It's Not Just What You Eat--When You Eat Matters, Too!

During the holidays, it's easy to fall into a pattern of eating a big meal at the end of the day while socializing with friends and family, staying up late, then sleeping in and skipping breakfast the next morning.....or breakfast becomes more like lunch.....

Don't let it become a habit!

Chrono-nutrition researchers have found that meal timing dramatically affects your weight, appetite, chronic disease risk, and your body’s ability to burn and store fat.

Our bodies are primed to digest and metabolize food early in the day. As the day progresses, our metabolisms become less efficient. A meal consumed at 9 a.m. can have vastly different metabolic effects than the same meal consumed at 9 p.m.

Eating later in the day predisposes you to gain weight

Study participants assigned to consume most of their calories earlier in the day, lost more weight than people who did the reverse. Their blood sugar, cholesterol levels, and insulin sensitivity, a marker of diabetes risk, improved.

Despite eating the same foods and having the same activity levels, they were hungrier when they ate most of their food later in the day.​

It's all about hunger hormones

Eating later increased their ghrelin levels (a hormone that increases appetite) and suppressed their levels of leptin, a hormone that causes satiety.

They burned less fat and fewer calories and pushed their fat cells to store more fat.

Healthy young adults burned less fat and had a 20% increase in their blood sugar levels when they ate dinner at 10 p.m. compared with when they ate the same dinner at 6 p.m.

Hormone-sensitive lipase, an enzyme that releases fat from our fat cells, is most active at night. It provides us with energy to keep our organs functioning as we sleep.

Eating late at night suppresses this enzyme, preventing the body from burning fat.

​These patterns hold for other mammals besides humans, including fluctuations of activity and rest on the gut microbiome.

Night-shift workers are particularly at risk.

People who work nights and sleep days have increased rates of sleep issues and obesity. They tend to gain more weight than people with 9-5 schedules.

When a group of nurses were switched to the night shift, they burned fewer calories than they did working days, even though their activities were the same. Night shift workers have a 40% greater risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, strokes, and abnormal heartbeats, compared to those working daytime hours.

Meal timing strategies

⏰ Try to eat most of your calories during the morning or afternoon but not at night. Skipping your morning meal increases your risk of obesity. Mornings are when our bodies are primed to metabolize food.

⏰ Eat sweets or simple carbs like bread, pasta, and pastries in the morning or early afternoon, when we're most insulin-sensitive.

⏰ Aim to eat dinner at least two to three hours before going to bed.

⏰ Try to make breakfast and lunch the biggest meals and dinner the smallest even if you don’t eat dinner early

⏰ Don't let perfection get in your way. People who ate a light dinner 5 days a week instead of 7 still gained better blood sugar control and less daily fatigue.

These strategies will maximize the effect of your food choices!