Walk Before Or After Eating, Which One Is Better?

YOGYAKARTA - Walking is a light activity that has benefits for fitness and health. Walking can help burn calories, train endurance, and activate joints, especially in the foot area to the hips. Many ask, walk before or after eating?

Walking for 30 minutes every day at a speed of 2 mph can burn about 77 calories. If done regularly, this activity provides positive benefits for the health of the body as a whole. Like other sports, walking also requires energy.

So which one is better, walk before or after eating? For those of you who are wondering about this, let's understand the explanation below to determine the right time for walking activities.

Walking, both before and after eating, can help increase healthy body metabolic activity. However, both times have different effects on the body.

To determine which one is more appropriate, you can consider it based on age, physical condition, and the purpose of walking. Here are the benefits of walking before and after eating:

The walking that is done before eating can provide the following benefits:

Walking for 30 minutes or more before eating can help reduce sugar and fat levels in the body. This activity stimulates metabolism by burning calories and energy.

A 2006 study published in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism revealed that those who walk before eating burn more fat than those who do it after eating.

Research in 2015 published in the International Journal of General Medicine also supports these findings. Running quickly when an empty stomach can help the body burn more fat.

Walking before eating not only burns more fat, but can also suppress appetite due to an increase in body temperature. When body temperature increases, the body will focus on lowering it to maintain balance or homeostasis.

As a result, appetite and the digestive process are temporarily postponed until the body temperature returns to normal. On the other hand, when the body starts to feel cold, appetite will increase again.

Therefore, if you are trying to lose weight, walking before eating can be an effective way to reduce food intake. Especially if this activity causes a significant increase in body temperature.

Even if you walk, including exercise with light intensity, you should avoid doing it as soon as you eat big. When the body digests large amounts of food while walking, an increasing blood supply can make the heart work harder than usual.

To avoid this, it is recommended to wait about 45 minutes to an hour before starting walking after eating big. But this does not mean that walking after eating has no benefits for the body.

Here are some of the benefits of walking after eating:

For people with insomnia, walking after eating can help improve sleep quality. This is due to the production of chemicals that trigger drowsiness as a by-product of the metabolic process, especially when sugar is burned to produce energy.

The more sugar is used during physical activity, the higher the production of sleeping-supporting chemicals. In addition, light activities such as walking are also effective in reducing the desire to snack at night.

A study published in Sports Medicine revealed that walking lightly after eating can significantly reduce blood sugar levels, thus helping prevent the risk of type 2 diabetes. This benefit can be felt even by walking for 2-5 minutes.

"Every small step you do will have a positive impact, even if it's just a simple step," said Dr. Kershaw Patel, a preventive heartmat at Houston Methodist Hospital, as quoted by The New York Post.

That's a review of walking before or after eating, which one is better? Actually, walking is done either before or after eating together has its own benefits as explained above. Also read changes in the body when walking regularly.

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