If you exercise after you eat, you might be doing yourself a favor and lose more weight than if you eat after you workout. The Surrey University and Imperial College London researchers have just published a study in the Journal of Endocrinology. Participants in the study cycled for an hour at about 65% of their maximum heart rate after they ate a meal.
How Does This Work?
Participants usually waited an hour after their meal before exercising. The interesting portion of the study details that even those participants who were exercising ate more than normal. According to the scientists who ran the study, exercising after eating promotes weight loss because it boosts hormones that suppress appetite.
How does this help if the participants already ate? Well, that appetitite suppression carried over to the next meal. Fewer calories were converted to fat because the participants were burning more in their exercise program.
Granted, this study utilized only a few people. There were just 12 volunteers. They all ate the same breakfast. An hour after breakfast, 6 of them worked out for an hour on their exercise bikes. The other 6 sat quietly. They were then given another hour to break before being allowed to eat as much as they wanted.
It should hardly be surprising that the 6 who worked out burned more calories on average than those who sat idle. During their after exercise meal, those who worked out ate more. But according to the tests, they actually took in fewer calories than their idle counterparts.
What Impact Does This Study Have?
Well at the moment, more studies will likely need to happen. But one of the things we’ve always believed is that if you exercise a lot and eat too much, that one will cancel out the other. Increasing your exercise however, also increases how many calories you burn on average, so even if you eat more – you’re still taking in less.
I can get behind an exercise program like that.
Check out Valorie’s series in the Weight Loss blog on the cost of losing a pound.
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