Don’t overcompensate activity with more food, more rest

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Why You Shouldn’t Reward a Workout With a Slump

Posted by Susan Bowerman, M.S., RD, CSSD, CSOWM, FAND – Senior Director, Worldwide Nutrition Education and Training

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Consistent activity for weight management.

Don’t overcompensate activity with more food and more rest!

Maybe you’ve had this happen to you. After working out a little harder than usual, you find yourself thinking, “I just burned up an awful lot of calories—think I’ll have a cheeseburger.” It’s called ‘calorie compensation.’ Often after exercising we end up overeating, convinced that we’ve burned up a lot more calories than we actually have. But overeating—adjusting our ‘calories in’—isn’t the only way we compensate. Sometimes we adjust our ‘calories out.’ And after a spell of activity, we overcompensate by simply becoming a lot less active for the rest of the day.

It’s been suggested that we might each be born with our own “activitystat”—a biological mechanism that keeps our daily energy expenditure fairly constant. The idea is that any time we engage in some fairly vigorous activity, the internal activity thermostat will lead us to make up for it by increasing our level of inactivity.

But the notion of the “activitystat” has been called into question. For one thing, if this internal regulation of our energy expenditure were hard-wired, it should persist throughout our lives. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Studies have found that young kids, as well as folks over the age of 60, do tend to compensate. They balance their exercise with inactivity, so that their daily energy expenditure stays fairly constant day after day. But in younger adults, exercise doesn’t trigger this same downward adjustment in activity for the rest of the day—so they end up burning more calories than usual.

Even if the activitystat does exist, there are psychological factors at work that affect our energy balance, too. They influence not only how much exercise we engage in but also whether or not we ‘make adjustments’ by taking it easy the rest of the day, or rewarding ourselves with extra food.

We can and often do override the biological controls that regulate our food intake, and we make conscious decisions about how much (or how little) we’re going to eat. Similarly, the amount of energy we expend each day is also something we can control. We can be determined to get regular physical activity. And we can find tools (like activity logs, pedometers or apps for the phone) that will help us meet our activity goals and keep our weight in check.

It also helps to have a good handle on your ‘calories in’ as well as your ‘calories out.’ Most people estimate that they burn 2-3 times more calories through exercise than they actually do, and they underestimate the calories they eat by anywhere from 20-40%. Keeping tabs on your calories will tell you that a stroll around the park doesn’t justify eating a cheeseburger. Or taking a nap.

Susan Bowerman, M.S., RD, CSSD, CSOWM, FAND – Senior Director, Worldwide Nutrition Education and Training
Susan is the Senior Director of Worldwide Nutrition Education and Training at Herbalife, where she is responsible for the development of nutrition education and training materials, and is one of the primary authors of the Herbalife-sponsored blog, www.discovergoodnutrition.com. She is a Registered Dietitian and holds two Board Certifications from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics as a Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics, and a Certified Specialist in Obesity and Weight Management. Susan is also a Fellow of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Susan graduated with distinction in biology from the University of Colorado, and received her master’s degree in Food Science and Nutrition from Colorado State University. She then completed her dietetic internship at the University of Kansas. Susan has taught extensively and developed educational programs targeted to individuals, groups and industry in her areas of expertise, including health promotion, weight management and sports nutrition. Prior to her role at Herbalife, she was the assistant director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, and has held appointments as adjunct professor in nutrition at Pepperdine University and as lecturer in nutrition in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Susan was a consultant to the (then) Los Angeles Raiders for six seasons, and was a contributing columnist for the Los Angeles Times Health Section for two years. She is a co-author of 23 research papers, 14 book chapters, and was a co-author of two books for the public: “What Color is Your Diet?” and “The L.A. Shape Diet” by Dr. David Heber, published by Harper Collins in 2001 and 2004, respectively.