Preworkout drinks and supplements have been on the market almost as long as weight sets and workout belts, but should you also eat a meal before heading into the gym? While the answer for many years has been “no”, and that the practice may be detrimental, newer research has shown that this rule of fitness may not be set in stone.
The New York times featured an article that cited a study in which cyclists had a meal prior to a workout and were able to complete a twenty minute ride without issue. Also noted in the study was that consuming easily digested carbs before you exercise may enable your workout to actually go longer.
That being said, if your goal is to shed fat fast and lower the number on the scale, there’s plenty of research that supports missing a meal before you workout to maximize your body’s fat burning potential.
Most people that exercise hold the interest of getting the most bang for their buck, or getting good results, fast. An easy to way insure faster weight-loss especially is to workout while fasting.
When you exercise while fasting, it essentially forces your body to lose excess fat, as it’s fat burning processes are controlled by your sympathetic nervous system, which is activated by workouts and lack of food.
And for reference, the sympathetic nervous system is the part of the autonomic nervous system that contains chiefly adrenergic fibers and tends to depress secretion, decrease the tone and contractility of smooth muscle, and increase heart rate.
And the combination of fasting and exercising increases the efficiency of cellular factors and catalysts which force the breakdown of fat and glycogen for energy. One study, for example, found that fasting before aerobic training leads to greater reductions in body weight and body fat then otherwise.
Risks of Fasted Workouts
But when considering using fasted exercise as a method to burn fat, you must also remember that your body will also begin to break down protein for fuel, and proteins are the building blocks of your muscle.
And you also run the risk of slowing down your metabolism. In one small study from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, after a group of men and women fasted every other day for 22 days, their resting metabolic rates (how many calories they burned each day by simply living), had dropped by five percent, or 83 calories.
That’s not to say you can’t exercise at all without all these risks unmitigated. You just have to remember to keep your workouts low-intensity, such as making sure that you can carry on a conversation easily if you’re exercising. So things like light jogging or a small run on the elliptical would be best on one of these diets.
So, while fasted cardio or weight training will definitely lead to quick results on the scale, you have to realize that you will also be forfeiting muscle mass in favor of fat loss.
