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" After you&amp;#x27;ve worked your butt off at the gym, or wherever you exercise, what&amp;#x27;s the first thing you like to do? Take a shower? Have a cold drink? Make a snack? Chill out on the couch? All sound good, right? Well, researchers say that one of these things isn&amp;#x27;t so healthy. Read on to find out...**** The answer--drum roll--is snacking! Don&amp;#x27;t do it say researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. While a hearty snack may be what professional athletes turn to after a long training session, us regular folk should step away from the refrigerator, they say. Why? According to their findings, eating soon after exercise &amp;quot;blunts&amp;quot; the benefits of a good workout. Better bet: Stick with low-cal beverages like water (I know, boring--but here are a few tasty ideas), and wait at least two hours after a workout to eat. Another hydration idea: coconut water, which I wrote about recently. &amp;quot;If people are going to go out and exercise to benefit their health, they should not be eating back the calories immediately upon finishing, or within a couple of hours of finishing,&amp;quot; said Barry S. Braun, director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. &amp;quot;In order to maintain the benefits, you need to be in this calorie deficit.&amp;quot; What&amp;#x27;s your typical post-workout pattern? Are you ravenously hungry? Or do you find that you wait a few hours to eat anyway? (Random side note: I just had a flashback to my elementary-school swimming lesson days. I used to get soooo hungry after an hour of swimming, and my health nut mom would let me have a candy bar afterward--I always got a Payday bar! Ha!) Photo: iStock"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/blogs/vitamin-g/2008/12/fitness-news-what-researchers>