Imagine your body as a 24-hour car if you want to quickly grasp the concept of energy balance. Similar to how you know there is no purpose in putting more gas in your automobile than it can contain, you would never expect it to get you from point A to point B without routine recharging, but that is how many of us use our bodies. We try running on empty for several hours and then overfill the tank with petrol. This strategy is self-destructive.
Let us imagine you decide to go for a morning jog on an empty stomach since you truly want to lose weight. Muscle tissue may be broken down to produce energy most easily. Your body can convert specific amino acids—the building blocks of muscle—to glucose, the sugar that powers human activity. Someone running before eating may actually be breaking down the very tissue he’s trying to improve. This is counterproductive—a “muscle-loss” diet.
For most of us, the "fat-gain" diet is probably more usual. With this one, you wait a long time between meals, and then, when you’re ravenously hungry, you wipe out an entire buffet line. This guarantees that you’ll get a larger surge of the hormone insulin than you ordinarily would and that means more fat storage.
The "muscle-loss" and "fat-gain" techniques previously discussed can likely be combined to make your body an ideal fat-storing, muscle-burning machine. In the near term, intense exercise reduces hunger, but over time, your appetite increases in proportion to your level of effort.
Running 10 miles on an empty stomach and then eating enough to fuel a 15-mile run results in muscle loss during the run and fat accumulation during the post-run meal.
Energy balance is the answer:
- Eat as soon as you wake up.
- Make sure you eat a small meal before you exercise, no matter what time of day it is. Not only does the food prevent your muscle tissue from be-coming cardio chow, it also increases the number of calories you burn during and after exercise. Research indicates that physical activity after a meal speeds up metabolism.
- Eat immediately after exercising, when your body has depleted its energy reserves. Move quickly to avoid using your muscles as a source of energy.
- Consume five to six modest meals per day.. Studies have shown that athletes who added three daily snacks to their three square meals lost fat and gained muscle, besides improving in all the other things that are important to athletes, such as power and endurance. Of course, you can’t simply add a few hundred calories to your diet and lose weight, but you can redistribute your daily calories so you’re eating more often but consuming less at individual meals.
- Eat before bed. You might need to eat immediately before bed if you are attempting to shed fat and gain muscle because your body breaks down muscle tissue while you sleep. Planning this snack will help you resist the temptation to inhale an entire chocolate cake at midnight.
However you do it, it’s clear that the worst dieting strategy is cutting out tons of calories indiscriminately in hopes of sudden dramatic weight loss. If you’re more patient and try to lose a pound a week every week or two, you’ll be more likely to reach your goals and less likely to regain those unwanted pounds.