Surprising Research: Exercise to Lose Weight? Stay Warm!
Very interesting study on exercise reported in the NY Times:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/exercise-to-lose-we ight-stay-warm/?smid=fb-share&_r=0
If you’re hoping that exercise might keep you from gaining weight this holiday season, you may want to dial up the thermostat and do your workout indoors. According to a surprising new study, exercising in chilly temperatures could undermine dieting willpower.
By now, most of us have heard or discovered for ourselves that exercise is an unreliable means of controlling weight. After starting an exercise program, some people lose a pound or two, but others don’t lose weight, and many add body fat.
Why exercise affects people so differently in terms of weight control is uncertain. Scientists know that exercise generally increases appetite, so that many people consume more after a workout than they incinerate during it. But not all people overeat after workouts.
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It has long been known that exercising in cold water, as people do when swimming, tends to ignite appetite afterward more than a comparable amount of exercise on land. Many researchers had assumed that swimming itself was the culprit — that something about paddling prone in chilly water left people ravenous.
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Almost all of the walkers consumed significantly more calories and, in particular, more carbohydrates after they had been walking in the cold than when they had strolled in the more temperate room.
Most of those who exercised in the cold also showed higher blood levels of a hormone called ghrelin that is known to spark hunger. There was little change in ghrelin levels after the warmer exercise.
Over all, the volunteers felt more ravenous after working out in the cold and loaded their plates with more food than when they had been warm during their workout.
But they had not burned more calories during the exercise session in the cold. In fact, the researchers’ data showed, they had expended significantly fewer calories then than when walking while warm.
This finding might seem to fly in the face of the widely held idea that exercising in the cold requires lots of energy, because the body must heat itself.
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But his study does persuasively suggest that if you want to control yourself around holiday buffets, you should work out somewhere warm first.
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