What is the optimal exercise timing for weight loss?

Is it better to exercise in the morning or the evening, before breakfast or after breakfast?

There was a Nobel Prize-winning exercise physiologist who said he always ran a mile every

morning before breakfast.

Was he right?

Let's find out.

More than a dozen experiments have been published comparing the amount of fat burned in a fasted

versus fed state, and every single one found more fat was burned on an empty stomach.

On average, a single bout of low-to-moderate intensity activity before a meal burned off three

grams more fat than the same amount of exercise after a meal.

That's about three-quarters of a pat of butter's worth of fat, enough to improve insulin sensitivity,

same amount of exercise, but more fat loss all because of timing.

Now, just because you burn more fat while you're exercising doesn't necessarily mean you

end up with less fat at the end of the day.

Maybe your body offsets the extra fat loss that occurs during exercise with a little extra

fat storage when you finally do eat, balancing it out. Researchers in Japan set out to investigate

the possibility that your body makes up for it later by measuring 24-hour fat balance, after

100 minutes of running, either before breakfast or after lunch.

On the exercise after lunch day, they burned a total of 608 calories of fat over the course of that day.

In contrast, in the exercise before breakfast days in the same 24-hour period,

they burned through nearly 90% more, 1,142 calories of straight fat.

So the next day they woke up with about a quarter cup of fat less after the same amount

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