Working out is important for the body. So, too, is eating right after exercising. Both form the optimal basis of natural health. A recent study comes with a few excellent health tips for people actively trying to get the most out of exercising. What you eat after can affect all the effort you did before. Let’s dive into this latest batch of health secrets.
Many of the health benefits of aerobic exercise come from the last exercise session you did. A single workout has a bigger impact on you health than the cumulative effects of weeks, months or years of exercising.
With that in mind, we should all know that a new study found that the nature of these benefits can be greatly affected by the food we eat afterwards. What you choose to eat will have different effects on the body’s metabolism.
The study found that exercise enhanced insulin sensitivity, particularly when meals eaten after the exercise session were low in carbohydrates. When you have enhanced insulin sensitivity, it is easier for the body to move sugar from the blood into tissues where it is stored or used as fuel. When that insulin sensitivity is impaired, it is a hallmark of type 2 diabetes.
One of the things the study found was that depriving yourself of calories after exercising (not eating a lot) didn’t improve insulin sensitivity any more than when they didn’t worry that much about calories. The idea: you don’t have to starve yourself after exercise to still reap some of the important health benefits.
The study included nine healthy sedentary men who underwent four sessions that lasted about 30 hours. Here are the four sessions:
1. No exercise, and meals matched their daily calorie expenditure. This was the control trial.
2. Exercise for 90 minutes at moderate intensity. After, meals matched the calories they just burned, with carefully balanced carbohydrates, fats, and protein.
3. The same as number two, except they ate meals afterward with relatively low carbohydrate content. But here they still ate enough total calories to match what they burned off.
4. The same as number three, but the low-calorie meals provided less energy than what was burned off. The food here had one-third fewer calories than the other sessions. This session had relatively high carbohydrate content to replace those burned off.
The exercise, if you are wondering, was a stationary bicycle and a treadmill. Each exercise session tended to increase insulin sensitivity. When people ate fewer carbohydrates after exercise, it enhanced insulin sensitivity significantly more. The results showed that people can still reap some important health benefits from exercise without under-eating or shedding pounds.
Plus, it reinforced the idea that each exercise session can affect the body’s physiology. In other words, every workout counts. Don’t get give up if you haven’t exercised in a while.
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