The simple trick to make your workout BETTER – and help you lose weight faster
YOUR mum was right - breakfast really is the most important meal of the day.
While having a morning meal can help to curb mid-morning cravings, it's also now thought to help us burn more calories throughout the day after working out.
A new study suggests that eating breakfast before exercise may 'prime' the body to burn carbs during exercise, and to digest food quicker post-workout.
Scientists from the University of Bath, Birmingham, Newcastle and Stirling tested the blood glucose and muscle glycogen levels of 12 healthy male volunteers.
The men were either given breakfast before taking three hours' rest, or had a bowl of milky porridge two hours before exercise.
And researchers discovered that eating breakfast increased the rate at which the body burns carbs during exercise, as well as increasing overall metabolism after exercise.
At a time when more and more people are becoming in intermittent fasting and fasted cardio (not eating until after you've worked out) as a way of priming the body for burning fat, these findings are really interesting.
"This is the first study to examine the ways in which breakfast before exercise influences our responses to meals after exercise," said Dr Javier Gonzalez, from the University of Bath.
"We found that, compared to skipping breakfast, eating breakfast before exercise increases the speed at which we digest, absorb and metabolise carbohydrate that we may eat after exercise."
But that's not all.
Eating breakfast before working out not only has you burning off carbs from that meal, but also seems to help the body to use up any carb stored in our muscles as glycogen.
Think of it a bit like a carb-spring clean.
Eating a good breakfast and then exercising seems to flush out any excess carb hiding in the body.
As a result, our blood sugar after lunch seems clear faster if we've already had breakfast and done our exercise.
MORE ON FITNESS & EXERCISE
And it's that led scientists to believe that "at least after a single bout of exercise, eating breakfast before exercise may prime our body, ready for rapid storage of nutrition when we eat meals after exercise".
Scientists say that more research needs to be done into the health impacts of the findings, especially in regard to overweight people at risk from type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Today, we revealed how a woman lost a whopping 8st after a diabetes scare, while yesterday, Katie Piper revealed how power walking and 'clean eating' have helped her get in shape for Strictly.