The best time to exercise for weight loss - Articles - Happyweight

The best time to exercise for weight loss

Exercise is a great fat burner

As we all know, exercise is a brilliant way to burn energy. Depending on what type of exercise you do, and the weight that you are, you can burn quite a few calories with moderate exercise. For example, you can expect to burn over 300 calories with a brisk walk for an hour and 450 calories or more with an aerobics class.

This makes an enormous difference to your calorie deficit over a year. If you walked for an hour five times a week, you could expect to burn about 1,500 calories a week which is 78,000 calories a year. As a pound of fat contains around 3,500 calories, that would equate to an annual loss of over 22 pounds.

Exercise alters the way that your body burns and stores fat. One of the ways that it does this, is that it improves the body’s use of insulin, the fat storage hormone.  The good news is that exercise also helps prevent type 2 diabetes and a host of other complaints, which are now thought to be related to high circulating insulin levels.

Exercise also increases fat burning enzymes and reduces fat storing enzymes, both during exercise, and afterwards.

Exercising after meals helps burn more fat

Now it has also been discovered that the time that you exercise in relation to eating, has an effect on your body's ability to burn fat. Exercising after meals has a particularly beneficial effect for fat loss. This was discovered by scientists working at Surrey University and Imperial College London and published in the Journal of Endocrinology in 2007.

What was discovered was that people feel less hungry after exercise, and this carries on to the next meal.

In the research, 12 volunteers were fed the same breakfast. Then, an hour later, half of them worked out for an hour on an exercise bike while the other half sat quietly.

Both groups were left for another hour and then allowed to eat as much as they liked.

Obviously the people who exercised burned more than twice the calories than the people who sat quietly, 492 compared to 197 calories.

The people who had exercised tended to eat more too as expected, 913 calories versus 762 calories of the non-exercising group.

Most people believe that exercise increases your appetite and thus you eat more food to compensate for the additional activity. However, the opposite appears to be true. When the total amount of energy burned during exercise was taken into account, the exercising people took in fewer calories overall. They ate 421 less calories compared to 565 calories consumed by the inactive group.

Researcher Dr Denise Robertson said: "In the past we have been concerned that, although exercise burns energy, people subsequently ate more after working out. This would cancel out any possible weight reduction effects of exercise. But our research shows that exercise may alter people's appetite to help them lose weight and prevent further weight gain as part of a healthy, balanced lifestyle."

Exercise affects the hormones which switch off hunger

What was discovered was that the levels of hormones called PYY, GLP-1 and PP increased during exercise and immediately after. These are the hormones that trigger feelings of satiety; they switch off hunger.

This is great news, and great motivation for those who are trying to lose weight. Not only does exercise burn calories, but it also has an effect on appetite which means that overall you are likely to eat less.

The important thing with exercise, is to choose something that you enjoy and that is sustainable. If you can plan your exercise to follow your meals, and you are maximising your body's fat burning potential too. Although, high impact aerobics or activities involving jumping around may not be the best option on a full stomach! But walking, cycling, and weight training could certainly be feasible.

I help my clients to find the best ways to exercise for their lifestyle and enjoyment and monitor them over time so that they can really see the changes happening in their body composition (fat and muscle levels), as well as general markers of fitness like fasting blood sugar and triglyceride levels and blood pressure.

Please call me to discuss how I can help you to achive your goals 0844 8001197.

You might also find the chart useful as they show how much energy is expended during exercise.