Strength training & HIIT - Can't stop eating!

(Kristen Ann) #12

Thanks Erin, I appreciate that!

(April Harkness) #13

I keep my sessions short as I found long sessions increase my hunger. I actually adressed the length of my workouts on my fb page today bc everyone was asking and assume by looking at me that I spend hours in the gym. I dont. My kb workout today? 12 min.

(Kristen Ann) #14

Update: I dropped the HIIT and replaced with short moderate cardio sessions, and I can now stop eating. Hunger, calories, and eating window all back to normal. And my pants feel a little looser :).

(traci simpson) #15

I walk almost every morning and sometimes lift later in the day and most of the time it’s on an empty stomach. I take a three hour dance class on Saturdays and never eat until I’m back home and I’m not any hungrier than any other time. I just got back awhile ago from lifting and when I got back, about 30 minutes after I ate, not because I was starving but because I wanted to eat within my window. I could have waited another 30 minutes of so if I wanted to.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #16

That advice is for carb burners. The advice for ketonians is to increase protein if you are trying to put on muscle, and to continue to eat fat to satiety as one would under any other circumstances. I suspect that a good part of your hunger is for protein. In particular, eat foods rich in the essential branched-chain amino acids (leucine, iso-leucine, and valine). Under other circumstances they can be inflammatory in quantity, but you need them for muscle-building, so it’s fine.

In addition to the extra protein, you need energy to fuel the muscle-building, and here’s where the fat comes in. It will provide the energy needed to reshape the amino acids from your protein intake into muscle proteins. The key, however, is eating to satiety—NOT to a caloric deficit, and not to stuff your gut with fat, either. Our body has evolved a set of intricate mechanisms for keeping food intake and energy expenditure in balance, so let it do its job by eating to satisfy your hunger, no more, no less. Your appetite will set itself at the right level to fuel your muscle-building activities, while at the same time drawing down some of the excess fat you may happen to have lying around. You do not need to eat an intentional deficit, merely to let your body do its job.

(Kristen Ann) #17

So you’re saying that fat burners are indeed unicorns…?!

(Kristen Ann) #18

Hey Erin, would I be sweating at his heart rate…? Just trying to judge my pace. I know you said it doesn’t have to be exact and that I should be able to hold a conversation, but I might be taking it too easy on the elliptical…

I’m doing 20-40 min depending if I lift weights, 4/20 ramp incline, 9/20 resistance and going slow enough to hold a conversation, but only getting a hint of sweat on my back and no where else.

(Erin Macfarland ) #19

You might up the resistance a bit, you should be able to talk but still have to catch your breath a bit :wink:

(Bunny) #20

Seeing it through that looking glass:

Maybe you need more calories to build more muscle volume that is why you are hungry?

To burn body fat you need to eat less?

Or something like that?

When you are lifting something you are building something which requires more calories? (the time you spend doing it is the significant factor?)

I myself lift as much weight as I possibly can without resting to break apart (rip & tear) muscle tissue then stop for a long period of time (until the next week) to rebuild more tissue. If I continue to lift for longer periods of time, the more calories I’m going to require?

Another crazy little thing about hormones is the more testosterone you have, the more protein you can eat because you then have the chemistry to handle increased protein intake to build more muscle volume.

It’s just a matter of figuring out where the trade-off really is? The more muscle volume you build, the more body fat you will burn when at rest including the immediate oxidation of dietary carbohydrates? So you may need to eat more calories for a while until you achieve that end?

Can we please stop repeating the “You have to eat at a deficit to lose weight on KETO” lie?
(Marianne) #21

Very helpful - thank you.

Planet Fitness has a $1 joining feel right now. I’ve been wanting to get back, mainly for the 30-minute workout. After your tips, I will throw in some cardio, too, even though I don’t like it.

(Marianne) #22

Me, too.

(Marianne) #23

Wow, 12 minutes!?

What is kb?

(April Harkness) #25

instead of describing, I shall show you-

I will actually be posting week 2 (it’s a training program I am designing for my boyfriend - yes we are back together after a long heart to heart talk!) on a different thread called workout with April under Weightlifting.

(Bunny) #26

You are awesome!

(Marianne) #27

How much does that kettlebell weigh? Looks pretty heavy.

(Katie) #28

My suggestion is to hit your protein target (~1 gram of protein per pound of of lean body mass or overall mass), and try upping your fat. This might help with satiety. I recently did this and fasting is easier and I am sooner satiated. I do OMAD and eat the fattier portion of my meal first in order to feel satiated sooner, and it seems to really help.

If/When you do gain weight from strength training, be sure to note changes in physique, not just the scale. Your body may be getting healthier, trimmer, and more muscular, but your overall body mass will increase. That would be a good, healthy gain and totally okay! Consider documenting with progress photos.

(Kristen Ann) #29

I dropped HIIT and am ding some moderate cardio occasionally with strength training. My hunger, satiety signals, and eating window are all back to normal! No changes on the scale but my pants are a little looser.

(Windmill Tilter) #30

It’s definitely not just you. High intensity training sends my appetite through the roof. I do a High Intensity Resistance Training (HIRT) workout once per week where you do just 5 exercises (bench press, leg press, cable row, lat pull down,overhead press) with the heaviest weight possible for just a single set of 90 seconds or until you hit total muscle failure. Total working time under load is barely 8 minutes for the whole workout (it’s called Body by Science)

After those workouts, I generally eat over 4000kcals, and frequently go over 5000kcals! It’s so taxing that recovery takes me about a week, but that’s just fine, because I’d get fat pretty quick if I did it more often. :yum:

(Windmill Tilter) #31

One thing I wonder about is whether hunger after exercise could be a proxy for efficacy. If I futz about on an elliptical for an hour a day, never get particularly hungry, and build no lean muscle, is this necessarily better than lifting something incredibly heavy at 100% intensity for a short time, getting ravenously hungry, and growing 3oz of new muscle?

I’m not asserting that this is what normally happens for people, but it’s possible. Even when I have those crazy 4000-5000kcal after lifting weights once a week, I still lose weight each week, but the amount I can lift each week goes up and over the course of months my muscles are growing visibly bigger and my waistline is growing measurably smaller.

It’s possible that eating to satiety after exercise might be self regulating for people with healthy metabolisms, and hunger is commensurate with demand to repair/build new muscle. I don’t know that this is true for anybody, much less everybody, but I wonder to what extent it could be true in people whose satiety signals are working properly.

Put differently, if we don’t get hungry after exercise, maybe we haven’t accomplished much?

(JJ) #32

Great reading the replies.

I experience insane hunger around my longer exercise efforts. I cycle about 80km a week (mix of some long, some short rides) and run 5-15km a week. I do weights 2 or 3 times a week for about 20min. A day or so after a long bike ride or run, I could represent Australia in the eating Olympics. Fasting is almost impossible if I have a big week of glyco burning kinda action.

Although my natural instinct is to try to suppress/ignore the hunger as I worry about regaining the weight I have lost, I find just eating up a storm seems the best approach for now.