Does Working Out on an Empty Stomach Actually Burn More Fat?

This week we actually are going to be getting into an interesting topic and that is if we should work out, especially if we work out in the mornings, before we eat or if we should eat and then work out.

yeah that's been a debate in the gym for a very long time as to who eats before they get a workout in sometimes you see people even eating a banana or something like that before they start their workout but if you haven't eaten all night that's actually your insulin is lower in that case so um you don't have a bunch of food sitting in your system obviously so your body supposedly has no choice but to start dipping into that stored body fat which sounds completely logical

It does.

So except there's a catch.

You can burn more fat during a workout without necessarily losing more body fat over the course of a week, a month or a year.

And that distinction basically explains this entire debate.

So we're going to get into what we are calling A fasted workout, really that's what it means when we don't eat before we work out, we're actually fasting, fasted workout.

For most people, we're talking about waking up right away in the morning, maybe not eating for eight hours, sometimes 10 or 12 hours, and then exercising before we eat breakfast.

All right, yeah, we'll dig a little deeper into what actually happens when you exercise fasted.

So definitely right on that.

And when you wake up, your insulin is generally lower than it would be after eating and your body isn't processing a recent meal.

So during exercise, your body tends to rely proportionately more on stored fat for fuel in that case.

So here's where the fasted workout people are actually right.

Research has shown that during aerobic exercise, actually, people exercising fasted can oxidize or burn a greater amount of fat than people who exercise after eating.

So that's an important distinction to focus on.

It's that aerobic exercise.

So systematic review and meta-analysis found exactly that.

So fasted aerobic exercise produced greater fat oxidation during the exercise session.

All right, podcast over then.

Not quite, because now comes the important part.

Your body doesn't really care about what happened during those 45 minutes on the treadmill.

It cares more about your energy balance over the rest of the day.

So it's important here to just know that not eating breakfast, you do lose more calories or have that fat burn.

But then again, what happens after our workout also matters, if not even more than before.