If you exercise before breakfast, you burn twice the fat as those that eat  breakfast before they worked out, a small UK study found.

The explanation – when exercising with no fuel forces the body to turn to stored carbs, and when those are quickly gone, to fat cells, CNN reports.

Unfortunately, the eat-after group didn't lose more weight than the eat-before group during the six weeks of the study, but it did have "profound and positive" effects on the health of the group that fasted, researchers said.

The group who exercised before breakfast increased their ability to respond to insulin, which is all the more remarkable given that both exercise groups lost a similar amount of weight and both gained a similar amount of fitness," said exercise physiologist Javier Gonzalez, an associate professor in the department for health at the University of Bath, in a statement.

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