Thread: Can someone explain to me why we cannot store and burn fat at the same time theory?

You'll use some of the energy from postprandial hepatic glucose release and the food you just ate - and of course, eating stimulates an insulin response - a spike in the first phase, and a slow, steady wave in the second. Insulin promotes storage and halts lipolysis. You'll store some of the energy as glycogen in the tissues of your muscles and the liver, and the rest as fat for later retrieval as energy. I'm not entirely sure of what you're getting at but hopefully this sufficiently addresses your question.

I was just reading an article that might help: Medscape: Medscape Access

Not entirely clear on what your question is...

Are you talking about a short term time period after eating or longer term over a period of days, weeks?

In the short term, most of what you eat is broken down into its basic components through digestion and utilized as the body needs...your muscles and liver store glycogen (energy source) from carbohydrates. Protein is used to re-build structure in the body (like muscles) or it can be converted to glycogen for energy or fatty acid for storage. Fats are used for various metabolic processes like nutrient transport or they can be converted to glycogen for energy or stored as fatty acids. When you are physically doing something you are using ATP to power your movements and the glycogen is sucked from those areas to re-form ATP as it is being used. If you are sedentary and your glycogen stores are full-up, the body will switch to transforming the glycogen/amino acids/fatty acids into adipose tissue for storage.

This is basically what happens on a daily basis depending on what you are doing and when you are eating. When you average this out over a longer time period, days, weeks, etc... thats where you see more fat being stored or being converted to glycogen for use during activity. This leads to the simple rule of calorie balance - eat more than you burn on average and you will either use it to build muscle if you are working out or it will be stored as fat. Eat less than you burn and the body will tap into those fat stores (or muscle if you are not dieting correctly) and you will lose weight.

Hope this helps...

It sounds like this can play in to why they say we cant burn fat and build muscle at the same time. Youre either using what you ate or going using reserves.

Correct. If you are are in a caloric deficit, the body uses the limited resources it is fed as an energy source to power metabolism and movement. If you are in a caloric surplus, it first uses what it is fed to power metabolism and movement and than anything left over is used to build lean mass or be stored as fat. It is just not physiologically possible to burn fat and build muscle at the same point in time.

Some "gifted" individuals appear that they are doing exactly this, but its only because their bodies are shifting from one phase to the other rather quickly on a day to day basis depending on how many calories are available at any given time. For the rest of us, it just more efficient to go on "cycles" of periods of weeks where we are "cutting" or "bulking" .

Think of it like this, if you have a shortage of money, you dip into your savings account til you have a surplus of money to put it back in.

Honestly your body is never in a "static" state. It's always building and breaking down at the same time, and the rates of these processes is what controls the final levels. I read a study about IMTG's that states there may be a set amount muscles can store, very similar to glycogen in concept.