The question always comes up as to when you should exercise. Is it before or after eating? How long before? How long after? Many professional athletes schedule their day’s activities around their meals. Also, many fitness enthusiasts become fanatical and inflexible about the time sequence of exercise and meals. Although the average exerciser doesn’t have to be as particular about timing walking in relation to mealtime, it’s still essential to become familiar, at least in part, with the physiology of digestion.
As food enters your stomach, the heart pumps a significant quantity of blood into the stomach to aid digestion. This does not pose a problem when you are at rest, but if you decide to exercise immediately after eating, there is a conflict of interests. The stomach now has to compete with the exercising muscles for the blood it needs for digestion. If the exercise gets vigorous, digestion is arrested and you begin to feel bloated and develop abdominal cramps. Exercise should, therefore, begin after a meal has passed through the stomach and small intestine. This takes approximately two to three hours after ingesting a large meal, and from sixty to ninety minutes after eating a smaller meal.
Foods high in fat and protein are digested slowly and tend to remain in the digestive tract for a longer time than a meal that is higher in complex carbohydrates (vegetables, fruits, whole grain cereals, and whole grain breads and pasta). Foods that are high in refined sugar, like cakes, candy, and pies, can trigger an excess insulin response and should not be eaten immediately before exercise. The excess insulin produced as a result of the high sugar content of food, combined with the exertion of exercise, could drop your blood sugar rapidly. This could result in weakness, muscle cramps, and even fainting.
On the other hand, fasting for long periods prior to exercise is also counterproductive. In order to replenish the stores of liver and muscle glycogen needed for energy, it is necessary to eat several hours before exercising. If you fast, you are depleting these energy stores, and exercise then becomes difficult and tiring without adequate fuel storage reserves for energy.
So what does this all have to do with your exercise schedule? The most important fact to be learned from this discussion on digestive physiology is that it is essential that you don’t exercise immediately after eating, especially if you’ve consumed a relatively large meal. This puts a strain on the cardiovascular system and can even deprive the heart of its own essential blood supply, particularly if you exercise vigorously immediately after eating.
Try Walking an Hour Before and an Hour After Meals
Moderate exercise such as walking, however, forty five to sixty minutes after a small meal and sixty to ninety minutes after a moderate meal, can actually aid in digestion by nudging the foodstuffs gently along the digestive tract. This in no way competes for the blood in the digestive tract, since the walking muscles do not require every available molecule of oxygen as strenuously exercising muscles do. In fact, the gentle art of walking allows oxygen to be evenly distributed to all of the body’s internal organs, including, in this particular case, the digestive tract.
Recent studies indicate a fourfold advantage for dieters who walk before and after meals. First, as we have seen in Tip 85, walking before eating quiets down the appetite control center in the brain and makes us less hungry. Second, walking at any time burns calories directly, as we walk. And third, new studies in exercise physiology have shown that walking anywhere from forty five to ninety minutes after eating a small to moderate sized meal will actually burn 10 to 15 percent more calories than walking on an empty stomach. This is explained by what is called the thermic dynamic action of food. What this means is that the actual digestion of foodstuffs, combined with the gentle action of walking, results in a slightly higher metabolic rate, thus burning more calories per hour. And fourth, as previously mentioned, research has indicated that you continue to burn calories long after you complete your walking exercise program. These are four great reasons to keep walking for weight loss and weight maintenance.
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