Eating protein before a workout doesn’t stop your body from burning fat like eating sugar does—so if you want to burn fat while exercising, protein is safer than carbs.

If you want to burn fat during your workout, eating protein before you start won’t hurt your fat-burning—eating sugar will. So protein might be a smarter pre-workout snack.

After working out, eating protein makes your body keep burning more calories—but it doesn’t make you burn more fat afterward. The extra calories come from somewhere else, like digesting the protein itself.

If you eat sugar before a 60-minute walk or light jog, your body burns less fat during the workout—but if you eat protein instead, it doesn’t hurt fat burning at all.

Eating protein before a workout makes your body keep burning more calories for an hour after you stop, but eating sugar doesn’t have that effect.

After a workout, your body burns more calories for a while if you ate protein before you started—more than if you ate sugar.