Is it okay to eat right before you sleep?

I have noticed that I fall asleep faster after eating a large meal. Eating a large meal often makes me tired on its own. Today, I would like to look at whether sleep quality is affected by the length of time between sleeping and eating.

Can the body focus on digestion and recovery at the same time?

Sleep Adviser doesn't think so. They recommend eating your last big meal 2-3 hours before bed time. According to them, your body will spend less energy on the restorative process if it needs to digest food. Digestion requires energy and blood flow. It takes from one fifth to a third of the calories found in protein for your body to break it down. The reason why you feel sleepy after eating a big meal is because your body uses a lot of energy to convert it into usable nutrients. This reduces the amount of energy that your body has available to rest and recover. Sleep adviser says that eating before bed will negatively affect your sleep in many ways.

The negative effects of eating before bed, according to Sleep Adviser:

• It can lead to decreased hunger in the morning, which has the knock-on effect of making you eat bigger meals later in the day. This could also encourage you to opt for unhealthy snacks later on.
• Indigestion occurs because the body's resources are split between digestion and sleep.
• There is a higher chance of mental exhaustion, impaired judgement and lower willpower. This may be caused by less energy that is spent on mental restoration during sleep.
• Nightmares can become more prominent and more frequent due to poor sleep quality.
• You may experience a lack of physical energy because the restorative processes that happen during deep sleep are disrupted until food is digested.

Sleep adviser says that you can have a small snack closer to bed time if it has been too long of a period between your last meal and bed time. Easily digestible foods like fruit are recommended. It is better to snack before sleep than to wake up in the middle of the night to fulfill hunger pangs. Midnight snacking is even worse than eating a large meal before bed. In the time leading up to sleep, rather focus on doing things that will help you get quality sleep. You can find a few ideas here.

The effects of eating before bed on weight gain or weight loss

Total amount of calories consumed has a greater impact than the time of calories consumed

Community Wellness at MIT Medical explains that eating closer to bed time does not increase the probability that nutrients will turn into calories. The general assumption has been that calories that are eaten closer to bed time will not be used as energy and will therefore be turned into fat. The reality is that you will lose weight if the amount of calories that you eat is lower than the amount of calories that you burn. The opposite is also true: Eating more calories than what you burn will lead to weight gain. The time of day that we eat these calories does not matter as much as what most people think.

Whether or not eating before bed will lead to weight gain is determined by the rest of your diet

If you eat before bed while still eating less that what your body uses during the day, you will lose weight. If the last meal of the day tips you over the calorie consumed versus calories burned mark, you will gain weight. A calorie is still a calorie. It is not worth more or less at different times of the day.

Think about this: If it takes you half an hour to eat a meal, those 30 minutes will have more calories consumed than calories burned. Does this mean that we should never eat more than a bite of food every half an hour? Of course we shouldn't. Some of that food will be used. Some of it will go into storage. It is impossible to stop food from going into storage. The key to losing weight is to make sure that your body takes more out of storage, on average, than what it puts in.

Metabolism does not completely shut down during sleep

This is another very important point. Your body is always burning energy - even when you sleep. The concerns about the impact of eating right before bed exist because both digestion and sleep require energy. The amount of calories that your body uses during sleep is much less than during waking hours, but your body still burns calories nonetheless.

If weight gain is the reason why you are worried about eating food before bed time, you will do much better to focus on the total amount of calories that you eat per day instead. This will give you a greater idea about the changes that you need to make to lose weight.

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