If you exercise in the hope of losing weight, you’ll want to know that a recent study published in the UK suggests your workouts could be making you fat.
According to Dr David Stensel, a leading expert on sport and exercise science, some types of exercise make you feel really hungry afterwards – and some of those make you crave fattening foods.
Local dietitians are not entirely convinced – they say, for instance, that we often eat unhealthy snacks after a workout simply we’ve convinced ourselves we deserve a “reward”. But they do offer various suggestions for managing genuine post-exercise cravings.
The Ghrelin made me do it!
“While some high-intensity exercise such as running in hot conditions suppresses the ghrelin hormone [which regulates appetite] and therefore appetite, other high-intensity exercise, such as swimming in cold water, increases the hormone, and in turn, the appetite,” says Stensel.
Medium-to-low intensity exercise such as walking has no impact on ghrelin, so you’re as hungry after an hour-long walk as you would have been if you’d just sat down for that same hour, he adds.
Biscuit boycott
Even if exercise does make you hungry, that doesn’t mean you have to eat – or, more to the point, eat a cheeseburger with chips.
In other words, if you do crave fattening foods after a workout, it’s restraint you should be exercising next!
Bear in mind that any effect physical exercise has had on your appetite only lasts until the body’s hormonal levels return to normal – usually between one and three hours later. So if you can resist long enough, those biscuits won’t look quite so tempting any more.
On the menu
This doesn’t mean you should fast after exercising. “You should eat something after training,” Stensel says. “Every responsible fitness advisor recommends that you eat after training and preferably within 45 minutes to an hour. This period – known as the golden hour – is when the muscles absorb the most nutrients and when glycogen, an energy reserve in your muscles, is replaced most efficiently. Lots of people get good results with a small high-protein shake – just beware of the extremely high sugar and carbohydrate content on juice-based smoothies.”
One of the main reasons people don’t lose weight despite working out is that they eat badly or overestimate how many kilojoules they’ve used up.
Losing weight is about striking the right balance between “energy in” and “energy out”. We start losing extra fat when we spend more energy that we consume.
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