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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Why Eating in the Middle of the Night is Bad for You

Why eating in the middle of the night is bad for you 

Hitting the fridge in the middle of the night can harm digestive health

BMC Medicine finds that poor sleep quality and uneven eating habits are significant risk factors for Gastroesophageal reflux (or GERD) disease. GERD is a digestive disorder that often causes indigestion and heartburn, brought on by problems with stomach content reflux. On the other hand, some cases of GERD can be relieved through a healthy diet and healthy lifestyle changes. Over 19 000 adults were studied in Japan. Out of 25 different lifestyle factors, sleep quality and irregular eating habits were the two lifestyle factors that had the biggest impact on whether these people had GERD disease or not.

Metabolism (the rate at which your body digests food and turns it into energy) is the link between midnight snacking and digestive health. Live Strong explains that your metabolism is slower in the middle of the night because your body is gearing down to sleep. When your metabolism is lower, your body struggles to digest food. This is the most likely reason why eating in the middle of your slumber hurts digestion. When your body needs to sleep, it slows down a lot of its processes (digestion, energy production, alertness) in order to enter into other processes (recovery, hormone regulation and re-calibration). Eating, an activity which should happen during wakeful times, messes up these natural patterns.

If it is natural to eat when I am awake, why am I hungry in the middle of the night?

Possibility 1: Anxiety

You aren't actually hungry - you're stressed. This keeps you awake with worrying thoughts that prevent you from sleeping. A lot of people turn to food when they feel anxious, because the sugar release or satisfaction hormone leptin (opposite of ghrelin) that follows food consumption brings on a sense of relief. This can turn into a viscous cycle, because you might feel like you can only relax and get back to sleep with the emotionally calming effects of food consumption. This becomes a bad habit that reinforces itself.

Possibility 2: Irregular hunger hormone activity

Psychology Today explains that ghrelin (opposite of leptin), the hunger hormone, is responsible for telling your body when to eat. Like many hormones, it works in cycles of increasing and decreasing intensity. Disturbed sleep patterns might be disrupting the proper regulation of this hormone, along with other hormones. Also, developing the habit of eating late into the night reinforces the times that your body thinks it should be eating. Your ghrelin levels could be too high when they are supposed to be low; due to bad habit repetition. Since ghrelin is supposed to be down-regulated during sleep and up-regulated as you wake up, a disturbance between your sleep and ghrelin balance could be throwing your body's natural processes out.

How do I get out of it?

Here are healthy ways that you can break the negative habit of eating when you are supposed to be sleeping.

Exercise

One of the benefits of exercise is the fact that it increases good sleep quality. Exercising during the day will take a lot of energy out of you, which will make you more tired at night (especially when you're just starting out). This will initially increase your body's need for sleep and can lengthen the time that you stay asleep before waking up. As your body adjusts to your exercise regime, your quality of sleep will improve. This means that you will sleep deeper and that your body will get more benefit from sleep (that it is supposed to get) before being interrupted.

Eat well before you sleep

By eating a meal rich in nutrients before you go to bed, you satisfy your hunger hormones so that they can last longer before drawing you to your next meal. Aim for foods high in protein, because they take longer to break down and will last longer than foods which are high in sugar or carbohydrates. Protein also helps to balance out blood sugar, so that your sugar levels will not drop too quickly during sleep and cause hunger. Don't drink too many fluids before going to bed, because this might wake you up for bathroom visits. Also, drinking fluids before bed can harm your bladder.

Stress free

If you can determine the root cause of what might be causing the anxiety that is waking you up, you can sleep without the need for food therapy. If you can't fix the anxiety-causing problem, find ways to deal with and accept it. Establish a bed time routine that relaxes you and gets you ready for a good, long sleep cycle. Here are great ways to relax before bed.

Eat less with each visit

Try to break the habit in small increments, just like training the rest of your body. Plan the meals that you will eat in the middle of the night and gradually decrease them over time. This will slowly but surely decreases the amount of food that your body gets used to consuming during your sleep cycle. Eventually, you won't be eating anything anymore.

Our bodies are naturally programmed to work in cycles. When we disrupt these cycles, havoc breaks lose as our bodies try to establish new cyclical patterns to restore order. Maintaining healthy habits strengthen their holds over time. STAY STRONG!

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