Maggie's Farm

The battle of the bulge is always decided at the dinner table. But an army that shows up unprepared will almost always lose to the army that is prepared.

When people say "weight loss" they almost always mean "fat loss". After all, almost no one wants to lose muscle, right?

This means that you have to have a negative caloric balance.

Exercise, properly implemented, can have a role in creating that balance.

Part of the hunger signal comes from blood glucose levels--when they drop you feel more hungry. This is why foods high in simple sugars don't satisfy for as long. You get an insulin spike after eating them which drives the glucose into the muscle, lowering blood glucose and making you hungry.

Your liver contains about 2000 calories of glucose at any given time. Reasonably hard exercise seems to trigger the release of this glucose into the blood stream, thus staving off hunger for a while. It also may be that once you feed after that that the liver prioritizes refilling those sugar stocks.

Zone 2 training also trains your mitochondria to use fatty acids as a substrate for energy production. Thus after adaption 40 to 60 minutes of zone two training not only helps increases calories burned, but also works on burning the very stuff you want to get rid of.

But do have to be careful not to eat back all the calories you just burned.