Exercise And Sugar Cravings (Why We Crave Sugar After Workout)

Exercise and sugar cravings can the type of exercise you do affect the type of

cravings you have I'm gonna explain hey I'm Dr. Sten Ekberg with Wellness For Life

and if you like to truly master health by understanding how the body really

works make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you

don't miss anything. So one of my viewers Manuel Carranza he was asking me after

watching a video on aerobic and anaerobic that I did a while back if the

type of training if his heart rate could have anything to do with his sugar

cravings so let's talk about how all of that works let's just dive a little bit

deeper and first of all food that's the stuff that we eat to produce energy so

on a bigger scale we also eat for nutrition but for this purpose of this

discussion we're just going to talk about the energy portion of it and

that's energy turns into ATP that's the energy currency so it's a unit of ATP is

a unit of energy currency and we have to make trillions and trillions of these

every day we have a normal and we have a backup way of making ATP the normal way

is in the presence of oxygen when we have enough oxygen that's why we breathe

is to convert things into energy so fat protein glucose alcohol ketones no

matter what it is the ultimate goal is to oxidize it to burn it in the presence

of oxygen and convert it into ATP so glucose for example when we burn one

unit of glucose it turns into 38 units of ATP that's pretty good that's a lot

of ATP that means it's a complete burning a complete oxidation of that

food the very first step of breaking down

that glucose is called glycolysis and that means we split that glucose in two

and now that the breakdown itself the splitting itself yields two ATP's even

when there's no so before the oxygen gets to work on the

glucose we get two ATP's simply by breaking that molecule in to the normal

way is then to continue to oxidize it and get the full 38 but if we have a

crisis if we can't keep up if there's not enough oxygen around then the bond

disk is going to keep breaking glucose after glucose after glucose it's going

to ramp up the glycolysis to just try to make do with the two atps for the time

being so let's look at how that would relate to exercise so this is called

aerobic exercise that means that your heart rate is about 120 or below it

means that you are breathing calm you're taking deep full breaths at a regular

pace but you're not huffing and puffing you're not panting so if you're out

walking with somebody for example then you could still speak a complete

sentence you wouldn't just be stuttering and and just sentence fragments and

words but you could basically speak normally because there is enough oxygen

to keep up with the energy requirements that means you can breathe fully but

calmly and your body is in balance it's it's keeping up it's not falling behind

with these energy requirements every piece of molecule is turning into 38

ATP's in this situation of course the oxygen is coming in through the lungs

you breathe so you take in air that air contains oxygen that gets absorbed and

gets exposed to the red blood cells and the red blood cells have hemoglobin that

binds with the oxygen and carries it through the bloodstream to the target

tissues and then those tissues have to take it up so there's a tissue uptake

and every one of these processes gets better if we practice it the body

is so good at up regulating and down regulating and practicing and getting

better at the things we do a regular basis so if you do this on a

regular basis the body will have a really good oxygen uptake so let's look

at the other example now the heart rate is 156 and I'm just picking the example

of the question he asked my my heart rate is typically around 156 on average

he gave that number so we'll use that what what happens then so now your body

is breathing your breathing harder if you have monitored your heart rate when

you're out working out you'll know this for a fact that at 156 you're panting

pretty hard it's a pretty intense workout because there's not enough

oxygen to keep up with the energy requirements so you can't just breathe

calmly you have to breathe faster and faster and faster in an attempt to take

in more oxygen to keep up but you still can't keep up not fully so the cells now

they're saying that the target tissues the muscles that are performing the work

they're not real happy they're they're having a bit of a crisis they're saying

you know we're starving down here is there anything at all that you can do to

help us out because we're falling behind and now the body has to it still does as

much as it can of number one here but it also has to upregulate it has to

increase the second part so it starts breaking down glucose with glycolysis at

a faster and faster rate and the thing that makes that happen is cortisol so

the first thing that happens when there's a crisis as your body says we

got to have more sugar to deal with this crisis and cortisol is the messenger

that starts a bunch of different processes to produce and free up sugar

in the body so it tells the liver to break down glycogen it tells all the

tissues it starts breaking down some protein because that's the source of

glucose or any way the body can get some glucose now to

to support this crisis that the body is going to do that and cortisol is the

hormone that makes that happen when you're breaking down a lot of glucose in

the absence of oxygen there's a byproduct

it's called lactic acid because you can't keep up you just sort of chopping

it down the middle and leaving the pieces B so you're getting the two ATP's

but there's a lot of debris there's a lot of leftovers there's a lot of waste

called lactic acid and the way of course you know that happens is because your

legs get heavy and they start burning and the more the longer you go at this

high rate the more it starts burning the lactic acid is proportional to the

amount of burn and proportional to the amount of oxygen debt so oxygen debt

means that you're falling behind you've basically borrowed energy and you're

gonna have to pay it back sometimes so that's why even after you slow down and

you sort of try to recover your heart rate might stay up for fifteen twenty

thirty minutes to catch up to pay back this oxygen debt to break down the

lactic acid in the presence of oxygen to put it back into this preferred pathway

because this was just like a temporary loan but everything that puts you into

more of a crisis anything that triggers cortisol anything that that moves you

from a fat metabolism primarily to more of a carbohydrate sugar metabolism is

also going to increase your cravings because it's an emergency fuel

carbohydrates is an emergency fuel it's the it's the only fuel that works in an

emergency even though the fat is is preferred so you have the fat in the

bottom but then to top it off the carbs is the the sugar is the only thing that

works so yes the more you do of an aerobic training the more cortisol you

produce and the more your body is going to learn

depend on carbohydrates so yes your cravings after a workout you're gonna

your body wants to top off the the sugar stores again so you'll be craving sweets

and chocolates and soda and whatnot so there's all sorts of exercise that is

good when we just have to understand how much of it is good for what purpose so

someone who's 50 year old and just trying to stay healthy is not going to

train the same way that an Olympic athlete is going to train an Olympic

athlete has to do a lot of this because it's about event specific skills and

event specific endurance but that Ness doesn't necessarily have anything to do

with health so I'm gonna make another video keep a lookout for that where we

talk more about the specific ranges that you can be in and how much you would

want to be in those for those specific reasons so I hope that helped clear up

that question and if you have any other questions please let me know if you have

comments put them down below if it's on this video or any other we just want to

help people understand how the body works and how it relates to health we

don't want to just treat symptoms or fix this or that or take this for that we

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