Exercise and Hunger - Nutrition Tips - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. I get a lot of questions about exercise during weight loss programs, and although I am not a personal trainer, there are some really good things to know about exercise that can come at you from the nutrition standpoint and the life style piece. So I think one of the big places of confusion is people think that you exercise to lose weight. Well if anybody out there, me included, has ever been in one of those treadmill machines when you look down and you see the little display that says how many calories you have burned over the course of this particular exercise about, it takes a long time to get to end of that hard ship hour, it is a really long time. So, that is not really why you are there. And I think if you can change in your mind, the why you are doing the exercise, it will really help you to understand it. You exercise to re-educate your body on how to use fuel. OK? Let me say that again. You re-educate your body on how to use fuel. So what you are doing is you are telling the muscles “oh, right, I am supposed to use this and burn this up, and not put it away for storage”. So what you are really doing is setting an environment up for burning as being the default, as opposed to storing being the default. So you do not exercise to lose weight, that is the key piece to remember. When you exercise, during the course of exercising and immediately following exercising, you will find that you actually experience a reduction in hunger because the body has too many other things to do. It is saying “oh, we are busy, we are doing this, we are doing this activity” , so it is not engaging the digestive system in the same sort of way. So, what happens is, you get about an hour away from your exercise, and then that kicks in the body, it is like “oh, we used up all that fuel, we need more”, and it is OK. That is another key piece to understanding about weight loss is it is OK to be hungry. Hungry is a signal, it is not a danger. If you get to the point where you are light headed, feeling really spacy, now you are passed hungry, you need to make sure you get something to eat. But really what you want to get back to is real food, reasonable quantities in a reasonable periods of time across your day.
