London ? Running on empty may not be such a bad idea after all.

Though many athletes eat before training, some scientists say that if you really want to get rid of more fat, you should skip the pre-workout snack.

Several studies suggest exercising while your body is low on food may be a good way to trim excess fat. In a recent paper, European researchers found that cyclists who trained without eating burned significantly more fat than their counterparts who ate.

Muscles usually get their energy from carbohydrates, which is why athletes like Lance Armstrong and Michael Phelps scarf down enormous amounts of food before a race. But if you haven’t eaten before exercising, your body doesn’t have many carbohydrates in reserve. That forces it to burn fat instead, scientists say.

Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong eats a piece of coconut cream pie in Sully, Iowa, in this July 27, 2006, file photo during a seven-day bike ride across Iowa. Though many athletes eat before training, some scientists say that if you really want to get rid of more fat, you should skip the pre-workout snack.

“When you exercise (after fasting), your adrenaline is high and your insulin is low,” said Peter Hespel, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Leuven in Belgium. “That ratio is favorable for your muscles to oxidize (break down) more fatty acids.” Hespel said that people who exercise without having eaten burn more fat than they would if they had grabbed a bite beforehand.

In a study published in April, researchers at the University of Birmingham and elsewhere assigned seven people to cycle three days a week, followed by an intense session an hour later without eating. Another seven people followed the same regime, without the instruction to fast.

Though members of the group that didn’t eat performed worse on the intensive training, they burned a higher proportion of fat to carbohydrates than the group that ate. The results were published by Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.

In a 2008 study, Hespel and colleagues tested the effects on men who did endurance training without eating versus those who ate. In the athletes who hadn’t eaten, the researchers found a spike in the amount of proteins needed to process fat, meaning their bodies had been primed through fasting to burn more fat.

Hespel recommends people do this kind of training before breakfast, since eating carbohydrates interrupts the process of metabolizing fat for about six hours afterward.

Though he and colleagues have primarily studied the effects of exercising without eating in young, healthy people, he thinks the method could also help people with problems like diabetes. Because exercising without eating produces muscles that are better at absorbing glucose — which is important for preventing diabetes — Hespel theorized the strategy would also help diabetics control their insulin levels.

Other experts said that even though people may burn more fat this way, it is mostly fat within the muscles that will be lost and won’t make a big difference to people trying to lose weight.

“When you exercise (without eating), fat is broken down more quickly in the muscle,” said Andrew Greenberg, director of the Obesity and Metabolism Laboratory at Tufts University. “You may enhance how you burn the fat in the muscles, but it doesn’t affect your overall body fat,” Greenberg said.

He said more intense exercise may prompt the body to burn more fatty acids in other regions of the body, but that a lot of training would be required to see a big difference.