“Eating at night will yield to weight gain”
I cannot tell you how many times I have had clients ask me if they are allowed to eat at night, or if eating at night will cause rapid weight gain. Eating at night, eating after 6pm, or whatever version of this “old wives’ tale” you’ve heard is not true. Yes, you are reading that right. You can eat food at night, even after 6pm and not gain weight! In fact, you can even do these things and end up losing weight.
To help get my point across, I am going to use an example of budgeting money and comparing it to our food intake. Let’s say that you have 100$ you can spend today. It does not matter what time of day you spend the money, morning, noon, or night as long as you only spend 100$.
Now let’s take that same concept and apply it to our daily calorie balance. If you have 2,000 calories to eat in a day, it will not matter what time of day you eat them. You can have a normal breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks (even a pre-bed snack). As long as you are staying within your 2,000 calories it does not matter time of day you are eating your food.
Why does eating at night get a bad reputation?
I can only speculate here, but I’m going to assume that late night eating for most people is usually mindless snacking in front of the TV/internet/video game as they unwind from the day. If you are mindlessly snacking in large amounts a few nights a week, then it is likely that you will be gaining some weight/body fat.
If snacking at night is something you want to do or enjoy just be sure to pre-plan for it just as you would if you wanted to purchase something using your 100$.
Things to be aware of:
If you eat a large meal at night directly before bed, you may see that reflected on the scale in the morning when weighing yourself. Does that mean that you gained 2-3lbs overnight? NO! All that means is that you ate food later than normal and most likely didn’t have time to digest it all before going to sleep. You may even wake up a little bit full too.
The facts:
If you want to eat food/snacks at night, you absolutely can! Just budget and plan for it. There is no magical time of the day for eating as long as we are staying within our daily calorie balance.
