What’s up, fellow Obsessives?
This is another reminder to turn your clocks ahead this morning — unless you’re a member at one of the 32 Orangetheory locations in Arizona.
Yep, you can go on and keep confusing the rest of the country any time we try to schedule a meeting with you …
📆 The Week Ahead
🎂 Birthday Burn (Tuesday): Celebrate Orangetheory’s sweet 16th with a 3G template that’ll likely be full of references to the number 16.
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Why Does OTF Make Us So Hungry?
Breakfast might be my favorite meal of the day.
I just don’t know if I need to eat it three times.
Yet there are days I attend my 4:55 a.m. class at Orangetheory and find myself eating three times before lunch.
A ½ cup of overnight oats and coffee before the workout
Egg whites and an English muffin an hour post-workout
A big bowl of cereal mid-to-late morning (not the wisest health choice, but I’m Jerry Seinfeld when it comes to my love of cereal.)
My wife and I joke about me being a bottomless pit after OTF.
“Have you had your third breakfast yet?” she’ll often joke as I go for the cereal box.
It’s obviously not hard to understand why there’s so much hunger for many of us.
OTF is not a casual workout. It’s not a quick walk around the block. For 60 minutes, we spike our heart rates, recover and then do it again, burning hundreds of calories in the process.
A quick Google search also shows me that we’re burning plenty of glycogen, the stored carbs our muscles use for fuel. When the glycogen is depleted, it spikes a hunger hormone named ghrelin.
But here’s the thing: Ghrelin takes a little while to get its butt moving, hence the insatiable hunger pains that can attack in the middle of your 10 am working meeting.
So how do you win the battle on OTF days?
Considering I’ll still mix in Frosted Mini-Wheats to my recovery routine, I’m the last person to be dispensing nutritional advice.
But the prevailing wisdom is that you want a good mix of both protein and carbs to keep that ghrelin from turning ghoulish.
Five things you can eat after OTF to fight hunger:
Eggs with toast: Maybe the most literal definition of protein and carbs. Easy and cheap to make.
Greek yogurt with fruit. High protein and natural carbs. Granola can easily be added to make it last even longer.
Protein smoothie and a banana. It’s really hard to beat bananas when it comes to getting carbs back into your system.
Cottage cheese with berries. Cottage cheese isn’t my favorite, but there’s a reason tons of fitness influencers push it.
Overnight oats. If they’re good before the workout, they’re likely good after it as well. I’m going to start experimenting with a second, bigger round this week and see what that does for me.
I don’t get too upset about the hunger, though.
It’s a signal I got up and did the right thing by getting my body moving. It’s a reminder I already worked hard, but also a reminder I need to make the right fueling decisions.
No one wants to eat three breakfasts.
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🏆 Milestones and Records
Congrats to Brianna B., who set a PR of 1:47 on Thursday’s 0.25 mile tread!
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One Last Thing
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