Is Exercise Making You Eat More?

显示全部楼层 · 发表于 2008-2-24 23:37:43

You've started off the New Year right by ramping up your exercise routine. Good for you! But are you in fact losing the weight you had hoped to lose?

If the pounds aren't exactly melting off, it's probably not the fault of your workouts. Instead, it could be that your more intensive exercise routine is causing you to eat more.

That's right: Research suggests that women, more so than men, tend to eat more once they start working out regularly.

Why? It may be purely psychological: After we've completed our daily exercise routine, we may figure we can afford to splurge a little. Or, perhaps it's that more exercise increases our natural hunger pangs. (If that's the case, you still need to make healthy choices.)

It really doesn't matter what the reason is if you remember the #1 rule of losing weight: Calories burned must exceed calories taken in.

Think about it this way: It is easier to eat more calories than it is to burn off those calories with exercise. For example, a 30-minute walk can burn around 200 calories (depending on your weight and pace). But you can quickly cancel out those 200 calories afterwards by munching down 12 Ritz crackers — in less time than it takes to put on your running shoes.

Exercise should be something you do on most days of the week. But even this level of commitment to exercising doesn't give you carte blanche to eat whatever you want. If you've recently started exercising and you think it's causing you to gain weight, start by checking out your eating habits.