Exercising Before Breakfast May Be Better For Managing Blood Sugar, Says Study

Just by making a few changes in our lifestyle, we can prevent and also handle serious health problems like weight gain and diabetes. Apart from following a healthy diet, exercising also plays a major role in managing diseases like diabetes. When body is not able to produce enough insulin or is unable to respond to it, our blood sugar level rises excessively; this condition is called diabetes. It may be difficult to manage diabetes but by reforming our eating habits and exercise schedules, we can control and regulate our blood sugar level in a better way. Recently, the department for Health at the University of Bath conducted a research that suggests that exercising in the morning before breakfast might be better to lose weight as well as manage diabetes. Dr Javier Gonzalez of the Department for Health at the University of Bath said, “Our results suggest that changing the timing of when you eat in relation to when you exercise can bring about profound and positive changes to your overall health.”The study was conducted involving overweight or obese thirty men, divided into two intervention groups. One group was asked to eat breakfast before or after exercise and the other control group made no lifestyle changes. The team found that participants who exercised before breakfast shed more fat than the group who exercised after breakfast. The researchers explained this event by stating that increased fat burn happens due to lower insulin levels during exercise when people have fasted overnight as they can use the fat stored in fat tissue and muscles, as energy fuel.This experiment went on for six weeks and its results were published in the ‘Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism’. “We found that the men in the study who exercised before breakfast burned double the amount of fat than the group who exercised after. Importantly, whilst this didn’t have any effect on weight loss, it did dramatically improve their overall health,” said Dr Javier Gonzalez.The researchers also discovered that muscles of the people who exercised before breakfast were more responsive to insulin as compared to the participants who exercised after breakfast, despite undergoing similar workout sessions and following a similar diet. “The group who exercised before breakfast increased their ability to respond to insulin, which is all the more remarkable given that both exercise groups lost a similar amount of weight and both gained a similar amount of fitness. The only difference was the timing of the food intake,” added Dr Javier Gonzalez.