Filed under: Food and Nutrition, Women's Health, Men's Health
Remember the infamous diet rule of not eating after 8pm? Well, it's years later since many changes have been made to what was once considered to be sound dietary advice (has anyone seen the new food pyramid?), and most people now agree that cutting off your food this early may not be the best idea.
Unless you happen to go to bed at 9pm (which very well may be the case), you may want to keep eating up until an hour or so before you fall asleep. Eating any closer to bedtime may interfere with your sleep. Denying yourself food hours before bedtime, however, can actually cause you to slow down your metabolism over time.
Even though your body naturally slows your metabolism while you sleep, you are still burning calories. If you sleep for eight hours, for example, that's eight hours of calorie burning (albeit less than when you're awake), coupled with the amount of hours from the time you stopped eating until the time you fell asleep. So, you could be looking at upwards of 8 to 10 hours of not having any new food in your system, yet your body is burning calories the entire time. Seems like this should be a good thing, right? It is and it isn't.
It is a good thing because you need to burn calories to lose weight. We know that much. It's not a good thing because you are forcing your body to go into conservation mode. Our bodies, which are not as evolved as we would like to believe, respond to continuous periods of diminished caloric intake by slowing our metabolic rate. This, in turn, can cause some weight gain over time rather than weight loss.
Just be sure to eat something healthy at night. Everything I just said about weight loss and eating after 8pm is completely null and void if wolf down a tray of lasagna. Instead, try a healthy snack, such as a bowl of cottage cheese (if you can, or choose to, do dairy). The casein protein contained in cottage cheese digests very slowly, so it will stay in your system throughout most of the night. And, as an added bonus, foods that take longer to digest actually burn more calories in the process of their own digestion.
Continue reading Don't deny yourself food after 8pm
Permalink |
Email this |
Comments