Remember the eternal debate about when to exercise? Now comes some sound scientific evidence that working out before breakfast does something that exercising after breakfast doesn't do: it keeps weight off. Gretchen Reynolds, writing in the New York Times Well column, reports on research conducted at the Research Centre for Exercise and Health, Department of Biomedical Kinesiology, K.U. Leuven, Belgium, that divided 28 healthy, young men into three groups. One group did not exercise. One group exercised in the morning before breakfast, and one group exercised in the morning after breakfast. All of the workouts were identical, and all of the men ate the same calorie-heavy breakfast. The researchers found that after six weeks, the non-exercisers had gained an average of six pounds, and had also developed insulin resistance  their muscles were no longer responding well to insulin and weren’t pulling glucose out of the bloodstream efficiently. Reynolds reports that the men who ate breakfast before exercising gained about half as much weight as the control group, and also became somewhat insulin-resistant. Only the group that exercised before breakfast gained almost no weight and showed no signs of insulin resistance.
Read more from Gretchen Reynolds.
Read an abstract of the research here.
You don’t have to exercise before breakfast, you can do it before any meal and have the same affects.