How Exercise Affects Diet
There are many different theories and recommendations for nutritional and dietary manipulations that are assumed to enhance the results from your workout.
Working out can help you stick to your diet
There is pre and post workout nutrition which includes some sort of protein and amino acid cocktail.
There is also post workout carbohydrate loading in an effort to get the muscles to supercompensate with higher glycogen storage.
Then there are numerous theories how to manipulate your hormonal profile through diet and exercise to get the body to look and react a certain way.
Most of this is just pseudoscience that doesn’t add up to much when put to the test scientifically, or it applies in very specific situations for very short time frames and is only detectable in elite level athletes using scientific equipment to measure the changes.
In other words, you’ll never notice or feel or experience any of these changes in your day to day life even if you follow most of these recommendations to a ‘T’.
I think the real effect that diet and exercise can have is creating a positive effect on each other through accountability and ritual.
It seems to be easier to stick to a diet plan on the days that you workout because you’ve built some structure and positive ritual into your day.
You workout, you feel good about working out, the workout itself feels good, and this starts a movement of positive momentum.
You start to feel accountable to yourself and that you’re moving in a positive direction. All of this positive empowering feeling helps you stick to whatever diet plan you had for the day. Maybe the momentum and accountability from the workout helps you avoid having two slices of pizza for lunch and instead you opt for something with less calories.
The thinking is simple…you just don’t want to ‘ruin’ the workout by having a lousy meal or by eating something that isn’t part of your plan or that doesn’t contribute to getting you to your body shape and fitness goals.
Conversely on days when you don’t have a workout scheduled (or days when you miss your workout because of some other circumstance) it seems easy to fall off of the diet wagon as well. Missing the workout begets missing on your diet.
So not only do you miss the workout, but you also decide that you might as well go for all you can eat pizza and wings and finish it off with a quart of ice cream.
Even though you can’t out exercise a bad diet, you can certainly use your workout as a source of momentum and positive ritual to stick to your diet plan.
I’d go as far as to say even a 20 min walk is still enough to build up that momentum for the day to help you stay on track with your eating.
I think one of the major reasons so many people struggle with their diet is simply because we are terribly sedentary and we are losing touch with part of what it means to be human and alive…and that is physical activity.
The sedentary life that many people are now living is uncharted and unprecedented. There has never been a time in human history when people have been this sedentary. We are just not adapted well to this lifestyle. We were built to move and until the industrial revolution we had to spend most of our days in very active jobs.
I’d even go as far as to suggest it’s also part of why so many people have sleeping problems and issues with depression…We just don’t move enough.
Getting back to the core of what we are (built to move) is a vital step to getting in shape and staying in shape.
The effect exercise can have on your diet is more to do with feeling good and building momentum than it has to do with glycogen or protein synthesis or any of that pseudo-scientific stuff.
Getting up and moving more is the easiest and most effective way to stay on track with your diet.
Think of it as building an upward spiral of positive momentum that eventually fuels itself. You’ll know you are there when you have an urge to workout and cannot do without it.
John
18 Responses to “How Exercise Affects Diet”
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February 22nd, 2011 at 2:03 pm
non exercise physical activity attracts me more,it makes you busy and when youre busy doing something you dont think about eating.
February 22nd, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Yosun,
That is a perfect example of how activity and movement can work to help with diet.
February 22nd, 2011 at 6:55 pm
Getting back into working out over the last two years originated with small but consistent steps. I initially was overwhelmed by the new styles of equipment and all of the athletes there, so I started slow and rather inconspicuously. Never did I Ever dream that the results that I Could achieve, would achieve. Getting rid of the rest of this spare tire is slow and definite- not a hope, just a knowing that it will happen.
This is yet another great article of inspiration- keep us going boss, and Thanks
February 22nd, 2011 at 7:27 pm
genuinely enjoyed the 1st half of your blog, its something I can really relate too. On a personal level I felt I would sabbotage my diet when missing on a workout due to possesing a perfectionist-like mentality. If one aspect of my goal as a whole went bad, then I would drop everything for that day. In addition, Id have a tendency to skip my workout when my diet fell off track that day.
This is why I find your mind set to attaining a better physique appealing. Eat less- move more, which is simple as could be. Other fitness personalities have a lot more “set of rules” to follow, and more rules= better chance you won’t abide by to one rule or another. For those who posses perfectionist-type mentalites, multiple rules to diet/workout can cause difficulties in adherence and make one feel that a better physique is too difficult to attain.
keep up the great work. For someone whose backround is in physiology you possess an amazing understanding of human behavior.
February 23rd, 2011 at 1:39 am
Absolutely, I go to the gym or do some other activity on recovery days even if it’s stretching or light cardio simply for the fact that it keeps me from going on an eat-a-thon.
John, other than Creatine, what supplements currently available would maximize intramuscular water retention? (i.e. hyper-hydration)
February 23rd, 2011 at 9:40 am
Jas,
You could try betaine.
JB
February 23rd, 2011 at 10:37 am
Thanks, never heard of it for bodybuilding, until now.
February 24th, 2011 at 8:10 am
Speaking of exercise and diet,after reading about your education and after reading your blogs I am disappointed to find out that the NASM course i took seems like BS. Can you recommend any good books as far as training and/or diet? I don’t care what level of reading it is, I just want to absorb some accurate information..
February 24th, 2011 at 9:37 am
Missm88,
1) You could try ‘supertraining’ by Mel Siff
2) Science and Practice of Strength Training by Vladimir Zatsiorsky
These are pretty interesting and dig relatively deep.
The other option is to read the following journals:
1) Journal of strength and conditioning research
2) Strength and conditioning Journal
This should give you more detailed info compared to a certification course.
February 24th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
John,
What do you think of using weight and waist measurements to estimate % body fat?
And associating % body fat with a look vs. lbs of body fat
(i.e. a 250 lb guy at 10% vs. a 150 lb guy at 10%)
February 25th, 2011 at 8:34 am
Interesting but whatever happened to the phi life podcast?
February 25th, 2011 at 10:02 am
Jas,
That is the whole point of the waist vs height ratio. Most people will be at a rather predictable based on their waist to height ratio. And it also gives us a better measure of what you actually look like.
February 25th, 2011 at 10:59 am
Sundays tend to be the only day I don’t have some kind of scheduled/structured workout and yup, I find on that day, I tend to fall off my eating sometimes a bit too much. Other days, I can stay right on track no problem and it absolutely has to do with the fact that I got a great workout in and psychologically, I don’t want mess it up with excess food.
February 25th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Mike,
I really think this is the big benefit of exercise that nobody ever considers or talks about. It’s really a psychosomatic thing. It adds in layers of accountability, momentum, positive reinforcement, that feeling as you say of not wanting to ‘mess up’ a good day.
It’s as if we need to view the day as a game, and the workout is part of the ritual of ‘winning’ the day.
February 25th, 2011 at 3:23 pm
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February 26th, 2011 at 3:35 pm
John,
I’ve been thinking about something; since leaning down involves not only fat loss but water loss, wouldn’t a person’s lean mass technically decrease… making it harder to predict lean body mass across various body fat percentages?
Jason
February 27th, 2011 at 1:04 am
J,
Yes that is correct…it’s also why I don’t care about body fat % estimates. All that matters is what you look like in the mirror.
June 1st, 2011 at 9:07 pm
John,
Couldn’t have said it better myself. When I don’t workout for a few days I start cheating more and more on my diet, but even a 30 minute walk and I will eat clean for the most part. Its almost all phsychological and it works. So just remember to workout and the diet should follow suit.
Cheers,
Tim D