Carbs burned during exersize?
 

I have a question. I know that they estimate how many calories are burned during exersize. Is there any information available out there on how many carbs are burned during exersize, if at all? Just curious

I don't think the body burns the various types of fuel equally. It partially depends on the type of activity (long, slow sustained activites use more fat as fuel than carbs) but in general from what I've read carbs are burned first. It's just much simpler fuel for your body to access.

So take how many calories an activity burns and if the # of carbs you've consumed (assuming your body isn't storing them anymore) multiplied by 4 ( number of calories per carb) is lower, you're burning fat as well as carbs.

But all of that is assuming you're on a typical low-calorie diet. If I read The New Diet Revolution correctly, the reason we don't have to watch calories as well as carbs is because it's the insulin that determines how much of our food we store for energy later. Excercising seems to be a separate entity in LC. Instead of being focused on using up the calories (or carbs) you put in your mouth, the diet takes care of that and the excercising goes straight to using up the energy already stored as fat.

Hi Gawdess,

If you are burning carbs during your exercise then for every four calories burned you would be burning 1 gram of carbs.

The question is, if the calories you are burning are coming from carbs or fat? That is why some people will do cardio on an empty tummy first thing in the morning, when they are carb depleted, so that they are burning fat instead of carbs.

Arnie

Excercising on an empty stomach
 

It makes no sense to excercise on an empty stomach. If you're going by the calories used / calories expended it has nothing to do with metabolic advantage opinion, then you need to look at the total expended calories for the whole day.

If you burn 600 calories on an empty stomach and then eat, your body is still going to have to use up the calories in that meal throughout the day otherwise they will replace whatever "fat" was burned during the excercise. The only thing that makes excercising better than non-weight loss focused aerobic activites is that by exhausting our muscles we cause them to need more fuel to repair and grow in addition to the original expenditure of fuel needed to perform the excercises themselves.

But as we all know with LC you don't need to do ANYTHING different besides stopping the insulin induced fat storage response by limiting our carbs. We can eat twice as many calories as we ever did on a high carb diet and lose weight. It's not about the calories we eat or the calories (whether in the form of carbs or fat) that we burn. It's about correcting our body's imbalance so it can rid itself of the fat stores it doesn't need. It's the insulin that tells our body to store the calories our body doesn't immediately need as fat. By correcting our insulin response we stop that cycle.

Sorry but so many people try to just switch carbs for fat and keep all the same principles of the low-calorie mentality and it just doesn't apply to a low carb lifestyle.

In the LC life, excercise is important for whole body wellness, strengthening joints and muscles (including the heart) to prevent injury - not for calorie burning. The Cardio workout mentality is just as wrong and detrimental to us as the low-fat myths.

Actually fat is burned, up to two hours after a workout. So it really makes no difference in eating/not eating before a cardio session. Unless of course you plan on going 14 to 16 hours without any food.

Sorry, have to disagree here. I find exercise hugely important to keep Atkins going. It keeps me in Ketosis and accelerates my weight loss. While it make not be strickly necessary in the Atkins plan, calorie burning exercise is just as effective during Atkins as it is in any other diet plan.

I don't see how you can say that Cardio workouts are a myth, or detrimental to us. Cardio exercise burns off calories. It doesn't matter if those calories come from carb or fat based processes, you still need to burn them off. And while low insulin levels help prevent fat storage, they do not eliminate it. If you overeat on Atkins, you will store fat, carbs on not. I know lots of people who have gained weight on Atkins by eating way too much, especially high fat with no exercise! I have also found that high cardio exercise can break a stall. Woot to that. :yay:

brobin

This may not be the proper forum in which to argue this, but this post perpetuates the "you can eat all you want, as long as it's low-carb" fallacy. It implies that there is some sort of "magic" fat burning process associated with a low-carb diet, and that is just plain wrong. Sure, there is evidence that low-carb diets increase metabolism, making it easier to achieve the caloric deficit needed to lose weight, but you can't eat twice as many calories and expect to lose weight. Weight is lost because of a deficit in calories, not some magical metabolic process. Exercise is a great way to increase the caloric deficit that you may be able to acheive on a low-carb diet.