When Should I Eat Carbs? | Top Pros Give Their Answer
When Should I Eat Carbs?
Top Pros Give Their Answer
Q: I am not sure when to eat carbs. I know I am supposed to eat protein at every meal, and carbs are a must for the meal, pre- and post-workout, but what about the other meals of the day? Should I include carbs in all of them, or only certain meals?
Dexter Jackson
It all depends on you as an individual, as well as your goals. Some guys need a lot of carbs, or else they can’t even hold their weight. Others start getting fat if they have more than a small amount of carbs every day. It can also be very different, depending on what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re dieting for a contest, you will probably have to either gradually reduce your carbs as the show day gets closer, or cycle them so you have more or less of them on certain days— like three days of lower carbs, followed by a fourth day when you eat a ton.
You might even vary your carbs by meals, like you were talking about. In the off-season when you’re trying to gain new mass and bodyweight, you would probably want carbs with every meal. That would change as you started to diet. Say you eat six meals a day. You might take carbs out of that final sixth meal, and just have protein and vegetables for the first couple of weeks of the diet. Then you might cut carbs out of the fifth and sixth meals for another couple of weeks, and so on.
It’s pretty common for bodybuilders to only eat carbs in the meals before and after their workouts in the final four to six weeks before competing, to strip off the last bits of body fat. But even there, people are different. Some guys can keep carbs in most if not all of their meals, if they have that type of metabolism. If they don’t, they start flattening out and losing muscle.
So it should be clear by now that there’s no universal answer to the question. You have to find out for yourself how many carb meals your body handles best, as well as the amounts, and even the carbohydrate sources your body responds best to.
Branch Warren
In the off-season, the goal is to get stronger and grow bigger. For that, you need a steady amount of carbs. That means eating them with every meal. If you find yourself putting on more body fat than you like, start reducing the amounts or maybe cut them out of your final meal of the day. When your goal is to get leaner, either for a contest or just a personal goal, you need to find out how many carb meals your body does best with. Even at a couple of weeks out from a contest, I still have carbs in all my meals except the last one. Not everybody does so well with all those carbs, but you have to at least try it before you know for sure. If not, you might be shortchanging yourself out of mass that you could be holding on to as you get ripped.
Evan Centopani
This is one of those cases where you absolutely need to go through a period of trial-and-error to see what your body and your metabolism respond best to. Let’s say you eat six meals a day. You could start out with having carbs as part of three of your meals, and see how you look and feel doing that for a while. Then, add a fourth carb meal and give it a couple of weeks. Do you look and feel better, or worse?
Some people find they do best having carbs with every meal, while others only have carbs with maybe two meals a day, with the rest being made up of protein and healthy fats. Those fats can come from nuts or nut butter, whole eggs or fatty fish like salmon.
Your appetite and what you prefer are often linked to what your body needs. Let’s say you’re eating a chicken breast, and you can choose between a baked potato and some sliced avocado, yet you crave the avocado over the potato. That’s fine. Both choices are healthy, and both provide your body with energy sources. It really comes down to how you process either one preferentially, and the only way to find that out is to experiment.
Justin Compton
This is a tough question, because it depends on a few things. What is your body type? If you’re a tall, skinny ectomorph type who struggles to gain every ounce of weight, you would probably want carbohydrates with all your meals, and in large quantities. On the other end of the spectrum, maybe you’re an endomorph. Gaining weight isn’t a problem for you at all, in fact you have to be very careful or else you start getting fat. In a case like that, you could be so sensitive to carbs that having them in anything other than the meals before and after your workouts could cause you to put on unwanted body fat.
You also have to look at your overall activity level. Someone with a physical type of job who is burning calories all day at work will obviously need to eat more carbs than someone who sits at a desk. I personally need carbohydrates at every meal to hold my size and fullness, but that’s me. In spite of my size and weight, I have a pretty fast metabolism, plus I train with extreme intensity and with a lot of volume.