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Burn the Fat Q & A, With Coach Tom Venuto
Q: Tom, How do I know the maximum number of carbohydrate grams I can eat in one sitting without excessively spiking my insulin and having those carbs turn into fat? For a man, would 70 grams be about right? Is there a rule of thumb?
A: How many carbs can you eat per meal without storing it as body fat? This is a common question, and a part of the reason is due to low carb diets getting so popular. Unfortunately that’s why many people have become afraid of carbs.
To avoid unnecessary fear of carbs or even having that mindset turn into some kind of eating disorder, it’s important to first remind yourself that carbs don’t make you fat, excess calories do.
If you eat too much of any food or any macronutrient, you’ll store fat. But you won’t gain body fat unless you have a calorie surplus. That means the short answer is, the amount of carbs that’s too many is the amount of carbs that pushes you into a calorie surplus.
When it comes to fat storage, the issue is not carbs per se. The issue is not insulin. The issue is excess calories.
Even if one of your meals had a huge amount of carbs, like 100 grams or even 150 grams, if you ate less at other meals so you still ended up in a calorie deficit for the day, you’d still lose fat. It’s having a calorie deficit at the end of the day (and end of every week) that leads to fat loss.
With that said, it’s not a bad idea to have at target to shoot at for your macros per meal, or at least a macro range to aim at.
I can give you some general rules of thumb based on averages for the typical man or woman, but there’s no single number of carb grams per day or per meal that applies to everyone.
Carbohydrate goals for the day and per meal can vary dramatically based your goals, your body size, your activity level and even your personal preferences (some people like eating more carbs, some people don’t mind eating less).
If you look around, you’ll see lots of case studies of different people having success on a wide range of carb and fat macros, including high carb, medium carb or low carb diets. As long as you eat enough protein and you have a calorie deficit, you’ll lose fat.
How many carbs per meal top lose weight is an individual matter that depends primarily on on these 5 “carb setting” factors:
1.Your total daily calorie expenditure
The bigger your calorie budget, the more carbs you can eat per day and per meal. It’s really that simple. If you’re a big athletic man and you burn 3500 calories per day (that’s a big calorie budget), you get to eat a lot more carbs than a small, sedentary woman who only has a budget of 2000 calories per day.
These two people are so different in their dietary needs, there’s no single rule of thumb that applies to both of them. You simply have to do the macro math based on the calories you have to work with.
Certain outliers, like endurance athletes, can burn mind-boggling amounts of calories, so their carb intakes are off the charts. They can be literally multiples of what the average dieter is eating, and yet they still don’t gain weight.
That’s why knowing how many carbs per meal you should eat starts with knowing how many calories you burn each day.
Your daily calorie expenditure is easy to calculate using standard equations like the Harris Benedict method. When you use an online calculator, all it takes is entering a few of your personal stats and then a mouse click.
2. Your state of energy balance.
How many carbs per meal you should eat is also going to depend on your goal. Are you pursuing fat loss, weight maintenance or muscle gain?
Having a goal for weight maintenance means you’re eating at maintenance level calories. That in turn means you have room for more carbs than if your goal was fat loss. If your goal is muscle gain, you’ll be setting your calories in a surplus. That means you have even more room for carbs. Carb intakes on muscle gaining diets can be very high. Carb intakes on fat loss diets are always much lower.
To simplify things, let’s consider that the average woman usually aims for between 1400 and 1800 calorie per day for fat loss. The average man usually aims for between 2100 and 2500 calories for fat loss. These general rules of thumb probably cover 70% of the population. The other 30% are outliers leaning to one side or the other (unusually high or unusually low calorie expenditure).
If the average woman has a 1600 calorie per day budget and the average man has a 2300 calorie per day budget, that only leaves certain amount of room for carbs. Protein is the top priority so you have to make room for that first. You’re also going to leave room for some dietary fat. So you can now see that how many carbs per meal you can eat is constrained by how many calories per day you can eat and still be in a caloric deficit for the day.
3. Your meal frequency.
How many carbs you eat per meal will also depend on how many meals you choose to eat each day. The higher your meal frequency the lower the amount of carbs you can have per meal (and vice versa).
In the bodybuilding tradition, most men eat 5 or 6 meals a day and most women eat 4 or 5 meals a day. That approach works well for building muscle mass because eating a protein food multiple times a day optimizes muscle protein synthesis, However, a high meal frequency is not a necessity for people with fat loss goals.
Based on what we know today about nutrient timing, it’s ideal to choose your meal frequency based not only on your goal, but also on your personal preferences. It’s best to choose a meal schedule you know you’ll be able to follow consistently as a lifestyle.
When you ask the question, “how many carbs per meal,” here’s the important point to remember: If you choose 3 meals a day, you’ll be eating more grams of carbs per meal than if you chose 5 meals per day. (We’re assuming you’re going to spread your carbs fairly evenly across all your meals).
If a man eats 2300 calories per day and sets his carbs at 40%, that’s 920 carb calories which is 230 grams per day in total to work with. If those 230 grams are spread across 5 meals, that’s 46 grams per meal. If he spreads those 230 total grams across only 3 meals, not that’s 76 grams of carbs per meal. Might seem like a lot to some people, but it’s For fat loss, if all else remains equal, the results will be the same at the end of the day, because either way, the total carbs and total calories are the same.
If a woman eats 1600 calories per day and she gets 40% of those calories from carbs, that’s 610 calories, which is 160 grams of carbs to work with for the whole day. If she spreads them out over 5 meals, she gets only 32 grams of carbs per meal. If she spreads them over 3 meals, that’s 53 grams of carbs per meal.
If you look at these examples, you should have some decent rules of thumb about how many grams of carbs per meal for weight loss is ideal. While you can see it’s possible to give guidelines for what’s typical, you can also now see that carbs per meal can vary a lot because so many factors are involved. This includes your meal frequency, as well as your calories (which are influenced heavily by gender too).
It varies even more when we move the goal posts and the aim switches from fat loss to muscle gain. I recently created a new set of muscle gain meal plans in the Burn the Fat Inner Circle meal planning software (not just for myself, but so members could see them too). If you looked at my muscle gain meal plans, you’d see that I aim for an average of 86 grams of carbs per meal spread out over 5 meals a day.
These numbers are based on being an 180 pound guy. Imagine how high the carb grams would be for a 220 pound guy who wants to grow to 230 muscular pounds. Easily over 100 grams of carbs per meal, right?
If you were to then look up my recent 2500-calorie fat loss meal plan (not a low carb meal plan, a balanced-macro meal plan), you’d see my carb intake was then only 65 grams per meal. (Again over 5 meals a day). If it were a competition-prep meal plan for getting really ripped, I might actually drop the carbs a bit more so I’d have room to increase the protein. By then, my carbs might be all the way down to only 40 grams per meal.
4. Your carb distribution across your meals.
I don’t recommend eating your whole day’s worth of carbs in one meal and then no carbs at any of your other meals. However, you don’t have to spread your carbs evenly across all your meals.
Some people prefer a bigger dinner, breakfast, pre-workout meal or post workout meal. If you want to move around some of your carbs through the day to suit your preferences, that’s fine.
The main priority for fat loss is that you set your calories properly and set your protein properly. This includes being in a calorie deficit, and hitting your ideal protein intake every day, and doing it consistently.
Most people like to spread their carbs evenly through the day. From a meal planning perspective, that’s the simplest way to do it because if you create maybe 10, 12, or 15 favorite “go to” meals or recipes and you plan them out so they all have about the same calories and macros, it’s super-easy to rotate them and get some variety in your meal plan while nailing your macros day after day.
5. Your preferred dietary approach (macros) – low carb, moderate carb or high carb.
It is not necessary to cut carbs to very low levels to lose fat. It is however, a perfectly viable option if you can sustain it. For fat loss, there are some advantages to swapping out some carbs and putting a bit more protein in their place.
To achieve fat loss, some things are mandatory and some things are not. A calorie deficit is mandatory. Eating enough protein is also mandatory, if you want the weight you lose to come from fat and not lean mass.
In contrast, how many carbs you eat (and how much fat) has much more leeway than most people think. You can choose a diet that’s higher in carbs and lower in fat, a diet that’s higher in fat and lower in carbs, or choose a more evenly balanced macro split somewhere in between.
You can make this decision based largely on personal preference, and which approach you choose will change the answer to the how many carbs per meal question entirely. If you decided to follow the low carb approach, then obviously, the carbohydrate grams will be much lower than what we discussed here. In fact, the entire question almost becomes moot.
If you follow any of my work, you probably know that I’m not against low carb diets, especially lower-carb diets that are high in protein and very high in vegetable (fibrous carb) intake. But you also know that I recommend starting with a diet that doesn’t eliminate entire foods groups or cut any macro too drastically.
So for our discussion here today, we’re assuming you’re using a relatively balanced macro diet, not an extreme low carb diet.But if you eat huge, high carb meals, why don’t some of those carbs get stored as fat? What about insulin?
So, you love indulging in a big “lumberjack” pack cake breakfast, or you enjoy making the family dinner the biggest meal of the day, with lots of pasta, and these meals have more calories and more carbs than any other meal. Why doesn’t it turn to fat?
But as I mentioned above, even if you eat a huge meal that’s mostly carbs, it’s still not going to cause fat storage if you stay in a deficit for the whole day.
Even if you did eat more carbs in one meal than your body needed at one point in time, some of it can get stored as muscle glycogen. If your glycogen stores were full, an acute carb excess may indeed lead to fat storage. But what you need to remember is that your fat cells are continuously taking in energy and also continually releasing energy over the course of a day and a whole week.
Even if one day included a huge, carb-heavy meal,if you stayed inside your calorie budget for the day, and if your other meals had fewer carbs and fewer calories, you could still have a net deficit for the day and still lose fat in the end. Same thing for a whole week. If one day you had a surplus, you’d store fat. But if the other six days you had a substantial deficit, you could end the week with a net deficit and still lose fat.
This isn’t a question of insulin spikes either, it’s simply how energy balance works. If you’re a fairly health person (not diabetic, and so on), even if there is an insulin spike, that shouldn’t worry you. Why do so meany freak out about insulin? It’s mainly because of myths spread by the low-carb dieting community.
Most advocates of low carb diets, especially ketogenic diets, claim that obesity is not caused by excess calories, but by hormones. The carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis is the theory of fat gain that claims carbohydrates spike insulin, and insulin causes fat storage and insulin stops fat from getting released from fat cells. While there’s a thread of truth in this because insulin is a storage hormone, this theory has been scientifically falsified. Also, most people completely misunderstand how insulin really works.
Technically, it’s correct that insulin is a storage and when insulin is high it prevents the release of fat from the fat cells. But insulin levels don’t stay elevated all day long after eating a high carb meal. Even if you’re body is in “storage mode” during the period following a meal, your body is fluctuating between the fed state where you’re absorbing (or storing) energy the and fasted state, where you’re releasing energy, not storing it.
Look at calorie balance in y our body like a bank account. After all the money deposits and all the money withdrawals, that’s what you’re left with in your net money balance. After all the calorie deposits and calorie withdrawals, that’s what you’re left with in your net fat balance. The balance in the end is not about what happens after a single deposit.
Almost all the long-term studies comparing low carb and high carb diets show no difference in results. That includes studies that were even funded by low carb advocacy groups. If calories and carbohydrates are matched, both types of diets produce similar results. When someone loses weight successfully on a low carb diet, it didn’t work because it controlled insulin, it worked because it helped that person achieve a calorie deficit (it’s hard to overeat when you’re on low carbs).
This idea that hormones, not calories, are what drives fat gain has been promoted by low carb diet advocates for so long, it’s been really hard to shake free of this myth. But the energy balance theory, which says that fat gain is caused by a surplus of calories, has always held true, and has been demonstrated in thousands of weight loss and obesity studies.
For the majority of metabolically healthy people (with no diseases or blood sugar disorders), insulin is not the thing to worry about. If you’re going to worry about something, worry about whether you’re eating too much over the whole day.
(Note: if you are using diet to help control any specific health or clinical issues, consult your doctor and or a clinical nutritionist or dietician for advice).
Summarizing it all
To sum up, how many carbs per meal should you eat for weight loss is a more complicated question that how many calories or how much protein. However, if you understand the 5 points I listed above, that should give you all the guidance you need to set up a meal plan that’s got the macros customized for you.
As you can understand now, because so many factors can influence your carbohydrate requirement, you can see the carb amount might be 25 grams, 50 grams, 70 grams, out could even top 100 grams per meal. It all depends on your needs. There’s no single carb amount, and that’s why I recommend macro-based meal planning so strongly.
You can learn everything you’ll ever need to know about carbohydrates and macros in the classic Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle (BFFM) book. There’s an entire chapter devoted to each macronutrient! Pick up a hard copy or audiobook at Amazon
If you want to take this to the next step and learn how to create entire meal plans based on macros, the meal planning system in my new ebook will literally take you by the hand and walk you through the creation of your first meal plan and then show you how to create as many more as you want. It’s called, The BFFM Guide to Flexible Meal Planning For Fat Loss (CLICK HERE).
Train hard and expect success,
Tom Venuto,
Founder & CEO, Burn the Fat Inner Circle
Author of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle
Author of The BFFM Guide to Flexible Meal Planning For Fat Loss
Already have the Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle books? Awesome! The next step is to join the Burn the Fat Inner Circle, our members-only online community and support site: www.BurnTheFatInnerCircle.com
Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilding and fat loss expert. He is also a recipe creator specializing in fat-burning, muscle-building cooking. Tom is a former competitive bodybuilder and today works as a full-time fitness coach, writer, blogger, and author. In his spare time, he is an avid outdoor enthusiast and backpacker. His book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle is an international bestseller, first as an ebook and now as a hardcover and audiobook. The Body Fat Solution, Tom’s book about emotional eating and long-term weight maintenance, was an Oprah Magazine and Men’s Fitness Magazine pick. Tom is also the founder of Burn The Fat Inner Circle – a fitness support community with over 52,000 members worldwide since 2006. Click here for membership details
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