Is it better to eat a meal before or after a workout?

IrishChick71

I've seen this question a few times while surfing the forums and I thought it would be helpful to post what Jillian Michaels' answer was to this same question:

Both. Here's what I like to do: have my breakfast at 9 a.m., work out from 10:30 to 12, and eat by 1 p.m. Here's why:

Back in the old days, people thought they should train on an empty stomach in order to burn more fat, but that has turned out to be FALSE. In fact, your body needs some glucose (blood sugar) for fuel in addition to what it can use from fat stores when you're working out. If you don't have any blood sugar available, your body will eat the muscles' glycogen, or stored glucose. Low blood sugar will also make you tired and sluggish during your training session. For these reasons, I suggest you eat something 45 minutes to an hour before training — you'll have more energy and endurance to work harder, burn more calories, and improve your muscle tone.

After training, during a period known as the golden hour (45 to 60 minutes after a workout), muscles absorb the most nutrients, and glycogen is replaced the most efficiently. You don't have to have a huge meal — just a little something that contains both protein and carbs will give the best results.



This article has really helped me get motivated in the morning to get up earlier so I CAN eat something before my early morning workout.

Hope it helps!

melissatacker

The research I have done says it is better to do a workout shortly before you eat because the exercise boosts your metabolism and you are likely to not gain as much from eating if it is done after exercise.

ms_erica

thanks for sharing!!

ms_erica

The research I have done says it is better to do a workout shortly before you eat because the exercise boosts your metabolism and you are likely to not gain as much from eating if it is done after exercise.

good to know as well....i been doing that...i work out and have my meal about 20 minutes right after

papastu

wish I had time to work out in the day , get up at 5-30am , leave for work at 6-30 home at 5, eat then do 1 hour at gym, dont get a choice as dont wanna be eating late at night :P

beautymkt

Great responses, however not sure which is the best way for me. My trainer from the gym had mentioned to me that eating a piece of fruit (glucose) 30mins prior to working out is good as well as eating on an empty stomache to burn more calories! Which one is it? hmmmm?

IrishChick71

The research I have done says it is better to do a workout shortly before you eat because the exercise boosts your metabolism and you are likely to not gain as much from eating if it is done after exercise.

Reminder: This isn't my article. It's part of a Q&A answered by Jillian Michaels.

I've done both, not eat before and eat before, and I find personally that eating a piece of fruit and/or slimfast shake does really help me stay focused during my morning workouts.(I tend to stay on my elliptical longer without looking at the clock so I get my full hour in. ) Then I eat my usual breakfast afterward which is never big anyway...just high in protein.

Everyone is different and so requires different needs. I just thought this would help a few people out there.

paroxysm

You might be interested in this article (drawn from this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20837645) It looks at working out before bkfst:

The holiday season brings many joys and, unfortunately, many countervailing dietary pitfalls. Even the fittest and most disciplined of us can succumb, indulging in more fat and calories than at any other time of the year. The health consequences, if the behavior is unchecked, can be swift and worrying. A recent study by scientists in Australia found that after only three days, an extremely high-fat, high-calorie diet can lead to increased blood sugar and insulin resistance, potentially increasing the risk for Type 2 diabetes. Waistlines also can expand at this time of year, prompting self-recrimination and unrealistic New Year’s resolutions.

But a new study published in The Journal of Physiology suggests a more reliable and far simpler response. Run or bicycle before breakfast. Exercising in the morning, before eating, the study results show, seems to significantly lessen the ill effects of holiday Bacchanalias.


For the study, researchers in Belgium recruited 28 healthy, active young men and began stuffing them with a truly lousy diet, composed of 50 percent fat and 30 percent more calories, overall, than the men had been consuming. Some of the men agreed not to exercise during the experiment. The rest were assigned to one of two exercise groups. The groups’ regimens were identical and exhausting. The men worked out four times a week in the mornings, running and cycling at a strenuous intensity. Two of the sessions lasted 90 minutes, the others, an hour. All of the workouts were supervised, so the energy expenditure of the two groups was identical.


Their early-morning routines, however, were not. One of the groups ate a hefty, carbohydrate-rich breakfast before exercising and continued to ingest carbohydrates, in the form of something like a sports drink, throughout their workouts. The second group worked out without eating first and drank only water during the training. They made up for their abstinence with breakfast later that morning, comparable in calories to the other group’s trencherman portions.

The experiment lasted for six weeks. At the end, the nonexercising group was, to no one’s surprise, super-sized, having packed on an average of more than six pounds. They had also developed insulin resistance — their muscles were no longer responding well to insulin and weren’t pulling sugar (or, more technically, glucose) out of the bloodstream efficiently — and they had begun storing extra fat within and between their muscle cells. Both insulin resistance and fat-marbled muscles are metabolically unhealthy conditions that can be precursors of diabetes.

The men who ate breakfast before exercising gained weight, too, although only about half as much as the control group. Like those sedentary big eaters, however, they had become more insulin-resistant and were storing a greater amount of fat in their muscles.

Only the group that exercised before breakfast gained almost no weight and showed no signs of insulin resistance. They also burned the fat they were taking in more efficiently. “Our current data,” the study’s authors wrote, “indicate that exercise training in the fasted state is more effective than exercise in the carbohydrate-fed state to stimulate glucose tolerance despite a hypercaloric high-fat diet.”

Just how exercising before breakfast blunts the deleterious effects of overindulging is not completely understood, although this study points toward several intriguing explanations. For one, as has been known for some time, exercising in a fasted state (usually possible only before breakfast), coaxes the body to burn a greater percentage of fat for fuel during vigorous exercise, instead of relying primarily on carbohydrates. When you burn fat, you obviously don’t store it in your muscles. In “our study, only the fasted group demonstrated beneficial metabolic adaptations, which eventually may enhance oxidative fatty acid turnover,” said Peter Hespel, Ph.D., a professor in the Research Center for Exercise and Health at Catholic University Leuven in Belgium and senior author of the study.

At the same time, the fasting group showed increased levels of a muscle protein that “is responsible for insulin-stimulated glucose transport in muscle and thus plays a pivotal role in regulation of insulin sensitivity,” Dr Hespel said.

In other words, working out before breakfast directly combated the two most detrimental effects of eating a high-fat, high-calorie diet. It also helped the men avoid gaining weight.

There are caveats, of course. Exercising on an empty stomach is unlikely to improve your performance during that workout. Carbohydrates are easier for working muscles to access and burn for energy than fat, which is why athletes typically eat a high-carbohydrate diet. The researchers also don’t know whether the same benefits will accrue if you exercise at a more leisurely pace and for less time than in this study, although, according to Leonie Heilbronn, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who has extensively studied the effects of high-fat diets and wrote a commentary about the Belgian study, “I would predict low intensity is better than nothing.”

So, unpleasant as the prospect may be, set your alarm after the next Christmas party to wake you early enough that you can run before sitting down to breakfast. “I would recommend this,” Dr. Heilbronn concluded, “as a way of combating Christmas” and those insidiously delectable cookies.

paroxysm

Let me just quote out this section:



"Only the group that exercised before breakfast gained almost no weight and showed no signs of insulin resistance. They also burned the fat they were taking in more efficiently. “Our current data,” the study’s authors wrote, “indicate that exercise training in the fasted state is more effective than exercise in the carbohydrate-fed state to stimulate glucose tolerance despite a hypercaloric high-fat diet.”


*edited to add-- it's too bad that once again this was a study done on all men. I anxiously await one done that includes WOMEN also. Perhaps a researcher in the US will pick up this and do a repeat/confirmation (where it is required to include women and minorities unless they are not applicable i.e. prostate cancer women/ovarian cancer men)

IrishChick71

Let me just quote out this section:



"Only the group that exercised before breakfast gained almost no weight and showed no signs of insulin resistance. They also burned the fat they were taking in more efficiently. “Our current data,” the study’s authors wrote, “indicate that exercise training in the fasted state is more effective than exercise in the carbohydrate-fed state to stimulate glucose tolerance despite a hypercaloric high-fat diet.”


*edited to add-- it's too bad that once again this was a study done on all men. I anxiously await one done that includes WOMEN also. Perhaps a researcher in the US will pick up this and do on (where it is required to include women and minorities unless they are not applicable i.e. prostate cancer women/ovarian cancer men)

Thanks! That is very interesting.

We get told so many different things it can be confusing.