Should I eat carbs in the evening?

No starches after 4pm? No way. Back-loading is the way forward to more muscle and less fat.

For decades, we’ve been told to pile our carb consumption in at the front end of the day. Eating a big, carb-laden breakfast, so that we can more easily burn off everything else you eat for the rest of the day.

The latest scientific research tells a different story. Its main premise is to skip breakfast, avoid carbs for most of the day, then shovel them down our throat like crazy for dinner after training. The pay-off: an insulin spike that feeds our muscle cells and starves your fat ones.

The cortisol connection

To understand how this works, you need to know what’s happening in your body while you sleep. Your levels of the stress hormone cortisol elevate throughout the night, which isn’t as evil as you’ve been led to believe. Carbs are converted into glucose (sugar), which raises your insulin. When cortisol acts without elevated insulin (ie. before you eat carbohydrates) it triggers the breakdown of harmful triglycerides into free fatty acids for metabolisation. In other words, cortisol accelerates the fat-burning process in the morning – but only if you don’t extinguish it with carbs.

Burn fat, don't store

Your body also releases the ‘hunger hormone’ ghrelin in the evening. As well as stimulating your appetite, ghrelin triggers the release of growth hormone. When this happens, your body releases more fat – fat it can use for energy. This also decreases the destruction of protein for fuel, so it can be used for muscle growth instead.

The problem? Insulin from carbs creates new fat cells and lowers your levels of ghrelin and therefore growth hormone, levels of which peak about two hours after you wake up. What that means: eating carbs in the morning hampers fat-burning for the rest of the day.

The solution: skip breakfast, consume protein and fat for the majority of the day, train in the evening, then pound high-GI carbs at night. Low-GI carbs are shown to hinder the body’s night time growth hormone release. I call this system “carb back-loading”. It manipulates insulin sensitivity – which is high in the morning and low in the evening, especially after exercise – to control which cells grow and which don’t. Skip the carbohydrates during the day and you can reduce the insulin spikes that make fat cells grow; load up at night after training and they’ll swell your muscles instead. It’s that simple.