A nutritionist reveals the best time to eat carbohydrates — so that your body uses them up instead of storing them as fat

What's the deal with carbohydrates? Should you eat them or cut them out entirely? Michelle Adams-Arent, a sports nutrition consultant, explains how to eat carbs so that you still get the best body composition. Following is a transcript of the video.

Michelle Adams-Arent: Carbohydrates, right? There always has to be a fall guy. When it comes to weight loss and carbohydrates, again, I think people jump on the bandwagon of let's not have any.

It's not really the place that we want to go. If we could ideally time our carbohydrates maybe around our workout, or maybe a little bit more in the morning, vs. eating them heavily at night, you might notice a better body composition change.

In the morning, our body is actually a little bit more adept at handling carbohydrate influx, so consuming carbohydrates. Our body is better able to use those carbohydrates at that time and they're less likely to be stored as fat. The same thing happens around our workout.

Exercise is a fabulous change to the environment in our body, and it actually changes how we react to the food that we take in. For real though, sugar is not the devil. It's a timing issue. It's all in context. Sugar is the fastest burning, cleanest burning source of fuel that your body has. So we need it. But we need it around our exercise. We don't need it when we're sitting on our couch. Your body doesn't need all of that carbohydrate energy at that time because you're not using it.

It's kind of like trying to fill up your gas tank when you're not driving anywhere. You just keep filling it up – I don't care how cheap gas is — it's spilling on the ground. You're just storing it as body fat. So when is the best time to have it? Again, around your workout, earlier in the morning, your body is better able to handle those nutrients. You'll be fine if you do it that way.

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