Feeling Hungry? A few things to consider!

Welcome to 5.14 Fitness,


I am writing about what happens when you get hungry. So what actually happens? You loose fat? Burn calories? Loose muscle?


So lets imagine it is half past twelve, you have not eaten since your Weetabix at breakfast. You have been exercising at a fairly high intensity in little burst (playing basketball on the play ground), followed by working your brain back at the house (doing a crossword puzzle). You are feeling hungry as you have not eaten in a while but also as you have burnt all the calories from breakfast and your body is beginning to burn up its stored energy supplies-fat!


You need to be hungry to burn fat as you need to have used up all the energy from your last meal. This is why more and more intense forms of exercise can help you loose weight, as you are burning up the energy from you last meal quicker and you body is having to go in to its reserves (fat).


What a lot of people are afraid of (especially body builders and those trying to gain muscle) are that if they do not eat as soon as they feel hungry their bodies will go into a catabolic state and then they eat straight away. A catabolic state is where your body, instead of burning fat, breaks down muscle for energy, this is because muscle fibres are less dense than fat so it is easier to get hold of.
When muscles are broken down, it decreases the quality of the muscles performance, the selected area will be smaller and you will have taken a step back away from your goals.

How to avoid a catabolic state? 

Well, the answer is simple do not over eat, eat clean, make sure you are full after every meal (so plently of carbohydrates) and do not let your self go too hungry (5hours without food max)!

If you eat as soon as you feel hungry all that fat that you will have broken down will be put back on and there will have been no point in the exercise. To cut a long story short, you will gain weight or have to exercise so much that you will have no life and your body will still have a tone of fat.

Moral of this post: let yourself get hungry ( work hard to burn calories ) and do not either; eat as soon as you feel hungry but also do not let yourself go starving, as we need food for energy which we use for our workouts

Hope this helps, all the usual stuff, check out other posts/pages, I will post whenever I can- peace!

Jason