It's close to your bedtime and you are craving an ice cream scoop or maybe the cookies in the kitchen are calling to you - quite a pickle right? Should you just sleep or give in to your cravings? There are chances that you have heard a lot of advices about how eating a midnight snack or even a late night meal is not okay. And maybe rightly so. It is not a great idea to eat before you go to bed, especially if you are trying to avoid excess body weight.
Hailey Fox, a registered dietitian with Banner Churchill Community Hospital in Fallon, in a blog says, "When we eat late at night, we tend to store extra calories from food as fat, and we don’t use stored fat as fuel. Our metabolism slows at night, so we don’t utilize energy from a late-night meal well." Also, eating late at night disturbs your body's circadian rhythm.
It is all about how your body adjusts its insulin sensitivity. There is a reason why your body is more sensitive in the morning. This is because it is the time when you have to fuel your body, get yourself moving and get yourself through the day.
The insulin resistance kicks up at night. This stores the extra calories as fats while you sleep. Another reason that eating late is bad is because that is when we tend to make less healthy decisions about what we consume.
Meaning, at night is when we eat the unhealthy stuff — chips, cookies, ice cream - it is all the junk food that we consume. At the same time, it is also mindless eating. Not many people know but i.