What is the Warmth Score?

For most of medical history, the body's heat was treated as a primary vital sign. A warm body with steady hands and pink extremities was a body with energy to spare. A cold one was a body running on stress hormones.

The Warmth Score brings that idea into a daily metric. It does not diagnose anything. It does not replace a doctor or a lab. It is a systems-health estimate that asks a simple question every day: based on what you slept, ate, felt, and absorbed from the environment, how warm is your system likely to be running right now?

Ray Peat's framework, extended by Georgi Dinkov and discussed at length on Danny Roddy's Generative Energy podcast, treats metabolism as the foundation underneath nearly every other system: thyroid output, sex hormones, mood, recovery, immune defense, even mental sharpness. When the body produces energy efficiently from glucose, it warms up, breathes out CO₂, and stays resilient. When energy production drops, the body conserves heat, falls back on stress hormones (adrenaline, cortisol), and feels cold, tired, and fragile.

• Body temperature

  Peat used 98.2 to 98.6°F as a rough warm window. Lower morning temps that climb after breakfast often track a struggling thyroid.

• Resting pulse

  A pulse around 75 to 85 bpm at rest is, in Peat's view, more typical of an active thyroid than the very low resting heart rates often praised in athletic culture.

• Circulation & extremities

  Cold hands and feet usually mean the body is conserving heat at the core, a sign of low metabolic drive or high stress load.

• Recovery & vitality

  Energy production sets the ceiling for recovery. You can sleep eight hours and still wake under-recovered if your metabolism is running cold.

Ray Peat built his framework over decades of essays on raypeat.com, drawing on Otto Warburg's metabolic biology, Hans Selye's stress research, and Broda Barnes' work on temperature and thyroid. He argued that the body is, above all, an energy-producing organism, and that warmth, pulse, and steady mood are the everyday read-outs of that energy.

Georgi Dinkov (haidut.me) and the team at Functional Performance Systems extended Peat's ideas with a steady stream of mechanistic, citation-heavy posts: anti-PUFA, the protective role of CO₂, glucose oxidation, the serotonin–estrogen–cortisol triad, and how thyroid hormone runs the show.

Danny Roddy turned the framework into a long-form audio archive, taping hundreds of conversations with Peat and Dinkov on the Generative Energy podcast. That archive is where most modern bioenergetic readers first hear the temperature and pulse method described in plain language.

The wider systems-health community (functional medicine, ancestral health, circadian biology) often arrives at similar signals from different angles: warmth, recovery, light exposure, and stress as the variables that quietly run everything else.

• Sleep

  Hours and felt quality. The body does most of its repair on sleep.

• Sunlight

  Morning and midday light tunes the circadian clock that gates thyroid, mood, and recovery.

• Carbs & food

  Adequate carbohydrate is, in Peat's view, the first thing that lets the thyroid run. Chronic low intake cools the system.

• Stress

  Sustained stress burns glucose into lactate and shifts the body toward adrenaline-driven warmth, which feels different from real metabolic warmth.

• Body temperature

  A direct read on how much heat the system is producing.

• Pulse & hydration

  Resting pulse and mineral-rich hydration both reflect circulatory tone.

• Cold extremities

  A simple, classic signal that the body is conserving heat.

• Activity load

  Moderate movement supports warmth. Heavy training without recovery cools the system instead of warming it.

BasedCal pulls carbs from your food log and sun minutes from your sun log automatically. Everything else is a quick check-in on the Today page.

States are descriptive, not prescriptive. Two people with the same number can be in very different places, which is why the card on Today always shows the factors driving the score.

• Get morning sun

  Skin and eyes, even ten minutes within an hour of waking. The single cheapest intervention on this list.

• Eat enough carbs

  Fruit, juice, honey, milk, well-cooked starch. Peat-style carb-forward eating warms the thyroid before any supplement does.

• Protect sleep

  Dark room, no late-night screens, dinner well before bed. Sleep is when warmth is rebuilt.

• Mineral hydration

  Salt, magnesium, fruit juice, real food. Bare water with no minerals can leave you colder, not warmer.

• Lower the stress load

  Less caffeine on an empty stomach, fewer fasted workouts, more meals with carbs and protein together.

• Moderate movement

  Walking, lifting, easy sport. Heavy training only when you have the recovery to back it.

The Warmth Score is opinionated. It draws from a specific lineage, and we link directly to it so you can read the originals and form your own view.

• Ray Peat, raypeat.com

  Original archive of essays on thyroid, temperature, pulse, sugar, and the bioenergetic view of metabolism.

• Georgi Dinkov, haidut.me

  Peat-aligned research blog. Anti-PUFA, thyroid, glucose oxidation, anti-serotonin, and the metabolic basis of disease.

• Functional Performance Systems

  Long-form essays grounding Peat ideas: temperature and pulse as health signs, the protective role of carbohydrate.

• Danny Roddy

  Generative Energy podcast and writing with Peat and Dinkov on metabolism, hair, hormones, and structural health.

• Generative Energy Podcast

  Long-form conversations with Peat and Dinkov. The clearest oral record of the bioenergetic framework.