Adam’s journal
On Sundays, I usually try to run for at least an hour. Typically, I start out slow and pick up the pace, so by the end of the run my heavy breathing is nearly drowning out the sound of my footfalls.
It’s my way of working all the stress and poison of the week out of my body, sort of a cleansing ritual. Then I come home and cook up a big mess of pancakes — some plain, some chocolate chip — for my sons and me.
Although I eat to my heart’s content (think at least 1,000 calories), I’ve noticed lately that I’m getting hungry again quite soon after these smorgasbords. Is this just a matter of my body wanting to replace the calories burned during exercise, or is there something more at work here?
Dr. Prescott prescribes
Knowing your pace, I suspect your hourlong runs usually cover eight or nine miles. That means you’re burning roughly 800-900 calories on your run. Throw in the fact that even without exercise you’d typically need a breakfast of a few hundred calories to make up for the caloric deficit you’d accumulated while you slept (and didn’t eat), and I’d say that you might require a breakfast of 1,000 to 1,200 calories to refill your tank.
So your carb-fest should be doing the refueling trick. Still, there could be another factor at work here that’s pushing the needle back to “E” faster than usual: the fabled exercise “afterburn” effect.
The hypothesis goes something like this: When you exercise, you rev up your body’s metabolism. Because things in motion want to stay in motion, even after you stop exercising, your body’s engine continues to rev for some time following the workout.
Thus, even once you stop running, you continue to burn up more fuel for some period following exercise.
The only problem with this hypothesis is that it hasn’t always held up in research studies.
Some have found no post-exercise effect.
Others obtained results that were negligible. Yet others identified significant afterburn — to the tune of hundreds of extra calories.
The newest addition to the literature, which appeared this year in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, suggests that afterburn is the real deal. But only under certain circumstances.
When study subjects worked out a high intensity (70 percent or better of their aerobic capacity) for 45 minutes, they burned an average of 420 calories. Then, over the next 14 hours, they burned an additional 190 calories versus days when they didn’t exercise.
This contrasts with studies where subjects exercised less intensely and for shorter periods of time — and researchers found no additional calories burned once the workouts were over.
Though far from settled, this research suggests that your quick-toreturn hunger may be caused by your long runs. The sustained, intense effort may be keeping your body’s metabolism fired up even after you’ve finished your run. What a nice problem to have.
