Skip breakfast before exercise to get better results, shows study

Skipping breakfast before exercise might reduce how much we eat during the remainder of the day, according to a small but intriguing new study of fit young men.

The study finds that the choice to eat or omit a meal before an early workout could affect our relationship to food for the rest of the day, in complicated and sometimes unexpected ways.

Weight management is, of course, one of the great public — and private — health concerns of our time. But the role of exercise in helping people to maintain, lose or, in some instances, add pounds is problematic. Exercise burns calories, but in many past studies, people who begin a new exercise program do not lose as much weight as would be expected, because they often compensate for the energy used during exercise by eating more later or moving less.

These compensations, usually subtle and unintended, indicate that our brains are receiving internal communiqués detailing how much energy we used during that last workout and, in response, sending biological signals that increase hunger or reduce our urge to move. Our helpful brains do not wish us to sustain an energy deficit and starve.

Previous studies show that many aspects of eating and exercise can affect how much people compensate for the calories burned during exercise, including the type and length of the exercise and the fitness and weight of the exercisers.

Skipping or consuming breakfast also can matter. When we eat a meal, our bodies rely on the carbohydrates in those foods as a primary source of energy. Some of those carbohydrates are stored in our bodies, but those internal stores of carbohydrates are small compared to the stores of fat. Some researchers believe that our brains may pay particular attention to any reductions in our carbohydrate levels and rush to replace them.

This is where breakfast comes in. If we skip eating in the morning, we have no calories from a meal available for fuel during exercise and instead will rely on — and reduce — our internal carbohydrate stores, along with some of our fat.

Some researchers have speculated that we might then wind up overcompensating later, eating more calories than we burned during the workout and undermining our efforts to maintain or lose weight.

But that possibility had not been investigated. So, for the new study, which was published in April in The Journal of Nutrition, scientists from the University of Bath in England and other institutions decided to look more closely at how breakfast and exercise interact.

They first recruited 12 healthy, active young men and asked them to report to the university’s exercise lab on three separate mornings. On one morning, the men ate a hearty, 430-calorie bowl of oatmeal and rested for several hours.

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