Do You Really Burn Carbs like Calories?

I have my Apple Health App/Apple watch linked to the site. At lunch today I did a mile walk (20 minutes) which burned about 120 calories but I noticed on the site my total carbs for the day are now at a negative. 

Do you really burn carbs like calories when you exercise? 

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  • I'd like to know this, too.  I exercise daily and I've been looking in other forums about this, too.  Everything I've read says that you shouldn't count your exercised off calories/carbs to allow yourself to eat more.  It says hit your goals, don't go over and don't take off what you burn through exercise.  Wonder what others think.

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    • Andrew Meyer
    • Software Developer
    • Andrew_Meyer
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Carbs are not calories carbs are carbohydrates a physical chemical structure.  Calories are a measure of energy expended.

    When carbs are converted to glucose and then metabolized in the cells it produces energy (calories) that the cell uses to do its "work".

    The app can be setup to do your carbs as a percentage of your total calories expended, in which case doing more exercise allows you more carbs. However the general rule for trying to do keto is to try and stay below 50 g carbs as a hard limit regardless of how much exercise you do.

    The reason for that is:

    1. When carbs enter your system they will get converted to glucose fairly quickly.

    2. When the glucose reaches a certain point it will trigger the production of insulin which aids in getting the glucose across the cell membrane, to ethier be used by the cell or if it is a fat cell to be stored for another time.

    3. When insulin goes up the liver stops producing ketones. Ketones only get made in the absence of insulin and low insulin requires low blood glucose levels. 

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    • Bee
    • Bee.1
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    DonnaChase I have never eaten back my workout calories. It ensures, among other things,  am "eating" a deficit and it has worked for me thus far. It may be different for others.

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