Why Your Food Bill Is increasing?

Why your food bill increases in proportion to the intensity and volume of your training

- Pedro van Gaalen

We’ve all been there before – neck deep in the fridge, on the hunt for more food mere minutes after dinner. It’s fairly common for individuals who train and race hard to find themselves in this compromising situation, which is far from ideal when you’re trying to maintain race weight or keep that conditioning you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

Having devoured all the leftovers from dinner, and your pre-prepped lunch for the next day, you’ll probably be plagued by feelings of guilt and resentment at your perceived inability to control your cravings. But don’t beat yourself up about it. There is a perfectly logical physiological answer to your plight of ravenous, insatiable hunger, and it’s called the compensation effect.

EXERCISE- INDUCED HUNGER

A growing body of research shows that, in general, energy expenditure from exercise results in an associated increase in caloric intake. By burning calories through intense or voluminous activity, researchers have found that feelings of hunger intensify as the sensitivity of the body’s hormonally-mediated appetite signalling system increases. This can also stimulate unconscious changes in food preferences, and alters the pleasure response to food in ways that significantly boost daily calorie intake.

Often referred to as compensation, this exercise-induced hunger not only cancels out the calories burnt during an exercise session, but it’s not uncommon for hard-training individuals to consume more calories than they expended. This happens because the body initiates a hormonally-driven survival response aimed at restoring the energy reserves that were depleted, and simultaneously tries to compensate for future bouts of excessive energy expenditure.