I wish someone would tackle that eating a night myth. I can't imagine if you eat the same thing at 2PM vs 11PM, you'll gain more weight in the latter. I always cringe when people tell me that.
Several things I've learned from studying nutrition lately:
1. The rabbit hole is deep. What's "healthy" depends how far you want to go down.
2. We don't know know how to eat healthy, just healthier. And what's healthier depends on the resolution you're looking at the body. Also you're particular goals and biology.
3. There's still a lot of conflict about basic things.
4. My old sense of black and white, bad foods and good foods, got destroyed; it wasn't nuanced.
For instance, even spinach and flaxseed contain cyanide [1]. Though not enough to kill you, in extremes they could. That was shocking, and just one example.
With eating and sleeping consider leptin levels. [2][3][4] Some people, because of obesity and overweightedness, in the long-term especially, have awkward leptin sensitivity. Also there are individual differences in genes and gene expression, or overall biology. And exercise factors too.
And that's just one hormone. You add insulin and how that reacts with leptin, and how that's effected by macro-nutrient balance, et cetera. At best I consider myself an intermediate in nutritional knowledge, considering what we now know. The next step up from interpreting papers on PubMed is producing them.
Yes, it is a myth. Calories in versus calories out. It's as simple as that.
There may be some small differences in how efficiently your body digests food at night than during the day but 2pm vs. 11pm is an incredibly minor optimization. It's like optimizing your array structures when you should be using a hash. The only timing optimization I've heard of which has some scientific backing is the glycogen/metabolic window thought that's exploited for those trying to gain weight.
I think the reason you often hear about the "don't eat at night" advice is that it's easy to do which is what people want to hear. Most people will fallaciously rather follow the advice of "Eat ice cream at 2pm instead of 11pm" than the advice of "Don't eat ice cream at all."
The reason that "don't eat at night" will sometimes appear to work is that people will naturally eat less when you cut out a huge block of time in which they can't eat.
Whoever taught you that has poor understanding of biochemistry. Ever heard of futile cycles? Heat dissipation in the mitochondria? Hormonal effects of food? Anabolic/catabolic foods? Let alone the short, medium and long terms effects on the transcriptome.
The major thing you don't understand is that what you do now has effects on your gene transcription over the next few months. Small changes can make huge differences not just in the short term, but longer term as well - in terms of your bodies energy efficiency (which you want to decrease if you are wanting to lose weight) and hormonal state (testo/corto relationships et al).
There is tons of research on timing of nutrients. Transcriptome effects of nutrients. Short term hormonal effects. Thermic effect of foods. Etc etc. If one nutrient causes a change in energy out, then that nutrient has less of an effect than one that doesn't. Therefore, some nutrients affect energy balance differently than others.
Tell me this if you still don't believe me: are there any foods or combinations of foods/timing that may cause a statistical difference in energy output in the short, medium and long term in humans?
Sorry trapper but your entire post here wreaks of someone trying to "bully" the reader. You throw out a lot of esoteric terms w/ little to back it up.
That said - are we even arguing about the same thing? You responded to my post that addressed the "eating at night" myth and you're going off on effects that food has "over the next few months."
Perhaps. I am sick of this "Yes, it is a myth. Calories in versus calories out. It's as simple as that." being portrayed by people as a fact. It's just not so simple, and it's wrong.
I could write long winded responses with references. The problem is you end up explaining most of biochemistry along with it, as the rabbit hole is truly deep. And people still don't get it, because most people even with undergrad degrees in biochem don't (you don't get to see the rabbit hole until you reach postgrad at most unis and read tons of papers).
It's kind of like trying to explain why functional programming is better than OO to someone who just uses excel.
None of the terminology used should be esoteric if you have studied biochemistry. Apologise for the tone, it is really frustrating seeing someone promote the same old myth.
links muscular development with how the timing of eating is correlated with the timing of exercise, so I can see how a similar principle could easily apply to wait loss.
There's some logic to it. If you eat right before you go to bed, your body is going to burn what you've just eaten for energy. However, if you go to bed hungry, your body has no choice but to burn fat stores for energy (and besides, who cares if you're hungry when you go to bed, you're asleep!). In that sense, eating late at night can cause more of what you eat to be stored and less of what's stored to be burned.
Sorry but the body doesn't burn just-eaten food that quickly. If you eat at 2pm instead of 11pm you're still going to be burning those calories when you go to bed at night. Ask any serious runner and they'll tell you that they do their carbo-loading the night before a race and that all those carbs still make a huge difference 12+ hours after consumption.
Unless you somehow burned through all your carb stores before bed you're not going to be burning much fat while you sleep. Plus sleeping itself burns very few calories so don't expect to be melting away pounds by sleeping.
and besides, who cares if you're hungry when you go to bed, you're asleep!
I think you hit on the biggest reason why this so-called diet works. People don't notice their hunger when they're asleep and thus less likely to cheat.
Sorry but the body doesn't burn just-eaten food that quickly.
> Reference please? Are you sure? :)
Unless you somehow burned through all your carb stores before bed you're not going to be burning much fat while you sleep.
> Explain ketone levels increase in the morning regardless of nightly meal composition
Plus sleeping itself burns very few calories so don't expect to be melting away pounds by sleeping.
> Exercise causing EPOC can be used in conjunction to reduce energy efficiency, increase energy loss as heat etc etc. You can alter BMR/RMR if you try.
Why can't you imagine it? Not saying you are wrong, but I can imagine the digestion system to have all sorts of quirks. It seems conceivable to channel energy harvested from the food into different outlets.
One thing to consider is if you go to bed hungry your blood sugar will drop during the night which will slow down your metabolism. Long term effects are that blood sugar will be harder to control in the future (not a good thing).
Diet or no diet...it doesn't really matter. What matters is putting in the effort to work out every day. Most workout diets will have you eat way more than you do right now anyways.
