Fast before exercising for maximum benefit

If you can exercise before you eat, you’ll burn off more fat because your healthy genes will get switched on.

A study of meal timing and physical activity shows that working out before breakfast may be more beneficial for health than eating first.

The results indicate that when we eat affects how much fat we burn during exercise. It also alters activity inside fat cells that promotes long-term health.

If you fast before working out, your muscles must rely primarily on your body’s reservoirs of fat. Accessing this fat, however, is difficult.

For the study, researchers from the University of Bath decided to home in on fat cells.

Our body fat is busy and bossy. In recent years, scientists have established that fat cells are constantly making and excreting a wide variety of substances which influence other systems and organs in the body.

The British scientists suspected that eating before exercise might affect the production of these substances. They first recruited 10 overweight, sedentary, but healthy young men with a typical western lifestyle and tested their fitness, metabolic rates and samples of their blood and fat tissue.

Then, on two separate mornings, each man walked for an hour on a treadmill at a pace during which his body would rely principally on fat for fuel. Before one of these workouts, the men skipped breakfast, so they exercised on a completely empty stomach after an overnight fast.

On the other occasion, they ate a substantial, 600-calorie morning meal of toast, jam, cereal, milk and orange juice about two hours before they started walking. There were considerable differences. The men had lower blood sugar levels at the start of their workouts when they’d skipped breakfast than when they’d eaten. As a result, they burned more fat during walks on an empty stomach than when they had eaten first. So far so good. But the impact on fat cells was most important.

Many genes behave differently, depending on whether someone has eaten or not before walking.

Good genes which improve blood sugar and insulin levels were more active when the men fasted before exercise than when they’d had breakfast first.

The implication of these results is that to gain the greatest health benefits from exercise, it may be wise to skip eating first, said Dylan Thompson, director of health research at the University of Bath and senior author of the study.

I, for one, don’t need more proof. I’m convinced working out on an empty stomach has advantages.

The impact on fat cells is very important