I often wonder why specific workouts give me an enormous appetite more than others. When I used to eat large breakfasts after I workout, my body became used to that habit, and when I consumed less regularly, my appetite was smaller. But my craving for large meals after strenuous exercise is less when I eat less and healthier. Some might assume that working out will always make you hungry, but the situation is more complicated.
Do you have the urge to eat a large meal after working out? Or when you finish a workout and do you discover that you weren’t as hungry as you had anticipated? These two scenarios provide accurate illustrations of how exercise affects your hunger.
The type of training you are performing, can affect your physiology, and your current diet, exercise can either raise or decrease your hunger. Understanding how exercise impacts hunger can help you organize your pre- and post-workout nutrition as well as your meal intake to support the fitness advancement you’re aiming for.
Insatiable vs. Appetite
Is there a difference between hunger and appetite? When your body senses that it needs more food, hormones and molecular processes result in the physical sensation of hunger. There are numerous causes for this reaction.
An emotional response or a trigger such as boredom, emotion, or the sight or scent of appetizing meals can cause an appetite. You may eat even though you are not hungry because of these triggers. Hunger, appetite, and digestion are all governed by different hormones.
Even in scientific literature, the phrases “hunger” and “appetite” are frequently used synonymously; however, describing the distinctions between psychological and physiological demands for food requires utilizing the terms to define distinct roles.
Nutrient-dense foods that support your training and aid in your body’s restoration after exercise are essential, so always keep that in mind. Whatever your objectives, concentrating on food quality is necessary for optimum performance and wellbeing.
The Hormones That Regulate Hunger
Hunger is influenced by a number of hormones and hormonal interactions. Knowing how these hormones impact hunger will put the many interactions between exercise types and these hormones and hunger into context. These key decision-makers are listed below:
Leptin: The hypothalamus reduces hunger when leptin levels are up. Adipose tissue (body fat) releases leptin into the bloodstream. Leptin levels rise with food intake and are correlated with body fat percentage.
Ghrelin: Ghrelin increases hunger through interacting with the hypothalamus. When your stomach is empty, the small intestine and stomach create it.
Adiponectin: As your body fat percentage decreases, more adiponectin—a hormone secreted by fat cells—is produced. Adiponectin levels fall as body fat levels rise, on the other hand.
The small intestine produces cholecystokinin before, during, and after meals. It reduces appetite and heightens sensations of fullness by causing the release of bile and digestive enzymes into the small intestine.
Following a meal, peptide YY reduces hunger for roughly 12 hours. Both the big and small intestines generate it.
Insulin: Insulin inhibits hunger and controls blood sugar levels. The pancreas is where it is made.
Glucocorticoids: While a cortisol shortage can lessen hunger, excessive glucocorticoid use can increase hunger. Your adrenal glands produce them, and among their many jobs is controlling inflammation.
The Impact of Vigorous Exercise
According to research on the impact of intensive exercise on appetite, there may be a blunting effect, which would suggest that after your HIIT session, you would not feel as hungry. According to other research, this impact may not actually lower calorie consumption overall on the training day but instead temporarily reduces appetite after the activity. The scientific community is divided on this, though.
Ghrelin and appetite were repressed following high-intensity continuous training, according to a study that tracked the levels of specific hunger hormones after rigorous kinds of exercise. Blood samples were taken before and after exercise as well as 30 and 90 minutes thereafter.
These effects were greatest following sprint interval training, albeit they were also present with moderate-intensity continuous training. In this study, compared to both moderate intensity and the control group that did not exercise, energy intake was lower the day after high-intensity continuous training. The results of this study, which tracked caloric intake the day before, the day of, and the day after the activity, showed a reduction in total caloric consumption the following day.
The importance of compensatory intake cannot be overstated. This phrase refers to whether or not the suppression of hunger results in a general reduction in calorie intake. Your calorie balance isn’t significantly affected if hunger is decreased but doesn’t affect how much you ultimately eat over time (calories in versus calories out).
The Results of Mild Workout
It has been demonstrated that moderate exercise has a variety of effects on appetite, calorie intake, and hunger. Several studies have revealed that the majority of people do not suffer compensatory changes in appetite following moderate-intensity exercise.
With an elevation in peptide YY, moderate continuous exercise can reduce appetite. This suppression lasts for around 12 hours. This indicates that moderate-intensity exercise does not increase food intake by causing hunger, despite the fact that it burns calories and increases your calorie production. Having said that, it is essential to eat after working out in order to replenish glycogen and repair muscle.
Studies have found that light exercise helps prevent hunger, but it does not cause people to eat less.
In contrast to sedentary people, it also has no impact on food consumption. If losing weight is your objective, this means you can use exercise to generate a calorie deficit that won’t be regained by eating more later.
If your goal is to boost performance or acquire or maintain weight, you might need to consciously increase your calorie intake if you exercise. You may support your exercise and build lean muscle by incorporating a little bit extra into your normal meals, particularly in the form of nutrient-dense protein and carbohydrates.
Strength training and controlling hunger
Depending on the kind of exercise you undertake, you can perform strength training at low, moderate, and high intensities. For instance, powerlifting with greater weights can raise the heart rate to almost its maximum, whereas resistance training with longer sets, more repetitions, and lighter weight may not.
However, strength training differs from conventional cardiovascular training in that it more frequently results in muscle damage than other forms of exercise. Muscles must sustain this kind of trauma in order to develop stronger and bigger muscles.
According to certain studies, doing strength training can significantly enhance hunger. Others, however, have advocated against a rise in calorie intake. If you want to gain muscle and lean mass, you probably need to consciously increase your caloric intake in order to both fuel the growth of new tissues and make up for the calories you waste while exercising.
Even though it is less likely, if you are new to strength training, you can gain muscle while losing fat. In this situation, you will need to achieve a slight caloric deficit while making sure to get enough protein to support the growth of muscle tissue.
How to Use These Impacts to Your Objectives
Beyond just reducing body weight, incorporating exercise into your lifestyle has numerous positive effects on your health and wellness. Yet, you could also have more particular objectives for your weight, such as body fat reduction, muscle growth, performance enhancement, or weight maintenance. If so, there are a few things to think about in terms of how your workout can affect your appetite.
Putting on weight while gaining muscle
When adding exercise to your lifestyle, you’ll probably need to increase your calorie intake to make up for the calories lost if your objective is to maintain or gain weight. You will require more calories, with a focus on consuming enough protein, to increase your lean mass and build muscle.
You can experiment with increasing the portions at each meal or adding a new meal, such a post-workout meal, to your schedule. For the greatest outcomes, try to concentrate on nutrient-dense foods that will fuel performance, especially complex carbohydrates and lean protein.
Some examples of nutritious meals to incorporate in your diet are starchy vegetables, sweet potatoes, beans and legumes, whole grain breads, quinoa, oats, tofu, eggs, fish, chicken, and lean cuts of beef.
Reducing weight and body fat
Making exercise a habit can help you lose weight and keep it off, especially when coupled with a wholesome, well-balanced diet.
Exercise is a great approach to reach your goals for weight maintenance, to achieve weight loss, and body fat reduction. Particularly during weight loss, resistance training helps lessen muscle loss and the ensuing metabolism slowing.
Keep in mind that you may be shedding body fat while maintaining or even developing lean muscle mass if you are trying to reduce weight but the scale is not responding as you’d anticipated. Body recomposition is the term for this effect, which most frequently affects beginners to weightlifting but may also happen to trained people if their protein consumption is high enough.
A Final Word from Doc T. Elliott
Exercise is an excellent supplement to any lifestyle regimen since it helps you feel your best and protects you from sickness. I worried about how exercise impacted my appetite for several different reasons. If my workouts increased my hunger and went against my goal to lose body fat and be in better shape. The good news is that the evidence suggests otherwise.
I learned to consciously increase my calorie intake if my objective is to maintain or raise my body weight, perhaps with the idea of gaining lean muscle mass. Whatever your objective, focus on eating adequate protein while fueling your body with nutrient-dense foods. If you need more clarification, a sports nutritionist or dietician can assist you in developing a healthy eating strategy that suits your needs.