To Eat or Not To Eat Before Going To The Gym?
There are a lot of questions when it comes to working out.
Some of them are justified, some of them are just silly and some are simply reasons for delaying daily exercises.
However, here’s one of the questions I used to ask myself or my trainers; I’m enclosing the answers I eventually received:
Does exercising on an empty stomach burn more fat than when you previously have a meal?
There are some who claim that working out after having eaten may upset your stomach. While there are others as well who say that not eating before going to the gym can cause serious issues, such as heart problems. This is because the amount of fat located in the blood tends to increase when the body works out on an empty stomach; such fat becomes dangerous, it affects the heart and might lead to serious illness.
Believe it or not, there is no clear answer to which is better (or worse) – eating or not eating before working out, especially after a new study was published. This research was conducted by researchers from the University of Birmingham.
It focused on cyclists and showed that those of them who trained after having a meal burnt less fat than those who did not eat first hand. The reason invoked was that lack of carbohydrates as source of energy leads to the body turning to fat in order to get what it needs. So, if there is no other energy provider, fat is just as good as any.
However, physicians do not recommend working out on an empty stomach. Depriving your body of vital nutrients by not eating may cause faintness and might derive in poor quality workouts. So, having a light meal before going to the gym is usually acceptable and even indicated if you tend to have hard working out sessions. Me, for instance, I usually eat a banana or some other fruit at hand, as well as raw nuts or a piece of bread for the carbs.
Nevertheless, if you do choose not to eat before going to the gym, careful not to overdo it afterwards. Meaning, you might feel hungrier than you normally do and you might tend to eat larger amounts of food. That will certainly cancel the benefits of any workout!
RSS Trackback URL 2. March 2011 (14:52)
Filed under: Fitness, Steaming diets by Slim
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