(Guest Post from Shaun Hadsall). Inside this short fat loss post, I’m going to tell you the three best times to eat carbs for faster fat loss. So most people are under the assumption that if you want to burn belly fat, you have to cut carbs and that’s not necessarily true.
Although there’s a lot of scientific evidence showing that low-carb diets are great for your health and they can help you burn more belly fat, it can be a double-edged sword because it only takes about one week of low-carb dieting before you suppress critical fat-burning hormones like leptin. And you also slow down your metabolism and you decrease your body’s thyroid’s efficiency, which is your body’s number-one fat-burning gland.
So the solution to this is to strategically add carbs into your diet the right way. And we do this by controlling insulin. Remember, whenever insulin is elevated, it’s impossible for your body to access fat as fuel. So the key to accessing fat consistently as fuel is to keep insulin under control.
So when insulin is high, fat burning is low. But when insulin is low, fat burning is high because it allows your body to release glucagon and glucagon cannot be released when insulin levels are elevated. So when you lower insulin, you release more glucagon. This hormone is responsible for releasing energy from tissues– in other words, fat– to be delivered to working muscles so they can be burned off.
So the key to burning belly fat is to lower insulin levels consistently. But you also want to spike them at the right time by strategically eating carbs because when you spike insulin at the right times, it prevents your metabolism from slowing down, it reactivates and spikes leptin levels that have been suppressed from low-carb dieting, and it also increases your body’s T4 to T3 conversion or your thyroid’s efficiency.
So the three best times to eat carbohydrates are pre-workout. Now, I recommend about three to four hours before a workout, eat your carbohydrates. And you balance them out with some protein, maybe a small amount of friendly fat, and of course, vegetables are optional. Nobody ever got fat from eating vegetables so you can add them to any meal.
But by eating about three to four hours beforehand, this gives insulin enough time to stabilize before the workout so that when you go into the workout, fat burning will be increased because of low insulin levels.
But you’ll also have enough energy from the food you ate about three or four hours ago to fuel your workout and to also, remember, increase those critical hormones that we talked about. So you’ll have energy from this, it will spike your thyroid, it’ll spike your leptin levels, and you’ll keep your metabolism cranking.
The second best time is post-workout. Right after a high-intensity workout done the right way, your muscles are like a sponge that’s been rung dry. And so you want to replenish this depleted glycogen and “glycogen” just a fancy word for energy that you store in your muscles and in your liver tissue from the carbohydrates that you eat.
So after a workout, these glycogen levels are really depleted so your body’s ready to suck up these nutrients. And that’s one of the best times to eat carbs because then they won’t spill over and be stored as belly fat.
The third and final time to eat carbs– and this is kind of odd. This goes against the grain– that’s two to three hours before bed. So a couple years ago, they published a study where they took two groups. One group ate all their carbohydrates in the morning. The other group ate all their carbohydrates in the evening. And the evening group actually lost more weight than the morning group.
Now, all metabolisms are a little bit different but this goes to show you that eating carbs late at night won’t necessarily make you fat. However, by eating carbs two to three hours before bed, what happens now is after that meal, you allow insulin to stabilize.
So remember, when insulin’s elevated, it doesn’t allow growth hormone to be released. So if you eat right before bed, it might not necessarily make you fat but it could potentially block your body from releasing growth hormone and recovering the right way. So it’s in your best interest to eat two to three hours before bed, your favorite carbs balanced again with protein, friendly fat, and vegetables if you choose so.
Now by doing this, you not only allow growth hormone to be released while you sleep. You also regulate your cortisol cycle because when you raise insulin with a meal two to three hours before bed, this helps you release more melatonin while you sleep.