Why You Feel Hungry After Weightlifting
The main reason you feel hungry is because of the calorie burn both during and after the workout. Of course, you burn a lot of calories during your workout since you’re moving, engaging your muscles, and getting your heartrate up. On top of this, you use quite a bit just to repair your body after the workout.
How Recovery Burns Calories
All exercise works by breaking down tissue, especially muscle tissue. Repairing this tissue is very “calorie expensive” because the body has to gather the materials from the digestive system, send them to the damaged tissue throughout the body, then lay down the material to get the tissue back to normal. Depending on what exercise you’re recovering from, you can make this process longer, making the calorie burn last much longer.
Strength training provides the longest “calorie burn” window during recovery. Not only does the body have to repair damaged muscle, it also has to add additional tissue to handle the work load better next time. This is exactly how you build muscle. You challenge the body with weight, then it will create more muscle to make the same weight easier to handle in the future. So as long as you add weights to your workout, you’ll burn more calories during recovery right? Not exactly. Not all strength training programs will cause this muscle building effects. Here are a few important characteristics of an effective routine:
- You can feel yourself getting stronger each workout
- You’re using progressive overload to prevent plateaus
- You’re still giving yourself enough recovery time between workouts. In other words, you’re not overtraining.
If you’ve never strength trained before and don’t know where to start, check out our article about starting a once-a-week routine to get started.
Important – Make Sure You’re Getting Your Protein
If you’re not paying attention to protein, the weight you’re losing could easily be from muscle. Some people will say they don’t mind this since they don’t want to be “bulky.” They want to be small and lean. However, losing weight from muscle never looks good. Instead, you may just look sick. Think back to a time you’ve gotten really sick, so you couldn’t eat or move very much. You may have lost some weight during that time, but you definitely didn’t look better. This is partially because you’re sick, but mostly because you lost a lot of muscle from inactivity.
Also, preserving muscle is important for keeping your metabolism elevated. In this case, metabolism refers to how many calories you burn every day. This includes both activity and involuntary things like recovery, heart beats, digestion, etc. The more muscle on your body, the faster your metabolism is. This is for three reasons:
- Expensive Tissue: Muscle is an “expensive tissue,” meaning it burns more calories to maintain compared to other tissue (skin, fat, etc.)
- Greater Exercise Output: More muscle means stronger, long-lasting workouts, which leads to more calorie burn per workout
- More Tissue to Recover: Similarly to the last point, more muscle also means more work for the body to repair. If the body is working harder to recover more muscle, it’ll burn more calories post workout as well
All of these points combine to make muscle essential for daily calorie burn. The easiest way to ensure you’re not losing muscle is to hit your individual protein goal every day.
How to Find Out Your Protein Goal?
Generally, you should be eating between 0.8 to 1.2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. If you’re carrying a lot of bodyfat, you should use 0.8g. If you’re already pretty lean but want to get six-pack shredded, you should use 1.2g.
You should have less protein if you carry a lot of fat because we’re only trying to feed your lean body mass (LBM). LBM is simply everything in your body that’s not fat; so muscle, bone, skin, etc.
When you multiply your bodyweight by 0.8g or 1.2g, you might be surprised how high your protein goal is. Most people who don’t pay attention to protein eat about 50g a day. When your goal is to get 100g to 200g a day, it can feel overwhelming. You’ll be eating much more meat and fish than you ever have before. Just remember it’ll all pay off in the end when you preserve almost all of your muscle during your weight loss journey.
Where Should I Get Protein From?
The best protein sources provide the most protein for the least calories. Great examples include:
- Chicken breast
- Most fish (salmon, tuna, tilapia, etc.)
- Protein supplements (like whey protein powder)
Paying attention to the calories is very important because you don’t want to ruin your calorie deficit. The best way to hit your protein goal without leaving your deficit is to track calories all together. However, if you’re not interested in tracking, you can use this simple trick to find out if you’re eating a good protein source.
test your protein source
- Go to fatsecret.com and use the search bar on the upper left
- Search for the food you want to test, and be as specific as possible. For example, if you’re eating a specific brand of food (like Kirkland Sardines), be sure to include that brand as well. The more detailed the search, the more reliable your results will be
- Find your food in the search results and open its nutrient facts
- Find the calories and protein, then divide calories by protein. This will give you the amount of calories per gram of protein. The lower this number, the better the protein source. For example, 4oz of pork tenderloin has 120 calories and 23 grams of protein. This gives it a ratio of 5.2 cal/g, making it a great protein source. Use the table below to find out what your cal/g ratio means.
| Calories per gram of protein (cal/g) | Is this a good protein source? |
| 4 – 8 cal/g | Perfect source of protein |
| 8 – 12 cal/g | This source is okay, but use it sparingly |
| 12+ cal/g | This is not a good source since there are too many calories |