Weight to go: How to reap the benefits to your exercise regimen

What you eat and drink before or after exercise can make all the difference to your ability to drop unwanted pounds, says Peta Bee.

You're working out diligently at the gym, so why isn’t your weight budging on the scales? The likelihood is that you are eating more without realising it. Getting the nibbles after a strenuous bout of exercise is far from unusual and a recent six month study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition proved that a group of novice gym-goers packed away more calories the more they moved.

In the study of 171 previously inactive men and women, some were asked to exercise three times a week on treadmills or exercise bikes until they had burned eight calories for every kilogram of their body weight (around 700 calories), some to work harder, exercising to burn about 1,760 calories a week, while a third group continued with their regular couch-potato habits. After six months, the sedentary group had, as expected, failed to lose weight.

But so too had most of the exercisers. The reason seemed to be that they had consumed 90 to 125 calories a day which doesn’t sound much, but was enough to offset the good work they had done in the exercise studio. Timothy Church, an adjunct professor at US-based Pennington Biomedical Research Centre who led the study, described it as “the ‘if I jog now, I deserve that doughnut’ idea”. But what else are we doing that might stall our weight loss?

Avoid sports drinks (but try carb rinsing)

Sports drinks are designed to provide fluid and energy in the form of carbohydrate – they are basically a sugary liquid typically containing 140 calories a bottle and consuming too many will result in weight gain unless you work out extra hard and extra long to use up the additional energy.

You will probably need a sports drink for endurance events lasting longer than an hour, but you can also get away with the practice of ‘carb-rinsing’ which can mean some of the benefits with none of the calories ingested.

Swilling your mouth with an isotonic sports drink and then spitting it out without swallowing any is popular among athletes and footballers. Earlier this year a study at the Dublin City University’s department of applied science, published in the journal Sports, reported that people were able to run for longer after practising carb mouth rinsing and consuming some caffeine.

How does it work? According to Mark Germaine, a performance nutritionist who led the Dublin research, “rinsing carbohydrate around the mouth activates reward-related areas of the brain which can reduce the perception of effort and increase performance”.

In other words, it persuades muscles to work harder, meaning you get more return for your workout efforts. A consensus statement on nutrition, published in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism this year, said carb-rinsing works even for shorter duration exercise.

Forget about re-fuelling

It’s a misconception you need to ‘re-fuel’ after every workout. A 30-minute treadmill run might use up around 250-300 calories, but ‘refuelling’ with nut butters, energy bars or a smoothie will substantially reduce your calorie deficit and make weight loss difficult. Eating pre-workout snacks like banana, granola bars or cereal immediately before hitting the gym is also a mistake.

“For one, the energy you think you are taking in won’t have time to be digested, absorbed and metabolised and can just mean extra calories with no performance gain,” says Dr Sarah Schenker, co- author of the Fast Diet Recipe Book.

And two, the calories ingested necessitate the release of insulin which will inhibit the mobilisation of fatty acids that are used by the body as fuel. All of this is bad news for weight loss

To fast or not to fast?

Whether or not working out on an empty stomach — so called cardio-fasting — accelerates weight loss has proved something of a conundrum. Last year, studies by Dr Javier Gonzalez, a human physiology researcher at the University of Bath, and scientists at the universities of Birmingham, Newcastle and Stirling, compared healthy volunteers who ate a breakfast of porridge before a workout with those who worked out in a fasted state.

Overall both approaches burned the same calories, but breakfast eaters tended to lose out by eating more as the day goes on.

A review of the evidence by researchers at the University of Limerick’s Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences found that both approaches can boost your metabolism and weight loss. It comes down to which you prefer.

“Pre-exercise feeding bolsters prolonged aerobic performance,” said Dr Brian Carson, a lecturer in exercise physiology and lead author of the Limerick review. But they also found evidence of “beneficial metabolic adaptations that fasted exercise may induce” which may also help you lose weight.

The verdict? Decide what works for you and stick at it.

Do drink a cup of blackcoffee before a workout

Used carefully, coffee — or specifically the caffeine it contains — can provide a boost to your weight loss workouts. In one of his recent papers, Germaine concluded that “caffeine alone would likely suffice as an ergogenic aid during high-intensity running” or other exercise as long as you had eaten something prior to working out.

Research by one of Europe’s leading caffeine experts, Neil Clarke, an associate professor in the school of life sciences at Coventry University, suggests that caffeine “can increase your resting metabolic rate”, which means it helps you burn more calories at rest.

“It also stimulates the nervous system, which increases circulating levels of adrenaline,” he says. “That can cause fat tissues to break down fats and release them into your blood. If this happens and you are exercising and not over-eating, it will help you to lose fat.

A study published last year demonstrated that caffeine intake might promote weight, BMI and body fat reduction.”

Most studies show you need about a dessert spoon of coffee granules dissolved in water 60 minutes before exercise to help boost your workout and weight loss.

Work a bit harder

High-intensity exercise has been shown in numerous studies to curb appetite rather than increase it.

The latest study to report this effect was published in the Journal of Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders in June (2019). For 12 weeks, 80 subjects with type 2 diabetes, half of whom were obese, took part in a treadmill-based interval training session in which they were told to warm up for 5 minutes, then sprint for 60 seconds followed by a 60-second jog.

They repeated this six times in the first week, increasing to 12 times by the end of the trial and always finished with a three minute cool down. Each session lasted 20-24 minutes but was hard work with subjects pushing themselves to 85-95% of their maximum heart rate. Results showed that the HIIT decreased the activity of so-called hunger hormones, such as ghrelin, suppressing appetite.

The effects were more pronounced in the people who were overweight. Others have shown that people are inclined to eat as much as 20% fewer calories after high intensity exercise than they do after a moderate gym workout.

Bypass the post-workoutprotein FIX

While some gyms have moved on from a preoccupation with post-workout protein, others persist in peddling the message that your body is crying out for protein after exercise and it is essential to replace it within an optimal one-hour window. But is it?

There’s no doubt that protein is essential for repairing muscle damage and can help the body to cope with the demands of strenuous workouts. Government guidelines suggest that we need 0.75g of protein per kilogram of body weight daily, or about 45g a day for an adult woman and 55.5g for a man to stay healthy and there’s evidence, says Schenker, that people who do a lot of strength training need a little more.

However, it’s not as much as you might think. A 2018 review paper published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that eating a lot more protein was not better even for people who lift weights, and that the tipping point for daily protein intake is about 1.6g per kilogram of body weight each day.

The RDA (recommended daily amount) of protein for an adult in Ireland is set at 0.75g per kilogram of body weight — for an 80kg man that would be met by consuming 60g of protein — the equivalent of a chicken breast and two eggs — in a day.

Most of us get enough in our daily diet from milk, eggs, cheese and fish to support any regular gym routine. And more is just extra calories that head to the waistline.