#and I had basically depleted glycogen via workout

[lucysweatslove]

Tw for the tags I just need to get this out (ED bullshit related)

[lauramalchowblog]

When Is The Best Time to Eat Carbs?

Beyond the great debate about how many carbs we should be eating, there is another question you might be wondering about: When is the best time of day to eat carbs?

Today we’re going to dig into the data and see if we can get some answers. Before we do, though, I want to make something clear. The types and amounts of food you are eating are much more important than nutrient timing when it comes to health, body composition, and even athletic performance.

Before worrying about nutrient timing, you should:

Eliminate the “big three”—grains, excess sugars, and offensive vegetable and seed oils

Consume an appropriate amount of food for your goals and activity level—neither too much nor too little

Ensure that you are getting enough micronutrients via diverse, nutrient-dense foods, plus supplementation when necessary

I’d also say that macronutrients—the relative amounts of carbs, protein, and fat you’re eating—comes before nutrient timing in the hierarchy of “likely to matter.” A Keto Reset is probably going to impact your health and body composition more than changing the timing of your carb intake.

Still, I know many of you are self-experimenters and optimizers. You like to explore ways to squeeze a little more “edge” out of your diet and lifestyle. For some of you, nutrient timing might be the key to resolving a nagging issue that hasn’t been fixed by diet and lifestyle changes. If this is something you’re curious about, read on.

The Best Time to Eat Carbs: Why Would Carb Timing Matter?

The growing field of “chrononutrition” investigates how food timing affects overall health. I’m sure you know that many bodily systems operate according to biological clocks. Sleep, immune system activity, and body temperature are all governed by circadian (~24-hour) clocks, for example. Disruption to our normal biological clocks negatively impacts health.

Metabolism operates according to circadian rhythms, too. On a basic level, we are meant to sleep when it’s dark, move and eat when it’s light. Insulin sensitivity and beta cell activity (the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin) are highest in the morning. Research shows that glucose tolerance—the body’s ability to clear glucose from the bloodstream after a meal—goes down if your sleep is poor or under conditions of circadian misalignment. There also seems to be a link between eating later at night, weight gain, impaired fat oxidation, and other negative health outcomes.

Taken together, this has led some researchers to suggest that we should eat most of our food earlier in the day to entrain, or align, our circadian rhythms. Doing so, they argue, could improve glycemic control (glucose regulation) and insulin sensitivity. It might also regulate appetite hormones and cortisol, and have downstream effects on body composition.

Carb Timing for Glycemic Control and Insulin Sensitivity

A number of studies seem to suggest that eating later is associated with impaired glucose tolerance and/or insulin sensitivity. On the other hand, both may be improved with early time restricted feeding (eTRF). This is where you eat in a compressed window, say 8 or 10 hours, and that window is shifted toward the morning. A typical eTRF schedule might entail eating all one’s food between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Most of these studies focus on food timing generally, not nutrient timing per se. For example, in this study, men with type 2 diabetes ate all their calories in a 9-hour window. In one phase, they ate from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (eTRF). In the other, they ate from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. Both schedules improved glucose tolerance, but only eTRF decreased fasting glucose.

A handful of studies do specifically look at carb timing:

Healthy volunteers kept three-day food diaries. Those who ate relatively more of their food, and more carbs specifically, in the morning were also more insulin sensitive than late eaters. (Eating more fat in the evening was also correlated with poorer insulin sensitivity. It’s not clear how much these effects were driven by total caloric intake.)

In another interesting study, researchers assigned men to eat two different diets for four weeks. They either ate most of their carbs before 1:30 p.m. and most of their fat after, or vice versa, in a cross-over design. For men who started out normal glucose control, carb timing didn’t matter. However, among men with high fasting glucose or impaired glucose tolerance, eating carbs at night led to unfavorable changes on several makers of glucose tolerance.

In contrast, in this study, men followed a hypocaloric diet for eight weeks. Participants who were assigned to eat most of their carbs at lunch instead of dinner ended up with higher fasting glucose and insulin, and poorer insulin resistance.

Does type of carb matter?

Maybe. Researchers compared low-GI (glycemic index) and high-GI meals with most of the calories loaded into either the morning or the evening. Participants had the highest postprandial glucose (glucose after a meal) and insulin in the high-GI + evening eating condition. It didn’t matter when participants ate low-GI carbs. (Participants also consumed 302 grams of carbohydrate per day. Diets consisted of bran cereal, low-fat fruit yogurt, “fruit loaf,” and a Mars bar, among other things. It’s not clear exactly how these findings apply to Primal eaters.)

Conclusion: More research is needed in this area, but the available evidence points to morning carb consumption being favorable for glycemic control, perhaps especially among people who already struggle in this area.

Carb timing for athletes

As you know, I’m a big fan of athletes using fat for fuel. It’s an efficient, cleaner burning, more abundant source of energy. Once you become fat-adapted, it’s amazing what you can do as a fat-burner. As I detail in Primal Endurance, low-carb and keto diets work tremendously well for endurance athletes and even for hard-core strength athletes.

That said, there is no denying the ergogenic effect of carbs – carbs’ effect on stamina, physical performance and recovery. When you’re fat-adapted and running mainly on fat (and maybe ketones), adding some carbs to the mix can be like rocket fuel. I’m a fan of the “train low, race high” strategy for endurance athletes. Conduct most of your training using a low-carb approach, but add carbs strategically for your highest-intensity training sessions and races. You don’t need a lot, maybe 60-100 grams per hour.

Targeted Carbs: Should You Eat Carbs Before a Workout?

One strategy I’ve talked about before is targeting your carb intake around workouts. There are two rationales here. One is the aforementioned ergogenic effect — giving your workouts a boost. The second is that when you exercise, a glucose transporter in muscle cells called GLUT4 moves to the surface of the cell. This facilitates the transport of glucose into the cells without insulin.

Intense exercise also depletes glycogen, so there is a window after exercise in which ingested carbs are more likely to go to replenish glycogen. This is what I mean when I talk about the “glycogen suitcases being open” after exercise.

Thus, it makes sense to time your carb intake around exercise, especially hard and/or long bouts. In the keto world, this strategy is called “targeted keto.” The same principle applies for low-carb-but-not-keto folks. It’s not because you need the carbs for workouts—most of us do just fine without any special carb loading—but that’s when the body is most ready to use or store them.

Does Eating Carbs in the Evening Help You Build Muscle?

In the world of muscle gains, there are a handful of approaches that involve backloading carbs into the evening following a workout. Bill Lagakos does an excellent job unpacking them in a two part blog series here and here. Briefly, the logic behind carb backloading is that you don’t want to eat carbs when you’re more insulin sensitive in the morning because they’ll get stored as fat (oversimplifying here). Instead, wait until later in the day when insulin sensitivity decreases, then use exercise to push carbs into muscle instead of fat.

There’s no real evidence that this works, beyond anecdotal evidence from people who enjoy eating carbs at night. If you have body fat to lose, I think the evidence favors shifting calories and carbs toward the morning.

For the average person looking to gain strength and functional fitness, carb timing is not a great concern. For fitness competitors or people trying to push their physical limits, it might start to matter.

If you’re looking to gain lean muscle, you might find that ingesting a small amount of carbohydrate—25 to 30 grams—before hitting the gym can be beneficial. Contrary to popular belief, however, post-workout carbs do not seem to enhance muscle synthesis or recovery to a meaningful degree, especially not when protein needs are covered.

Bottom line: Carb timing isn’t important for muscle building except maybe for elite competitors and high-performers.

Timing Carbs for Weight Loss: What Does the Science Say?

In recent years, some people have claimed that eating carbs at night actually supports weight loss. In fact, this is one of the rationales offered for the aforementioned carb backloading. However, the studies they typically cite as evidence for this assertion have methodological problems that I can’t overlook.

Those studies are also at odds with a larger number of studies linking weight loss to eating more of your calories earlier in the day. Mechanistically, eating late delays the onset of the overnight fast, interfering with fat-burning and potentially with switching on ketosis. Eating later can also be associated with eating more, period.

Unfortunately for the purposes of this post, studies that look at meal timing and weight loss don’t examine nutrient timing, with one exception. In this study, researchers compared two diets, one prioritizing carbs at lunch and protein at dinner, and the other vice versa. Participants lost equal amounts of fat on each, but the group who ate most of their carbs at dinner also lost more lean tissue—not what you want! (This was also the study that showed poorer glycemic control with lunchtime carbs, in contrast to most other studies.)

Bottom line: When it comes to weight loss, there’s not enough data to convince me that carb timing seems very important.

Carbs Before Bed and Sleep Quality

Theoretically, carb intake at night could positively affect sleep by increasing tryptophan production, which is a precursor of serotonin, which in turn promotes sleep. It makes sense. No empirical research directly supports this hypothesis, though. Still, experts recommend you try adding some carbs at night if you’re struggling with sleep, especially on a low-carb diet.

There are plenty of studies looking at the relationship between macronutrients and sleep. However, they look at dietary composition as a whole, not nutrient timing. A single small study found that eating a high-GI meal four hours before bed improved sleep onset, compared to a lower-GI meal, and also compared to eating that same high-GI meal eaten one hour before bed. That’s all we have data-wise, besides anecdotes.

Conclusion: Anecdotal evidence aside, there’s no proof that timing carbs at night help your sleep. It probably doesn’t hurt to try.

So Where Does This Leave Us?

Well first, it leaves us asking for more studies that systematically investigate carb timing. I specifically want to see more studies looking at carb timing in a low-carb population. As usual, the studies I cited here involved a standard high-carb paradigm. If you read the reports and see what researchers are feeding their participants… well, let’s just say you Primal folks wouldn’t volunteer for these studies.

This always leaves me wondering how well any of these findings apply to us fat-adapted folks. We can’t know for sure.

Let’s summarize the findings we have, though. First, for entraining your circadian rhythm, improving glycemic control, and losing weight, the available data altogether point to the benefits of eating more of your carbs earlier in the day.

You might wonder how this fits with intermittent fasting. First of all, I.F., doesn’t have to mean skipping breakfast. Many people skip breakfast largely out of convenience. If it works for you, great. Nothing I’ve said suggests that it’s bad for you. That said, if you’re still struggling with glucose tolerance, or you have a few stubborn pounds of body fat you’d like to lose, loading more of your calories and carbs earlier in the day seems to be a worthwhile experiment, as I’ve said before.

It makes sense to target carbs around exercise, but it’s generally not necessary for athletic performance. Most weekend warriors can get by just fine without any special carb timing strategy. People looking to gain muscle may want to ingest a small amount of pre-workout carbs, and endurance athletes should be open to using carbs around heavy training and races. I still think becoming fat-adapted should be every athlete’s first priority.

Finally, maybe experiment with some extra nighttime carbs if you’re a low-carb eater whose sleep is suffering.

But Don’t Sweat It

Nothing I’ve seen suggests that carb timing is more important than the amount and quality of food you eat. Once you dial in those higher-priority goals, by all means go ahead and try being more intentional about your carb timing if you want.

It might make a difference if you’re at the top of your performance game looking to squeeze out a few more drops, or if you have lingering health issues. Otherwise, I’d consider it just another variable you can experiment with if you want, but don’t sweat it if you have bigger things to worry about.

  More related posts from Mark’s Daily Apple

Dear Mark: Glycogen Should You Sleep-Low to Boost Performance?

(function($) { $("#dfLBgv4").load("https://www.marksdailyapple.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=dfads_ajax_load_ads&groups=674&limit=1&orderby=random&order=ASC&container_id=&container_html=none&container_class=&ad_html=div&ad_class=&callback_function=&return_javascript=0&_block_id=dfLBgv4" ); })( jQuery );

Additional references

Challet, E. (2019). The circadian regulation of food intake. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 15(7), 393–405.

Oda, H. (2015). Chrononutrition. Journal of Nutritional Science and Vitaminology, 61 Suppl, S92-94.

Oike, H., Oishi, K., & Kobori, M. (2014). Nutrients, Clock Genes, and Chrononutrition. Current Nutrition Reports, 3(3), 204–212.

Qian, J., Dalla Man, C., Morris, C. J., Cobelli, C., & Scheer, F. A. J. L. (2018). Differential effects of the circadian system and circadian misalignment on insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion in humans. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 20(10), 2481–2485.

Wefers, J., van Moorsel, D., Hansen, J., Connell, N. J., Havekes, B., Hoeks, J., van Marken Lichtenbelt, W. D., Duez, H., Phielix, E., Kalsbeek, A., Boekschoten, M. V., Hooiveld, G. J., Hesselink, M. K. C., Kersten, S., Staels, B., Scheer, F. A. J. L., & Schrauwen, P. (2018). Circadian misalignment induces fatty acid metabolism gene profiles and compromises insulin sensitivity in human skeletal muscle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(30), 7789–7794.

Zilberter, T., & Zilberter, E. Y. (2014). Breakfast: To Skip or Not to Skip? Frontiers in Public Health, 2. Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00059/full.

The post When Is The Best Time to Eat Carbs? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

When Is The Best Time to Eat Carbs? published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

[jesseneufeld]

When Is The Best Time to Eat Carbs?

Beyond the great debate about how many carbs we should be eating, there is another question you might be wondering about: When is the best time of day to eat carbs?

Today we’re going to dig into the data and see if we can get some answers. Before we do, though, I want to make something clear. The types and amounts of food you are eating are much more important than nutrient timing when it comes to health, body composition, and even athletic performance.

Before worrying about nutrient timing, you should:

Eliminate the “big three”—grains, excess sugars, and offensive vegetable and seed oils

Consume an appropriate amount of food for your goals and activity level—neither too much nor too little

Ensure that you are getting enough micronutrients via diverse, nutrient-dense foods, plus supplementation when necessary

I’d also say that macronutrients—the relative amounts of carbs, protein, and fat you’re eating—comes before nutrient timing in the hierarchy of “likely to matter.” A Keto Reset is probably going to impact your health and body composition more than changing the timing of your carb intake.

Still, I know many of you are self-experimenters and optimizers. You like to explore ways to squeeze a little more “edge” out of your diet and lifestyle. For some of you, nutrient timing might be the key to resolving a nagging issue that hasn’t been fixed by diet and lifestyle changes. If this is something you’re curious about, read on.

The Best Time to Eat Carbs: Why Would Carb Timing Matter?

The growing field of “chrononutrition” investigates how food timing affects overall health. I’m sure you know that many bodily systems operate according to biological clocks. Sleep, immune system activity, and body temperature are all governed by circadian (~24-hour) clocks, for example. Disruption to our normal biological clocks negatively impacts health.

Metabolism operates according to circadian rhythms, too. On a basic level, we are meant to sleep when it’s dark, move and eat when it’s light. Insulin sensitivity and beta cell activity (the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin) are highest in the morning. Research shows that glucose tolerance—the body’s ability to clear glucose from the bloodstream after a meal—goes down if your sleep is poor or under conditions of circadian misalignment. There also seems to be a link between eating later at night, weight gain, impaired fat oxidation, and other negative health outcomes.

Taken together, this has led some researchers to suggest that we should eat most of our food earlier in the day to entrain, or align, our circadian rhythms. Doing so, they argue, could improve glycemic control (glucose regulation) and insulin sensitivity. It might also regulate appetite hormones and cortisol, and have downstream effects on body composition.

Carb Timing for Glycemic Control and Insulin Sensitivity

A number of studies seem to suggest that eating later is associated with impaired glucose tolerance and/or insulin sensitivity. On the other hand, both may be improved with early time restricted feeding (eTRF). This is where you eat in a compressed window, say 8 or 10 hours, and that window is shifted toward the morning. A typical eTRF schedule might entail eating all one’s food between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Most of these studies focus on food timing generally, not nutrient timing per se. For example, in this study, men with type 2 diabetes ate all their calories in a 9-hour window. In one phase, they ate from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (eTRF). In the other, they ate from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. Both schedules improved glucose tolerance, but only eTRF decreased fasting glucose.

A handful of studies do specifically look at carb timing:

Healthy volunteers kept three-day food diaries. Those who ate relatively more of their food, and more carbs specifically, in the morning were also more insulin sensitive than late eaters. (Eating more fat in the evening was also correlated with poorer insulin sensitivity. It’s not clear how much these effects were driven by total caloric intake.)

In another interesting study, researchers assigned men to eat two different diets for four weeks. They either ate most of their carbs before 1:30 p.m. and most of their fat after, or vice versa, in a cross-over design. For men who started out normal glucose control, carb timing didn’t matter. However, among men with high fasting glucose or impaired glucose tolerance, eating carbs at night led to unfavorable changes on several makers of glucose tolerance.

In contrast, in this study, men followed a hypocaloric diet for eight weeks. Participants who were assigned to eat most of their carbs at lunch instead of dinner ended up with higher fasting glucose and insulin, and poorer insulin resistance.

Does type of carb matter?

Maybe. Researchers compared low-GI (glycemic index) and high-GI meals with most of the calories loaded into either the morning or the evening. Participants had the highest postprandial glucose (glucose after a meal) and insulin in the high-GI + evening eating condition. It didn’t matter when participants ate low-GI carbs. (Participants also consumed 302 grams of carbohydrate per day. Diets consisted of bran cereal, low-fat fruit yogurt, “fruit loaf,” and a Mars bar, among other things. It’s not clear exactly how these findings apply to Primal eaters.)

Conclusion: More research is needed in this area, but the available evidence points to morning carb consumption being favorable for glycemic control, perhaps especially among people who already struggle in this area.

Carb timing for athletes

As you know, I’m a big fan of athletes using fat for fuel. It’s an efficient, cleaner burning, more abundant source of energy. Once you become fat-adapted, it’s amazing what you can do as a fat-burner. As I detail in Primal Endurance, low-carb and keto diets work tremendously well for endurance athletes and even for hard-core strength athletes.

That said, there is no denying the ergogenic effect of carbs – carbs’ effect on stamina, physical performance and recovery. When you’re fat-adapted and running mainly on fat (and maybe ketones), adding some carbs to the mix can be like rocket fuel. I’m a fan of the “train low, race high” strategy for endurance athletes. Conduct most of your training using a low-carb approach, but add carbs strategically for your highest-intensity training sessions and races. You don’t need a lot, maybe 60-100 grams per hour.

Targeted Carbs: Should You Eat Carbs Before a Workout?

One strategy I’ve talked about before is targeting your carb intake around workouts. There are two rationales here. One is the aforementioned ergogenic effect — giving your workouts a boost. The second is that when you exercise, a glucose transporter in muscle cells called GLUT4 moves to the surface of the cell. This facilitates the transport of glucose into the cells without insulin.

Intense exercise also depletes glycogen, so there is a window after exercise in which ingested carbs are more likely to go to replenish glycogen. This is what I mean when I talk about the “glycogen suitcases being open” after exercise.

Thus, it makes sense to time your carb intake around exercise, especially hard and/or long bouts. In the keto world, this strategy is called “targeted keto.” The same principle applies for low-carb-but-not-keto folks. It’s not because you need the carbs for workouts—most of us do just fine without any special carb loading—but that’s when the body is most ready to use or store them.

Does Eating Carbs in the Evening Help You Build Muscle?

In the world of muscle gains, there are a handful of approaches that involve backloading carbs into the evening following a workout. Bill Lagakos does an excellent job unpacking them in a two part blog series here and here. Briefly, the logic behind carb backloading is that you don’t want to eat carbs when you’re more insulin sensitive in the morning because they’ll get stored as fat (oversimplifying here). Instead, wait until later in the day when insulin sensitivity decreases, then use exercise to push carbs into muscle instead of fat.

There’s no real evidence that this works, beyond anecdotal evidence from people who enjoy eating carbs at night. If you have body fat to lose, I think the evidence favors shifting calories and carbs toward the morning.

For the average person looking to gain strength and functional fitness, carb timing is not a great concern. For fitness competitors or people trying to push their physical limits, it might start to matter.

If you’re looking to gain lean muscle, you might find that ingesting a small amount of carbohydrate—25 to 30 grams—before hitting the gym can be beneficial. Contrary to popular belief, however, post-workout carbs do not seem to enhance muscle synthesis or recovery to a meaningful degree, especially not when protein needs are covered.

Bottom line: Carb timing isn’t important for muscle building except maybe for elite competitors and high-performers.

Timing Carbs for Weight Loss: What Does the Science Say?

In recent years, some people have claimed that eating carbs at night actually supports weight loss. In fact, this is one of the rationales offered for the aforementioned carb backloading. However, the studies they typically cite as evidence for this assertion have methodological problems that I can’t overlook.

Those studies are also at odds with a larger number of studies linking weight loss to eating more of your calories earlier in the day. Mechanistically, eating late delays the onset of the overnight fast, interfering with fat-burning and potentially with switching on ketosis. Eating later can also be associated with eating more, period.

Unfortunately for the purposes of this post, studies that look at meal timing and weight loss don’t examine nutrient timing, with one exception. In this study, researchers compared two diets, one prioritizing carbs at lunch and protein at dinner, and the other vice versa. Participants lost equal amounts of fat on each, but the group who ate most of their carbs at dinner also lost more lean tissue—not what you want! (This was also the study that showed poorer glycemic control with lunchtime carbs, in contrast to most other studies.)

Bottom line: When it comes to weight loss, there’s not enough data to convince me that carb timing seems very important.

Carbs Before Bed and Sleep Quality

Theoretically, carb intake at night could positively affect sleep by increasing tryptophan production, which is a precursor of serotonin, which in turn promotes sleep. It makes sense. No empirical research directly supports this hypothesis, though. Still, experts recommend you try adding some carbs at night if you’re struggling with sleep, especially on a low-carb diet.

There are plenty of studies looking at the relationship between macronutrients and sleep. However, they look at dietary composition as a whole, not nutrient timing. A single small study found that eating a high-GI meal four hours before bed improved sleep onset, compared to a lower-GI meal, and also compared to eating that same high-GI meal eaten one hour before bed. That’s all we have data-wise, besides anecdotes.

Conclusion: Anecdotal evidence aside, there’s no proof that timing carbs at night help your sleep. It probably doesn’t hurt to try.

So Where Does This Leave Us?

Well first, it leaves us asking for more studies that systematically investigate carb timing. I specifically want to see more studies looking at carb timing in a low-carb population. As usual, the studies I cited here involved a standard high-carb paradigm. If you read the reports and see what researchers are feeding their participants… well, let’s just say you Primal folks wouldn’t volunteer for these studies.

This always leaves me wondering how well any of these findings apply to us fat-adapted folks. We can’t know for sure.

Let’s summarize the findings we have, though. First, for entraining your circadian rhythm, improving glycemic control, and losing weight, the available data altogether point to the benefits of eating more of your carbs earlier in the day.

You might wonder how this fits with intermittent fasting. First of all, I.F., doesn’t have to mean skipping breakfast. Many people skip breakfast largely out of convenience. If it works for you, great. Nothing I’ve said suggests that it’s bad for you. That said, if you’re still struggling with glucose tolerance, or you have a few stubborn pounds of body fat you’d like to lose, loading more of your calories and carbs earlier in the day seems to be a worthwhile experiment, as I’ve said before.

It makes sense to target carbs around exercise, but it’s generally not necessary for athletic performance. Most weekend warriors can get by just fine without any special carb timing strategy. People looking to gain muscle may want to ingest a small amount of pre-workout carbs, and endurance athletes should be open to using carbs around heavy training and races. I still think becoming fat-adapted should be every athlete’s first priority.

Finally, maybe experiment with some extra nighttime carbs if you’re a low-carb eater whose sleep is suffering.

But Don’t Sweat It

Nothing I’ve seen suggests that carb timing is more important than the amount and quality of food you eat. Once you dial in those higher-priority goals, by all means go ahead and try being more intentional about your carb timing if you want.

It might make a difference if you’re at the top of your performance game looking to squeeze out a few more drops, or if you have lingering health issues. Otherwise, I’d consider it just another variable you can experiment with if you want, but don’t sweat it if you have bigger things to worry about.

  More related posts from Mark’s Daily Apple

Dear Mark: Glycogen Should You Sleep-Low to Boost Performance?

(function($) { $("#dfLBgv4").load("https://www.marksdailyapple.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=dfads_ajax_load_ads&groups=674&limit=1&orderby=random&order=ASC&container_id=&container_html=none&container_class=&ad_html=div&ad_class=&callback_function=&return_javascript=0&_block_id=dfLBgv4" ); })( jQuery );

Additional references

Challet, E. (2019). The circadian regulation of food intake. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 15(7), 393–405.

Oda, H. (2015). Chrononutrition. Journal of Nutritional Science and Vitaminology, 61 Suppl, S92-94.

Oike, H., Oishi, K., & Kobori, M. (2014). Nutrients, Clock Genes, and Chrononutrition. Current Nutrition Reports, 3(3), 204–212.

Qian, J., Dalla Man, C., Morris, C. J., Cobelli, C., & Scheer, F. A. J. L. (2018). Differential effects of the circadian system and circadian misalignment on insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion in humans. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 20(10), 2481–2485.

Wefers, J., van Moorsel, D., Hansen, J., Connell, N. J., Havekes, B., Hoeks, J., van Marken Lichtenbelt, W. D., Duez, H., Phielix, E., Kalsbeek, A., Boekschoten, M. V., Hooiveld, G. J., Hesselink, M. K. C., Kersten, S., Staels, B., Scheer, F. A. J. L., & Schrauwen, P. (2018). Circadian misalignment induces fatty acid metabolism gene profiles and compromises insulin sensitivity in human skeletal muscle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(30), 7789–7794.

Zilberter, T., & Zilberter, E. Y. (2014). Breakfast: To Skip or Not to Skip? Frontiers in Public Health, 2. Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00059/full.

The post When Is The Best Time to Eat Carbs? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

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[fishermariawo]

What Causes Slow Post-Workout Recovery—and What Can You Do About It?

One of the biggest mistakes I see among people who exercise is they forget this core truth: we get fitter not from training, but from recovering from training. This doesn’t just occur in beginners either. Some of the most experienced, hardest-charging athletes I know fail to heed the importance of recovery. Hell, the reason my endurance training destroyed my life and inadvertently set the stage for creation of the Primal Blueprint was that I didn’t grasp the concept of recovery. I just piled on the miles, thinking the more the merrier.

It didn’t work.

What is recovery, anyway?

There’s short-term recovery. Your heart rate slows back down, your body temperature drops, your sweat dries, your muscles and lungs stop burning.

Long-term recovery is less conspicuous, more internal. You replace lost energy stores, repair damaged muscle, clear out waste products, and begin the process of adaptation to the training.

When both short- and long-term recovery happen together, you “feel ready” to go again.

Some portion of how quickly we recover from training is out of our direct control.

Genetics is one factor we can’t control. Researchers have found genetic variants of collagen-encoding genes that increase or decrease the rate at which we recover from exercise-induced muscle damage, muscle tissue genes that increase resistance to exercise-induced muscle soreness, immune genes that affect the speed of adaptation to training. But even many genetic variants purported to affect recovery act through decisions carriers make. A carrier of a genetic variant linked to muscle power experienced more muscle damage and required more recovery after a soccer match, but only because that carrier “performed more speed and power actions during the game.”

Age is another factor out of our direct control. Sure, living, eating, and training right can stave off many of the worst effects of aging. Sure, a sedentary 70-year-old will recover from a workout far more slowly (if he or she can be cajoled into training) than a 70-year-old master athlete. But time does tick on. Following training that fatigues but doesn’t damage the muscles, like easy cycling, light weight training, or a sub-aerobic threshold jog, older athletes recover muscle function and performance at similar rates to younger athletes. After intense exercises that damage the muscles, like sprints, heavy lifting, intervals, or longer race-pace runs, however, older athletes recover more slowly than younger athletes.

Other factors, while preventable and modifiable over the long haul, inexorably inhibit workout recovery once they’re in place:

If you’re sick, you won’t recover as quickly. Illness diverts some of the resources that would otherwise be used to recover from training.

If you have heart disease, you’ll recover more slowly. In one study, having heart disease was the greatest predictor of a slower rate of heart rate recovery after exercise.

If your hormones are out of whack, you’ll likely recover more slowly. Hormones are the messengers and managers that tell our cells what to do. That includes muscle repair, hypertrophy, fuel replenishment, inflammatory signaling, and every other cellular function related to recovery.

Now I’ve got bad news and good news. Everything else that slows down workout recovery is under your direct control.

Factors We Can Control Stress

Stress is stress. Traffic is a stressor. A job you hate is a stressor. Procrastinating until you absolutely must get working is a stressor. And yes, exercise is a stressor. Too much of the psychological, lifestyle, or mental stress we all face impairs our ability to recover from exercise-induced stress.

Recent research confirms that “mental stress” impairs workout recovery, and it doesn’t speak in generalities. Thirty-one undergrads were assessed for stress levels using a battery of psychological tests, then engaged in a heavy lower body strength workout. At an hour post-workout, students in the high stress group had regained 38 percent of their leg strength, while students in the low stress group had regained 60 percent of their strength.

I developed my anti-stress supplement Primal Calm (now, Adaptogenic Calm) back in the chronic cardio days as a way to improve my training recovery. That’s what gave the product so much momentum in the endurance community—it turns out that beating back stress of all kinds quickened recovery from a very specific type of training stress.

Some stress is unavoidable. But most of us create additional stress in our lives and fail to do enough to counter or manage it. Stop making unforced errors.

Poor Sleep

Sleep debt impairs exercise recovery primarily via two routes: by increasing cortisol, reducing testosterone production, and lowering muscle protein synthesis; and by disrupting slow wave sleep, the constructive stage of slumber in which growth hormone secretion peaks, tissues heal, and muscles rebuild. That’s probably why sleep deprivation has been linked to muscular atrophy and increased urinary excretion of nitrogen, and why the kind of cortisol excess caused by sleep deprivation reduces muscle strength.

Additionally, sleep loss can increase the risk of injuries by decreasing balance and postural control. If you trip and fall, or throw out your back due to poor technique, you won’t even have a workout to recover from.

Most people think bad sleep is unavoidable. It happens to the best of us from time to time, but a night of bad sleep here and there isn’t going to slow down recovery. The real recovery killer is chronically bad sleep, and that’s the kind most of us can avoid by sticking to a good sleep hygiene regimen.

Nutrient Deficiencies

Since every physiological function requires a micronutrient substrate—vitamin, mineral, hormone, neurotransmitter, etc.—and physiological functions increase with exercise and recovery, active people require more micronutrients in their diet. “More of everything” is a safe bet, but there are a few key nutrients that working out especially depletes:

Zinc: Exercise, especially weight training, works better with plenty of testosterone on hand to build muscle and develop strength. Zinc is a key substrate for the production of testosterone, and studies show that exercise probably increases the need for zinc. In fact, one study found that exhaustive exercise depleted testosterone (and thyroid) hormones in athletes, while supplementing with zinc restored it.

Magnesium and Other Electrolytes: Magnesium is required for a number of physiological processes related to workout recovery, including oxygen uptake by cells, energy production, and electrolyte balance. Unfortunately, as one of the main electrolytes, lots of magnesium is lost to sweat during exercise. The same could be said for other electrolytes like calcium, sodium, and potassium, but most people get plenty of those minerals from a basic Primal eating plan. Getting enough magnesium, however, is a bit tougher, making magnesium deficiency a real issue for people trying to recover from workouts.

Iron: Intense exercise depletes iron, which is instrumental in the formation of red blood cells and oxygen delivery to your tissues during training and the immune response after it. They even have a name for it—exercise-induced anemia.

Soreness

Post-workout delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS, is no joke. While many of you folks reading this probably enjoy DOMS and take it as feedback for a job well done, it’s a hurdle that many beginners never move past. They join a gym, d0 a workout, feel great, go to bed feeling awesome, sleep like a baby, then wake up and find they have the bipedal capacity of a three-month-old. They can barely walk. Lifting their arms to brush their teeth is agony. Walking downstairs is out of the question. Some will move past the DOMS and get back into the gym. Many will not.

Low Fuel Availability

Working out expends energy. That energy must be replenished before you’re fully recovered and prepared to do another workout. Unless you’re trying to increase efficiency by training in a state of low fuel availability, like the “train low-carb, race high-carb” method, you should recover what’s been lost. What you replenish is conditional on the type of exercise you did. If you went for a long hike or easy bike ride that burned primarily body fat, you don’t need to—and probably shouldn’t—”replenish what you lost.” If you’re coming off a 30-minute full body CrossFit session that left you gasping on the ground in a puddle of sweat, you probably have some glycogen stores to refill.

This is a common issue for folks trying to lose weight through diet and exercise. Inadequate calorie intake coupled with intense exercise sends a “starvation” signal to the body, causing a down-regulation of anabolic hormones. Instead of growing lean mass and burning body fat, starvation (whether real or simulated) promotes muscle atrophy and body fat retention. Either alone can be somewhat effective, but combining the two for too long will only impair recovery.

Alcohol

Drinking directly impairs muscle protein synthesis, the essential step in muscle recovery and adaptation to training. Moderate or “social” drinking is probably safe (just don’t use alcohol as a post-workout recovery drink), but even just a single day per week of binge drinking is linked to 4x the risk of sarcopenia, or muscle-wasting. It’s hard to recover from your workouts if your muscles are atrophying.

Oddly, drinking directly after a training session also increases testosterone levels. One theory is that testosterone levels rise after drinking because it becomes less bioavailable; your muscle cells’ resistance to testosterone goes up, so it just circulates and gives “false” readings.

Things You Can Try

The obvious thing to try is the opposite of all the modifiable and preventable recovery-inhibitors mentioned above. Get good sleep, don’t drink too much (especially post-workout), get a handle on your stress, eat enough food, eat enough protein, get your micronutrients. What else?

Watermelon

L-citrulline is an amino acid found in watermelon that shows a significantly ameliorative effect on post-workout muscle pain, or delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). You can also supplement directly with L-citrulline, which may work, but watermelon is so good right now with a little salt, lime juice, and cayenne pepper, and it’s actually lower in carbs than you probably think (about 10 grams per cup of watermelon). I recommend fresh watermelon over pasteurized juice, as heat treatment reduces the effect.

Beets

Beets (and beet juice) aren’t only good for exercise performance. They also reduce DOMS. Nitrates have been posited as the primary constituent responsible for the effect, but beet juice works better than pure sodium nitrate.

Tart Cherry Juice

Tart cherry juice is best used to recover during competition, when your primary concern is to get back out there and perform. Its extreme effectiveness at killing muscle pain, reducing local and systemic inflammation and exercise-induced muscle damage suggests it may hamper training adaptations, however. It does also improve sleep, which should translate into better adaptations.

Massage

Massage feels great, and the evidence shows that it’s great for recovery from exercise. It alleviates DOMS. It speeds up the recovery of muscle strength and enhances proprioception. It improves central nervous system parasympathetic/sympathetic balance, even if the masseuse is one of those weird back massage machines.

Compression Garments

These aren’t just for show. A recent meta-analysis of the available research concluded that compression garments enhance muscle recovery after strength training and improve next-day cycling performance.

Whey

Compared to other proteins, whey protein accelerates muscle adaptation to eccentric exercise.

Creatine

Although we get creatine from red meat and fish, supplementary creatine can boost our recovery from exercise via a couple mechanisms. First, it increases muscle content of phosphocreatine. That’s the stuff we use for quick bursts of maximal effort, so carrying a little extra can do wonders for our ability to perform. Second, it enhances muscle glycogen replenishment without increasing insulin.

Fish Oil (or Fatty Fish)

Adding fish oil to a recovery drink reduced post-workout muscle soreness without affecting performance. Fish oil may also enhance muscle recovery from and adaptation to strength training.

Cold Water

A cold water plunge after training enhances the recovery of muscle function. However—and this is a big “however”—post training cold water plunges also seem to impair long term muscular adaptations to resistance training. In other words, a cold plunge might help you get back in the game for the short term at the cost of long-term adaptations.

More Carbs

I always say “Eat the carbs you earn.” While that often means eating fewer carbs than before, it can also mean eating more if you’ve trained hard enough to warrant them. This even applies to keto folks; depleting glycogen through exercise creates a “glycogen debt” that you can repay without inhibiting ketosis or fat-adaptation too much. The carbs—which you don’t need much of—go into muscle glycogen stores for recovery and later use without disrupting ketosis.

Don’t take this final section as a blanket recommendation, however. Before taking ice baths, dropping $500 on massages every week, taking a long list of expensive supplements, and walking around in a full body compression suit, make sure you’re sleeping, eating enough food, and giving yourself enough time between workouts. Quite often, handling the basics will be enough.

What have you found to be the best way to recover from your training? What are the biggest roadblocks? Let me know down below, and thanks for reading!

[cynthiamwashington]

What Causes Slow Post-Workout Recovery—and What Can You Do About It?

One of the biggest mistakes I see among people who exercise is they forget this core truth: we get fitter not from training, but from recovering from training. This doesn’t just occur in beginners either. Some of the most experienced, hardest-charging athletes I know fail to heed the importance of recovery. Hell, the reason my endurance training destroyed my life and inadvertently set the stage for creation of the Primal Blueprint was that I didn’t grasp the concept of recovery. I just piled on the miles, thinking the more the merrier.

It didn’t work.

What is recovery, anyway?

There’s short-term recovery. Your heart rate slows back down, your body temperature drops, your sweat dries, your muscles and lungs stop burning.

Long-term recovery is less conspicuous, more internal. You replace lost energy stores, repair damaged muscle, clear out waste products, and begin the process of adaptation to the training.

When both short- and long-term recovery happen together, you “feel ready” to go again.

Some portion of how quickly we recover from training is out of our direct control.

Genetics is one factor we can’t control. Researchers have found genetic variants of collagen-encoding genes that increase or decrease the rate at which we recover from exercise-induced muscle damage, muscle tissue genes that increase resistance to exercise-induced muscle soreness, immune genes that affect the speed of adaptation to training. But even many genetic variants purported to affect recovery act through decisions carriers make. A carrier of a genetic variant linked to muscle power experienced more muscle damage and required more recovery after a soccer match, but only because that carrier “performed more speed and power actions during the game.”

Age is another factor out of our direct control. Sure, living, eating, and training right can stave off many of the worst effects of aging. Sure, a sedentary 70-year-old will recover from a workout far more slowly (if he or she can be cajoled into training) than a 70-year-old master athlete. But time does tick on. Following training that fatigues but doesn’t damage the muscles, like easy cycling, light weight training, or a sub-aerobic threshold jog, older athletes recover muscle function and performance at similar rates to younger athletes. After intense exercises that damage the muscles, like sprints, heavy lifting, intervals, or longer race-pace runs, however, older athletes recover more slowly than younger athletes.

Other factors, while preventable and modifiable over the long haul, inexorably inhibit workout recovery once they’re in place:

If you’re sick, you won’t recover as quickly. Illness diverts some of the resources that would otherwise be used to recover from training.

If you have heart disease, you’ll recover more slowly. In one study, having heart disease was the greatest predictor of a slower rate of heart rate recovery after exercise.

If your hormones are out of whack, you’ll likely recover more slowly. Hormones are the messengers and managers that tell our cells what to do. That includes muscle repair, hypertrophy, fuel replenishment, inflammatory signaling, and every other cellular function related to recovery.

Now I’ve got bad news and good news. Everything else that slows down workout recovery is under your direct control.

Factors We Can Control

Stress

Stress is stress. Traffic is a stressor. A job you hate is a stressor. Procrastinating until you absolutely must get working is a stressor. And yes, exercise is a stressor. Too much of the psychological, lifestyle, or mental stress we all face impairs our ability to recover from exercise-induced stress.

Recent research confirms that “mental stress” impairs workout recovery, and it doesn’t speak in generalities. Thirty-one undergrads were assessed for stress levels using a battery of psychological tests, then engaged in a heavy lower body strength workout. At an hour post-workout, students in the high stress group had regained 38 percent of their leg strength, while students in the low stress group had regained 60 percent of their strength.

I developed my anti-stress supplement Primal Calm (now, Adaptogenic Calm) back in the chronic cardio days as a way to improve my training recovery. That’s what gave the product so much momentum in the endurance community—it turns out that beating back stress of all kinds quickened recovery from a very specific type of training stress.

Some stress is unavoidable. But most of us create additional stress in our lives and fail to do enough to counter or manage it. Stop making unforced errors.

Poor Sleep

Sleep debt impairs exercise recovery primarily via two routes: by increasing cortisol, reducing testosterone production, and lowering muscle protein synthesis; and by disrupting slow wave sleep, the constructive stage of slumber in which growth hormone secretion peaks, tissues heal, and muscles rebuild. That’s probably why sleep deprivation has been linked to muscular atrophy and increased urinary excretion of nitrogen, and why the kind of cortisol excess caused by sleep deprivation reduces muscle strength.

Additionally, sleep loss can increase the risk of injuries by decreasing balance and postural control. If you trip and fall, or throw out your back due to poor technique, you won’t even have a workout to recover from.

Most people think bad sleep is unavoidable. It happens to the best of us from time to time, but a night of bad sleep here and there isn’t going to slow down recovery. The real recovery killer is chronically bad sleep, and that’s the kind most of us can avoid by sticking to a good sleep hygiene regimen.

Nutrient Deficiencies

Since every physiological function requires a micronutrient substrate—vitamin, mineral, hormone, neurotransmitter, etc.—and physiological functions increase with exercise and recovery, active people require more micronutrients in their diet. “More of everything” is a safe bet, but there are a few key nutrients that working out especially depletes:

Zinc: Exercise, especially weight training, works better with plenty of testosterone on hand to build muscle and develop strength. Zinc is a key substrate for the production of testosterone, and studies show that exercise probably increases the need for zinc. In fact, one study found that exhaustive exercise depleted testosterone (and thyroid) hormones in athletes, while supplementing with zinc restored it.

Magnesium and Other Electrolytes: Magnesium is required for a number of physiological processes related to workout recovery, including oxygen uptake by cells, energy production, and electrolyte balance. Unfortunately, as one of the main electrolytes, lots of magnesium is lost to sweat during exercise. The same could be said for other electrolytes like calcium, sodium, and potassium, but most people get plenty of those minerals from a basic Primal eating plan. Getting enough magnesium, however, is a bit tougher, making magnesium deficiency a real issue for people trying to recover from workouts.

Iron: Intense exercise depletes iron, which is instrumental in the formation of red blood cells and oxygen delivery to your tissues during training and the immune response after it. They even have a name for it—exercise-induced anemia.

Soreness

Post-workout delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS, is no joke. While many of you folks reading this probably enjoy DOMS and take it as feedback for a job well done, it’s a hurdle that many beginners never move past. They join a gym, d0 a workout, feel great, go to bed feeling awesome, sleep like a baby, then wake up and find they have the bipedal capacity of a three-month-old. They can barely walk. Lifting their arms to brush their teeth is agony. Walking downstairs is out of the question. Some will move past the DOMS and get back into the gym. Many will not.

Low Fuel Availability

Working out expends energy. That energy must be replenished before you’re fully recovered and prepared to do another workout. Unless you’re trying to increase efficiency by training in a state of low fuel availability, like the “train low-carb, race high-carb” method, you should recover what’s been lost. What you replenish is conditional on the type of exercise you did. If you went for a long hike or easy bike ride that burned primarily body fat, you don’t need to—and probably shouldn’t—”replenish what you lost.” If you’re coming off a 30-minute full body CrossFit session that left you gasping on the ground in a puddle of sweat, you probably have some glycogen stores to refill.

This is a common issue for folks trying to lose weight through diet and exercise. Inadequate calorie intake coupled with intense exercise sends a “starvation” signal to the body, causing a down-regulation of anabolic hormones. Instead of growing lean mass and burning body fat, starvation (whether real or simulated) promotes muscle atrophy and body fat retention. Either alone can be somewhat effective, but combining the two for too long will only impair recovery.

Alcohol

Drinking directly impairs muscle protein synthesis, the essential step in muscle recovery and adaptation to training. Moderate or “social” drinking is probably safe (just don’t use alcohol as a post-workout recovery drink), but even just a single day per week of binge drinking is linked to 4x the risk of sarcopenia, or muscle-wasting. It’s hard to recover from your workouts if your muscles are atrophying.

Oddly, drinking directly after a training session also increases testosterone levels. One theory is that testosterone levels rise after drinking because it becomes less bioavailable; your muscle cells’ resistance to testosterone goes up, so it just circulates and gives “false” readings.

Things You Can Try

The obvious thing to try is the opposite of all the modifiable and preventable recovery-inhibitors mentioned above. Get good sleep, don’t drink too much (especially post-workout), get a handle on your stress, eat enough food, eat enough protein, get your micronutrients. What else?

Watermelon

L-citrulline is an amino acid found in watermelon that shows a significantly ameliorative effect on post-workout muscle pain, or delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). You can also supplement directly with L-citrulline, which may work, but watermelon is so good right now with a little salt, lime juice, and cayenne pepper, and it’s actually lower in carbs than you probably think (about 10 grams per cup of watermelon). I recommend fresh watermelon over pasteurized juice, as heat treatment reduces the effect.

Beets

Beets (and beet juice) aren’t only good for exercise performance. They also reduce DOMS. Nitrates have been posited as the primary constituent responsible for the effect, but beet juice works better than pure sodium nitrate.

Tart Cherry Juice

Tart cherry juice is best used to recover during competition, when your primary concern is to get back out there and perform. Its extreme effectiveness at killing muscle pain, reducing local and systemic inflammation and exercise-induced muscle damage suggests it may hamper training adaptations, however. It does also improve sleep, which should translate into better adaptations.

Massage

Massage feels great, and the evidence shows that it’s great for recovery from exercise. It alleviates DOMS. It speeds up the recovery of muscle strength and enhances proprioception. It improves central nervous system parasympathetic/sympathetic balance, even if the masseuse is one of those weird back massage machines.

Compression Garments

These aren’t just for show. A recent meta-analysis of the available research concluded that compression garments enhance muscle recovery after strength training and improve next-day cycling performance.

Whey

Compared to other proteins, whey protein accelerates muscle adaptation to eccentric exercise.

Creatine

Although we get creatine from red meat and fish, supplementary creatine can boost our recovery from exercise via a couple mechanisms. First, it increases muscle content of phosphocreatine. That’s the stuff we use for quick bursts of maximal effort, so carrying a little extra can do wonders for our ability to perform. Second, it enhances muscle glycogen replenishment without increasing insulin.

Fish Oil (or Fatty Fish)

Adding fish oil to a recovery drink reduced post-workout muscle soreness without affecting performance. Fish oil may also enhance muscle recovery from and adaptation to strength training.

Cold Water

A cold water plunge after training enhances the recovery of muscle function. However—and this is a big “however”—post training cold water plunges also seem to impair long term muscular adaptations to resistance training. In other words, a cold plunge might help you get back in the game for the short term at the cost of long-term adaptations.

More Carbs

I always say “Eat the carbs you earn.” While that often means eating fewer carbs than before, it can also mean eating more if you’ve trained hard enough to warrant them. This even applies to keto folks; depleting glycogen through exercise creates a “glycogen debt” that you can repay without inhibiting ketosis or fat-adaptation too much. The carbs—which you don’t need much of—go into muscle glycogen stores for recovery and later use without disrupting ketosis.

Don’t take this final section as a blanket recommendation, however. Before taking ice baths, dropping $500 on massages every week, taking a long list of expensive supplements, and walking around in a full body compression suit, make sure you’re sleeping, eating enough food, and giving yourself enough time between workouts. Quite often, handling the basics will be enough.

What have you found to be the best way to recover from your training? What are the biggest roadblocks? Let me know down below, and thanks for reading!

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