Here is a great blurb from the article “When Hunger Strikes” by Nathalie Plamondon-Thomas- on why it is SO IMPORTANT to eat real food before you workout so you have energy to contract your muscles properly and in turn change your body composition!
“Let’s say you describe a typical day of what you eat. You had breakfast before work, snack around 10am and by noon you are ready for lunch! Yet, you forgot your lunch at home, so you head to your fav coffee shop and get a ham and cheese sandwich. It tastes great and you feel full. But what does your body say? The grehlin (a stress hormone) is yelling, asking for more food! It sees the sandwhich coming in! So it says great!! I love ham and cheese sandwiches!! What’s this? Bread. Cool! Fibre and carbs are coming! But wait a minute. Your body doesn’t recognize the refined processed white bread, so it decides to just put it aside for now and store it- on the butt, thighs, stomach, anywhere it can!”
“The grehlin keeps asking for more food. But what about the ham? That’s protein, right? But it is processed ham, and again your body doesn’t recognize it! It decides to store that too! Next is cheese. Great! Dairy and protein together! But its processed cheese and your body doesn’t know what it is! What does it do with it!? Stores it! Same with the mayo. So the grehlin keeps asking for more and more food and will not shut up until it is fed!”
“At the end of lunch , all you’ve really eaten is a slice of tomato and a piece of lettuce! Vegetables. But with that they’re only good for a few minutes. Its no wonder why you are hungry again in an hour! You haven’t actually eaten properly. So what do you do at the end of the meal with the grehlin still yelling for food? You get an oatmeal-raisin cookie! All the refined sugar will be stored with the rest of the junk. So, really lots of garbage just added to the pile of unwanted inches covering your body!”
“You may think that the stuff accumulating on your thighs at lunch time will get out at 6pm when you hit the gym. With no proper fuel and a hard workout., you will likely crash!”
“When your body needs fuel, it looks for good fuel. So it won’t take the fat/garbage that it did not want in the first place. It stored it once. It will not run to the garbage at the first sign of hunger. If you are not eating it, you are stealing it from your body. If the gylycogen store is empty, your body will look for protein for fuel. It might take some energy from your muscles and bones, and then your workout makes you actually weaker than you were before. It will shrink your muscles, making you lose muscle mass, not fat. The garbage will still be there, but the muscles will be shrinking, changing your body composition.”
IMPORTANT: Eat real food before you workout!!