is there a difference between losing 100 calories through exercise and/or eating 100 calories less?
In: Biology
Yes. Let’s look at it as kind of the journey of 100 calories as part of a meal. In the first scenario, you just didn’t eat as many calories. In the second scenario:
You eat 100 calories, lets say in the form of sucrose. This makes its way through your digestive tract until it reaches the small intestine, and is absorbed. It enters your blood, creating a larger blood sugar spike than the meal with 100 fewer calories. This means more insulin is produced than normal, so your body has a greater response to the sugar, which has to be converted into carbohydrates stored in the liver, or fats stored in fat cells. This greater level of insulin also means that there’s a slightly greater chance of you developing diabetes. The extra calories can also affect your mental state, giving you one of those sugar high things.
You then exercise, burning exactly 100 calories; the excess you ate earlier. This depletes your blood sugar slightly, releasing hormones which tell your liver to convert some stored sugar back into blood sugar. The mechanical stimulation also causes microscopic damage to the muscles you exercised, although this can be repaired easily, and your body takes note to spend resources building the used muscles up (provided you exercise consistently).
Basically, not eating 100 calories vs burning 100 calories in one specific sitting is pretty much the same thing, but consistently eating less vs consistently exercising more over long periods of time will have notably different effects. If you want to build muscle, eat more exercise more, if you can’t be bothered with that, eat less.
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