Curb Your Appetite Dramatically With HIIT

Curb Your Appetite

We talk about eating fewer calories. We talk about burning more calories. But, when it comes to weight loss we frequently overlook how to curb your appetite. Hormones and neurotransmitters regulate our sense of hunger and fullness (satiety). Let’s face it, it’s hard to eat fewer calories if you’re having food cravings. Plus, it’s difficult to exercise and burn calories if you feel like you need to eat.

What if there was a way to naturally curb your appetite? Would you be interested? There is something and it’s not going to cost you any additional money.  It’s high intensity interval training or HIIT.

Calories and HIIT

A study by researchers in Australia and published in the International Journal of Obesity found that overweight men ate fewer calories after they performed high intensity interval training compared to the calories they ate after performing moderate continuous exercise (typical aerobics or cardio). They also ate fewer calories the day after performing high intensity interval training compared to moderate continuous exercise.

The study only involved 17 overweight men. Each man participated in four 30 minute exercise sessions. One session actually involved doing nothing (hard to call that an exercise session). The second consisted of cycling continuously at a moderate pace. The third consisted of short burst of cycling at high intensity. And, the fourth consisted of short bursts at very high intensity.

Their calorie consumption after each exercise session was 764 calories after rest session, 710 calories afer continuous moderate cycling, 621 calories after high intensity short bursts, and 594 calories after very high intensity short bursts – so a fairly nice linear relationship. Whether this decline in appetite persists after chronic or long-term HIIT is not yet known. How HIIT may curb appetite was not explained by the study.

We’ve already known that HIIT leads to the burning of more calories after exercise than moderate continuous aerobics through an improved EPOC or excess post exercise oxygen consumption.

So we now have two possible mechanisms by which HIIT contributes to weight loss: it can curb your appetite and enable you to burn more calories – a pretty ideal combination.