After a good workout, you need to refuel and you may wonder what you can eat post workout and not have it spoil the impact of exercising.
Feeding the workout
Heath and fitness is said to be 80% diet and 20% exercise; with these numbers, you may want to reconsider the value of exercise in maintaining a healthy lifestyle, particularly if you don’t enjoy exercising.
Exercise is not the driver of health management, but it is the essential catalyst. I think of exercise as switching the lights on; the switch connects the power to the light source. Likewise, regular exercise switches on a healthy lifestyle.
In general, exercise nutrition has three components; pre, during and post-workout. During the workout the best advice is to stay hydrated with water, we would not reach the intensity levels that require energy drinks in 30 minutes.
A pre-workout meal should consist of small amounts of carbohydrates such as a slice of toast, a banana or cereal. Simple carbohydrates break down into glucose and enter the muscle cells; they provide fuel to exercise at maximum capacity.
After a workout, it is important to replenish the glycogen (energy form that the body requires to function) that has been depleted during exercising. Eating protein after a workout is a must for a speedy muscle recovery, particularly after weight training.
If you are unable to eat a full meal right away, have a snack within 20 minutes of your training. Post workout “coffees” makes good sense; however, reach for a whole food protein rather than a sugary carbohydrate at this time.
Hunger and exercise
Many people report that they feel hunger after exercise and therefore eat more than they should.
Research supports the contrary, in a study published March 2016 in the Journal of Medicine and Science, researchers in the United Kingdom looked at how intense exercise impacted hunger.
They looked at the overall calorie consumption for two groups of people: The first group “dieted” by reducing their food intake to create an energy deficit, and the second group exercised to do the same.
The groups were then asked to refuel at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The diet participants ate an average of 944 calories while the exercise group ate 660 calories.
The research showed that the exercise group didn’t necessarily eat less food but made better food choices, which were naturally higher in nutrients rather than calories.
The halo effect of exercise
Exercise makes you feel good, but it doesn’t make you a fitness saint. Exercise is sometimes confused with being virtuous. Nothing is further from the truth; unscrupulous people exercise too!
Labeling yourself as a “good” person for exercising can have the effect of over-rewarding yourself with “bad” food; after all, balance is important…
Overindulging in nutritionally poor foods sabotages the body’s recovery from exercise. The body will continue to hunger until it gets the nutrients it needs.
In an interesting study by Cornell University (2014), researchers led 56 volunteers on a 2 km walk, telling half of them that it was for exercise and half that it was a scenic stroll.
The “exercise” group ate 35% more chocolate pudding for dessert than the “scenic” group.
In another experiment; 46 volunteers were given post-walk snacks, and the “exercisers” ate 124% more calories than those who were told it was just for fun.
The study author Carolina Werle, a professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management in France, said the following:
- “Viewing their walk as exercise led them [the volunteers] to be less happy and more fatigued,….The findings suggest that some people in exercise programs gain weight because they reward themselves by overeating after a workout,”
The key to a healthy diet is listening to your body, it is a product of nature and will always crave natural whole foods.
Our psychology may justify the consumption of processed foods, however, physically the body will be challenged to understand how to digest and process manufactured foods.
The body reacts like our psychology when faced with a difficult problem by placing it “in the too hard basket” to deal with it later.
Therefore, fat stores can be thought of as the body’s physiological “procrastination” of the processing of manufactured high calorie and nutritionally poor food.
Exercise provides the switch necessary to turn on the body’s use of energy stores and generate the desire for natural whole foods.
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Live well and eat well
Anna
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