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MyFitnessPal Community

Will eating late at night make me gain weight?

norminrusso22

I have a busy day and don’t really have time to eat I mainly have some caffeine and a small snack. I make up for my calories, proteins, etc at dinner time. Which is nice but then at night I get hungry again, I suppose maybe because my body’s energy was so depleted it needed more. Sometimes I get so hungry it feels like it hurts, but that’s thanks to depo injections. I feel like the only time I can eat is the evenings and nighttime’s but I’m worried that won’t help me lose weight. I just would like to know if it matters or not

Replies

yirara

No, meal timing has no influence on calorie needs of your body. But overeating leads to weight gain of course. And your body has so much more things that contain weight than only bodyfat. If you eat late there might be more food still in your intestinal tract when you get on the scale in the morning. If it's high in salt or carbs then your body stores more water which might not be gone in the morning. Again, neither of these things have an influence on bodyfat, but they show up on the scale. The same as if you were to wear very warm clothes when you step on the scale compared to a thin pyjama or naked.

elisa123gal

You'll hear all kinds of advice on this one... A simple way to figure it out is to not eat late at night for one week.. see if you lose more weight, or not. ( be sure to be honest with yourself and eat the same amount) see what works for you.
I hear most recent advice from functional doctors to not eat late at night so the body burns fat all night. Then folks on here are all about calories only.

csplatt

While it doesn’t matter and won’t impede progress, it sounds like it’s not working for you because you say you are painfully hungry.

tomcustombuilder

Your overall weekly calories determine what your weight will do not meal timing. It’s perfectly fine to eat late at night if your overall calories for the week are where they need to be. Your body rebuilds itself while you sleep so having food before you go to sleep is not really a bad thing.

PAV8888

You can argue whether you will have a higher or lower heart rate overnight and whether digestion will hinder your ability to sleep as well and for your body to repair itself.

Whether any of that will affect your weight other than via the presence or absence of processing by products in your system is up for grabs.

Your week long experiment doesn't account for that flaw, therefore it will not give you the real answer you're looking for (assuming that you are looking for one)

So here's the thing. Optimization is awesome! Eat a large breakfast, medium lunch, little dinner, sleep like a baby, exercise like a fiend, eat perfect macros, awesome combination of pristinely produced foods that meet all ethical considerations home cooked lovingly and never over eaten with awesome timing of protein and carbs around your exercise. Oh, and don't forget quantities of fruits and veggies and fish and calcium and vitamins and antioxidants and....

And then there is the real life.

Some optimization may matter a lot to you as an individual especially given your individual medical status . But some of them may not matter as much to Pete or Sue.

So every Pete and Sue had better find what gives them the biggest bang for their buck. Because trying to get everything optimized is likely to lead to nothing happening. Or of overdoing things so much that you end up on with the opposite type of disaster.

Timing of food is one of these things.

Can we come up with support for optimal timing? There's studies that do show advantages. Though I can't say that I've seen too much on exactly how much of an advantage.

So does this mean that nobody on night shift can lose weight?

Or that I couldn't lose a good 125lbs and maintain that loss for more or less the past 10 years while eating food at 8pm, and 1am and 3am including at times most of my calories for the day? I think that you can guess the answer.

And yes, 10 years later I'm actually trying to eat earlier at night because I can see the effects of late meals on my overnight sleeping heart rate. But that is NOT a weight control related optimization.

To lose weight you need a deficit. Period. Full stop. Nothing more and nothing less. And you need to be able to apply it over time.

So doing some optimizations and making some changes IS necessary, I won't hide it. We know how many people regain their losses. But every optimization and complication we introduce has to be evaluated (by us) as to whether it is worth it to us. Will this give me bang for the buck? Does it make my life easier and adds to my ability to create a deficit?

Physiologically I don't see a mechanism (or a believable functional doctor explanation) that explains how a vastly different amount of calories can get burned by eating early vs late. I can see some marginal issues about hunger, about energy availability to muscles, about elevated or lowered metabolic activity through the day (fasting did come partially from people looking to lower metabolic activity to increase life span).

But these margins are maybe discussing 50Cal and not 500Cal. While uncontrolled hunger and binging can easily add up to 1000 or 2000 or 5000Cal.

RuatyShackelford

I think this post points out not so much of an issue of weight loss/gain, but bigger picture self care and taking appropriate breaks during the day.

AnnPT77

Make some difference? Maybe. Prevent weight loss? No.

Any studies I've seen show at most minor effects from eating timing.

Here's the thing: Having a routine that's personally achievable matters more. It doesn't matter how good something is claimed to be in theory - not eating close to bed time, drinking green tea instead of Coke Zero, HIIT workouts instead of casual walking, whatever pop-sci stuff is showing up in the blogosphere and tabloids as weight loss magic.

If I can't stick with it, it's not going to work in practice, no matter how ideal it is in theory. Something less theoretically ideal that I can stick with can work, as long as it helps me eat manageably fewer calories than I burn.

I have to admit, not eating all day then getting home so hungry and in pain that I'd want to eat the kitchen and all of its contents . . . that wouldn't work for me, because I'd overeat. Maybe that's not true for you. Certainly, some people report their best success with OMAD, one meal a day time-restricted eating, and some of them eat that at dinner, late in the day. OMAD would make me fail, because it would make me miserable. It makes them successful. These individual differences matter.

Do what works for you.

Me, I eat on a variable schedule, when I feel like it, potentially any time from shortly after I get up the morning to shortly before bed, occasionally even in bed. Sometimes I eat late, sometimes I don't. I've seen no effect of those timing differences on my weight loss trend. That's been true for just under a year of weight loss, and 9+ years of successful weight maintenance since.

Sure, if I eat a big fiber-rich and high fluids dinner right before bed, my routine morning weigh-in the next day will show a higher body weight than if I'd stopped eating several hours earlier, and visited the bathroom a few times before bedtime. That's not about body fat. That's because a serving of plain water or an apple weigh just as much in my digestive tract as they weighed sitting on the kitchen counter, until my body fully digests/metabolizes them and jettisons the undigestible residue. Fat gain or loss shows up in a multi-week trend of body weight, not in the random fluctuations from one day to the next.

My reading and my experience suggest that when it comes to weight loss, worrying about eating timing is majoring in the minors. The main focus is finding a personally tolerable new routine of nearly any description that results in eating manageably fewer calories than the person burns, and repeating that fairly consistently over quite a long period of time.

Best wishes!

poodle_whisper

tomcustombuilder wrote: »

Your overall weekly calories determine what your weight will do not meal timing. It’s perfectly fine to eat late at night if your overall calories for the week are where they need to be. Your body rebuilds itself while you sleep so having food before you go to sleep is not really a bad thing.

your body repairs itself while you are in a fasted state. so, no.

AnnPT77

poodle_whisper wrote: »

tomcustombuilder wrote: »

Your overall weekly calories determine what your weight will do not meal timing. It’s perfectly fine to eat late at night if your overall calories for the week are where they need to be. Your body rebuilds itself while you sleep so having food before you go to sleep is not really a bad thing.

your body repairs itself while you are in a fasted state. so, no.

Sure, autophagy can be thought of as one type of cellular repair. But it's not the only one, and some other types require nutritional inputs. Further, fasting isn't the only thing that triggers autophagy. Calorie restriction is one of the others.

I'm not saying Tom's wrong, or you're wrong. It's just a little more complicated, IMO. Perhaps there are both good and bad aspects to eating shortly before bed, if we start considering all possible implications?

But that really doesn't matter, I think, when OP's question was whether eating shortly before bed will cause weight gain. There's really no evidence to suggest the timing of eating will make a significant difference in weight gain/loss, and certainly none that suggests eating shortly before bed will wipe out a calorie deficit, regardless of the size of the calorie deficit.

ninerbuff

poodle_whisper wrote: »

tomcustombuilder wrote: »

Your overall weekly calories determine what your weight will do not meal timing. It’s perfectly fine to eat late at night if your overall calories for the week are where they need to be. Your body rebuilds itself while you sleep so having food before you go to sleep is not really a bad thing.

your body repairs itself while you are in a fasted state. so, no.

While it's ALWAYS repairing regardless of diet, regimen, etc., in a fasted state it's NOT OPTIMALLY repairing itself. Protein is essentially to the body and if you DON'T take it in to help repair it, it will break down muscle tissue to from itself to do it.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
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Been in fitness for 40 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

tomcustombuilder

poodle_whisper wrote: »

tomcustombuilder wrote: »

Your overall weekly calories determine what your weight will do not meal timing. It’s perfectly fine to eat late at night if your overall calories for the week are where they need to be. Your body rebuilds itself while you sleep so having food before you go to sleep is not really a bad thing.

your body repairs itself while you are in a fasted state. so, no.

no.

tomcustombuilder

Going back to the argument of whether fasting while you sleep is good or not I will say the one benefit I did find of that when I’m trying to lose fat is that if you’re gonna be hungry, be hungry when you’re asleep, I learned that from the late Greg Plitt.

spiriteagle99

I have learned that if I go to bed hungry, I don't sleep or I will sleep a couple of hours and then wake up and stay awake the rest of the night. So I eat a snack around 10 pm and if I'm still hungry when I go to bed a couple of hours later I may eat another. Despite this, I have maintained a 50 lb. weight loss for many years. I keep the snacks light, so I don't have digestive issues, but enough that I'm not kept awake. I get a lot of exercise normally (running, walking, biking) which increases my appetite and the amount of calories I can eat without gaining weight. Days I get less exercise, I am usually not as hungry. I eat to my hunger level.

patriciafoley1

I eat dinner late at night deliberately because evening to late night is when I want to eat. I usually eat breakfast anywhere from 10 to noon (a scrambled egg, a piece of whole wheat bread, a slice of cheddar) lunch anywhere from 2 to 4 pm, and dinner anywhere from 8-10. I may have a low calorie snack, like sugar free jello, or something low carb during the day. I've lost 35 pounds since October of this year. And I'm 68. So you can lose weight even if eating late. I have always been a late night snacker, so this meal plan works for me.
OTOH, I too have read the reports that I should be intermittently fasting, or that I shouldn't eat after such and such an hour. And I confess, they bother me. It's hard enough to lose weight, restricting yourself to 1200 calories a day, for the most part, giving up a lot of the foods you love that you really can't have any more (I'm on a low carb, low salt diet) without feeling guilty and put upon because you aren't eating at the right time, for pete's sake, or doing the latest thing some experts say you have to do to lose weight. All we can do is try to do what works for us and adapt if it doesn't work. I think a lot of this is just a new fad. I remember when you couldn't eat more than a couple of eggs a week (I eat an egg every day) or WW was telling us to find success eating carb heavy processed frozen meals. I eat a lot of protein, and lots of eggs and cheese and steer clear of the rusks and carb heavy processed diet frozen meals that were once the bulwark of some diet industries.

ShowPoodleGirl

I generally eat most (generally all, but the odd day I may eat a bit sooner due to how the day pans out) of my cals between 2pm-9pm. It's just how it works best for me (when I'm hungry, when I have time). I eat a relatively small lunch (500ish cals),then generally a bigger supper (800ish), and leave around 500ish for 'night snack'. I'm down over 40 pounds from start of September.

paperpudding

elisa123gal wrote: »

You'll hear all kinds of advice on this one... A simple way to figure it out is to not eat late at night for one week.. see if you lose more weight, or not. ( be sure to be honest with yourself and eat the same amount) see what works for you.
I hear most recent advice from functional doctors to not eat late at night so the body burns fat all night. Then folks on here are all about calories only.

Well, yes, folks on here are about the calories because that is what matters for weight loss - CICO

I also think 1 week is not long enough to test any such experiment on yourself.