Background
If you need any information about the methods or materials used in this experiment, you can click here to find a detailed list.
This leg of the crossover experiment, part 3 is Salad first then sub. Dan exercises, Mark does not. Pretty simple… okay, this experiment has been anything but simple! The whole crossover design was a disaster. It just worked out due to timing that I was exercising right after the meal and Dan wasn’t and… well… it all got complicated from there.
So, Dan doesn’t do a lunch workout, he does an evening workout so his times are different. Could that be a factor in the results… maybe. All I can do is report it and we will see what comes out of it.
Results
Coming on the heels of the bizarre results of part 2 for Dan, an experiment we ran twice because his blood sugar was too high to start with, it is strange to see such normal and expected results for phase 3.
I ate a lot of calories, that included a fair amount of refined carbs in the form of bread and some sugar in the dressings. I ended up just tipping out of the orange zone into the red zone, which is higher than I expected but along the lines of a reasonable outcome.
Dan had a small curve and it appears that exercise took the edge off of the carbs for him. It would follow that his blood sugar would be lower than mine and it also appears to be quite a similar curve.
When compared to his salad first no exercise it looks quite clear that exercising while digesting the meal reduced the blood sugar compared to not exercising.
This is certainly the case with my results as well. If you remember, I had the insanely good results with the salad plus exercise and the quite bad results with salad no exercise.
I think this will be the end of logical correlations. I just don’t see how my sub first no exercise can top out above 8 and Dan is all over the place. I am still a little confused by his ‘sub first’ drop in blood sugar. It makes no sense to me, but I guess that is the true lesson in testing your own blood sugar. You learn a lot about what you can and can’t eat as an individual. I don’t think Dan has had his pizza lunch since that blood sugar surprise/nightmare! So for Dan, getting a Subway sub and a salad might be an excellent lunch choice especially if he eats the sub first. For me, I can only eat this combo if I am exercising right after and eating the salad first. Even then, I might want to try a salad with a half a sub. That might be in my sweet spot. In any case, one more cross over until we have a conclusion. So we can wait for that before surmising the outcome.
I wonder, given the clear benefits of exercising right after eating, if it would be worth it to go back and eat some of the most heinous meals and exercise right after to see the outcome.
