- It’s important to eat protein and carbs within one hour of a workout.
In the half hour to hour following a workout, ingested carbohydrates are preferentially metabolized into glycogen that is directed toward replenishing depleted glycogen stores in the muscles and the liver. This will happen anyway, but it happens faster if you can provide some fuel for the process within that 1/2 hour to hour window. Protein enters the picture in two ways. First, the speed of carbohydrate absorption is increased when there is approximately one gram of protein for every three to four grams of carbohydrate. Second, muscle protein synthesis is stimulated by eating enough protein (20+ grams). After a workout, the body is particularly primed for muscle protein synthesis, so protein + carbs following the workout serves the dual purpose of more quickly replenishing your glycogen stores, and provides material for muscle protein synthesis to be carried out.
It’s good to eat 5+ meals (or graze) throughout the day because it keeps your metab going.
Maybe fiction. It depends on what your definition of keeping your metabolism going is. Your metabolism is going all the time. And what you eat in any given meal has a lot to do with what your metabolism is doing in between meals. One area where it may be a benefit to having multiple smaller meals is, again, when dealing with protein and muscle synthesis. There is a limit to how much protein a body can utilize at once. This limit is somewhat dependent on muscle mass and the age of the person, but generally speaking, for a younger person is probably somewhere between 20 and 30 grams, while for someone in their 40s, may be between 30 and 40 grams. Less than 20 grams doesn’t particularly stimulate muscle protein synthesis, and too much protein means that the excess is either going to be discarded, or it’s going to have the carbon shells stripped out of it in order to make glucose, with the rest being discarded. So, if you want to keep that muscle protein synthesis chugging along all day, having 30 grams of protein every two to three hours will keep that part of your metabolism churning all day.
Being sedentary all day completely counteracts the effects of working out.
Fiction. IIRC, this comes from some research that shows that being sedentary all day effectively counterbalances very low levels of daily exercise. Any exercise is better than none, however, regardless of how sedentary one is when not exercising. Being sedentary does lead to higher resting insulin levels, and a slightly lower level of calorie consumption. There’s plenty of good research that shows a benefit from even moderate periods of standing (like 15 minutes) in an hour, without requiring a person to be standing all of the time
Fat you eat near bed time is more likely to be stored.
This one is weird. Fat cell behavior is controlled by insulin levels. Insulin provides pressure on fat cells that causes them to store fat. Thus, at higher insulin levels, the net result is that fatty acids are stored, and as insulin levels drop towards the fasting baseline levels, this storage pressure is reduced, allowing the net result to be that fatty acids are shed from fat cells and freed for use in other metabolic pathways.
Bed time is a period of fasting. So, generally speaking, your insulin levels are going to be headed towards their baseline fasting levels, and your fat cells are going to be shedding fat. However, what you eat with your fat is going to have a significant influence on the early part of this period, and is probably where this myth comes from. If your fat is consumed with enough carbohydrates to spike insulin levels, then that fat will tend to be stored, and because sleep has lower calorie demands than wakefulness, depending on what that last meal was, you may experience more storage of fat than release of fat over your whole sleep cycle. It all really depends on the size and content of that late meal.
You burn more fat throughout the day if you work out in the morning.
There is no good research evidence that I am aware of that supports this notion. My hunch is that if there is any actual effect from a morning workout, it is simply that a moderate morning workout can help to suppress midday appetite (moderate levels of exercise are shown to have a moderating effect on appetite levels), and can also be mentally stimulating, which helps keep a person from slowing down into a deeply sedentary mode later in the day. Again, though, there’s no good research that I know of that shows any sort of low level metabolic shift towards increased fat burning through the day if one exercises in the morning.