” I didn’t expect to wind up repeating the solution I’ve offered for aches, pains and depression: Stay fit, healthy and off meds.

I’m going to the gym. It’s air-conditioned.

Newport Beach resident CARRIE LUGER SLAYBACK is a retired teacher who ran the Los Angeles Marathon at age 70, winning first place in her age group. Her blog is lazyracer@blogspot.com.

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