Tell me again why eating before bed won't make me fat?

So my work sleep schedule is get up at noon, eat a small meal, work out, eat a normal meal at 3 p.m., and work until 2:30 a.m. During the time I work, I do not get breaks, am actively moving the whole time, and cannot eat meals in front of the public. So, I go from 3:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. usually on a protein bar. Let me reiterate that this is not my choice and I don't get meal breaks. So, should I not eat from 3:30 p.m. one day til noon the next day? Also, then I would need to consume about 1700 calories in within a 3 hour period. I simply have to eat before bed or I am intermittent fasting and then when I do eat, I'm having a binge.

If it's so bad for you, what do you suggest given what I've described?

Yeah, working late into the night can be a problem from a number of health points. There's a lot of medical research being done on the health challenges faced by nighttime workers. In your case, you might want to eat a bigger meal after you get up at noon and then delay working out for an hour (to give your stomach time to digest your food) before eating a similar-sized meal at 3 p.m. Can you eat a light snack and go to bed directly after you get off work? A lot of nighttime workers swear by taking melatonin before leaving work (you just dissolve a tablet or two under the tongue) and then they are sleepy by the time they get home. Is there any way you can eat more while working? It doesn't seem right that you cannot eat at all during work time--do you have a union?

Sounds like my schedule (bartending/managing a bar). No there is no union (at least not in most states) at about half of my jobs, I've never even gotten an hourly wage (only tips, though they still average enough, usually, to not worry about the $2/hr I would have been making).

I got in the habit of eating a large meal before work, and then eating a breakfast taco on the way home (usually at about 330am-4am by the time I actually eat) then I wake up, work out fasted and eat again before work. It isn't ideal but it still allows for about 12+ hours fasted (which is what produces the benefits you were talking about wrt hormones etc...).

One last thing to add, I currently have a later start time at work and practice intermittent fasting so I have been stopping eating shortly before bed on nights I don't work and fasting for 18 hours or so (up to 24 hours some days). During this time, growth hormones have been shown to continue increasing (through several studies) so why does it matter what time I quit eating or go to sleep? I spend more time producing those hormones than the average person anyway.

Thanks for your feedback. Hmm, you guessed my job, too. Guess I'm not the only one with this problem.

I think Bob's the winner here, he got to eat ice cream and go to bed with his mind at ease- and here we are staying up late worrying about the merit of Bob's choices.

While eating before bed may not necessarily make you fat (I haven't just now, so I won't know for sure until later), it invites your health to an uphill battle for various reasons, some of which have already been posted to this thread. I for one, more often than not, would wake up in the middle of the night when having eaten before bed. After all, who wants a brick smack in one's belly, not to mention then? My habit of not eating for as many as four hours before bed comes from the stomach's tranquil feel of lightness at bedtime and that the body will burn fat throughout the entire night's sleep. The underlying mechanism is that you can't absorb food and burn fat at the same time. There's the absorption phase which takes place after a meal and for the next about four hours, and there's the post-absorption phase when the body starts to use stored nutrients. I would imagine the other twelve hour half of a twenty-four hour period lends itself far less easily to such uninterrupted fasting. So to those of you joining us this morning, dig in!