I tend to shift fast-absorbed carbs and sweet-tasting foods including fruit toward the end, primarily to tame my appetite and secondarily to avoid feeling lethargic after my meal. In terms of energy expenditure, as someone with decent glucose tolerance, I doubt that food ordering affects me significantly (the margin of significance for me is +/- 100 kcal/day, anything more subtle I will acknowledge but won’t generally stress about). I do notice differences in thermogenesis when protein specifically precedes anything else, but only when I’ve eaten to a considerable surplus for the day.
Metabolically, as someone on a carb-friendly diet, after 20-30 fasted hours I’m presumably on a “fuel mix” delivered mainly via glycogenolysis and lipolysis; ketogenesis is barely noticeable (depending on carb intake and activity over the past few days, I may or may not even get the classic tell-tales of acetone breath and metallic taste around that time, presence of which nonetheless doesn’t guarantee that cells have actually began metabolizing these byproducts of fat catabolism for energy) and gluconeogenesis should be elevated but not yet peaked. Maybe with ideal timing and macro splits I could encourage slightly greater energy expenditure, by “feeding” beta oxidation and gluconeogenesis to their peak capacity (if only I had a tangible numeric clue of their respective “ceilings”); then have a bunch of fiber to buy me a little bit of time; then, with some additional delay, carbs, hoping that by the time the latter get absorbed and turned into glucose, the system will already have cleared out most of the fat and protein toward ATP, such that, worst-case, the carbs go toward glycogen replenishment and no new fat gets synthesized or stored. Pragmatically, if there’s any merit to my layman’s thought process at all, I doubt that it would be more than literal grams of fat such painstaking fine-tuning would “buy” (i.e. waste) me.
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