Is it okay to go to bed hungry?

I eat before bed but I leave out the carbs

Sure you can. But that sucks. If I can avoid things that suck, I do.

ryanp_942 wrote: »

Wiseandcurious wrote: »

If you don't mind, could you post any links to the studies you refer to? There is a world of diference between correlation and causality, so I am curious to read more about this link that has been established and see if there is any evidence that it might be a causal link.

Hopefully the link works (quite a lot of technical language for a non-scientist but the disease section is fairly easy to grasp) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016561471300165X#

If not, it should be easy enough to find on google by searching "How to fix a broken clock" by Schroeder and Colwell, 2013. I'd also recommend http://jbr.sagepub.com/content/26/5/423

Unfortunately many scientific journals have access fees so it may not be possible for you to read this particular review for free beyond the abstract. Some key words to look up if this is the case are 'circadian rhythm + metabolism'

The OP's question was "is it okay to go to bed hungry?" not "should I eat while working third shift?" For all we know, "bedtime" is 8:30 at night, which is well within people's normal circadian rhythm (is that even still a "thing?"). Even if it were midnight or four a.m., however, the digestive process is the same. The link between metabolic disorders and shift work is not yet proven but whether it were proven or not it would have nothing to do with how your body digests food.

I always go to bed hungry.

And something seems to settle during the night because I certainly do not wake up hungry. I don't get hungry until somewhere between 10 and 11 am.

LoupGarouTFTs wrote:

The OP's question was "is it okay to go to bed hungry?" not "should I eat while working third shift?" For all we know, "bedtime" is 8:30 at night, which is well within people's normal circadian rhythm (is that even still a "thing?"). Even if it were midnight or four a.m., however, the digestive process is the same. The link between metabolic disorders and shift work is not yet proven but whether it were proven or not it would have nothing to do with how your body digests food.

The digestive process is the same but I think the other poster is making the point that eating late at night might affect OP in other ways, such as ultimately increasing appetite. I don't think he was saying OP will gain weight, just offering that the times we eat relative to sleep are known in the research world to be interconnected processes as far as appetite etc. So certainly it's entirely possible to eat late and lose weight. Maybe that is all the OP was asking.

There was also recent research published that it may not just be timing of food but the window in which we eat that matters. In this case they found that trying to stick to a 12-hour food window was better for appetite regulation and weight gain I believe. I myself am trying to delay breakfast slightly because I know I cannot finish dinner until 8 pm most days. Giving your body that full "fasting" period (where the word "break-fast comes from! Child of a linguist here...) seems to help with appetite regulation apparently.

These are all again large studies over many people, and there are probably a lot of variables that we each individually don't share with the average study subjects in each way so we won't all see the same effects (which may themselves be quite small). But just piping in to say I'm familiar with this research too.

Many people clearly do eat before bed or have evening snacks and are losing weight, again, not what this poster was arguing against. For myself I think I do notice that eating before bed disrupts sleep (as many have stated), while others need fullness to sleep well.

Perhaps for OP a good solution might be to try shifting meals a little bit, leaving dinner closer to bedtime (or trying to get to sleep earlier). It shouldn't be necessary to eat right before bedtime consistently, right? Maybe this isn't possible if one has a shared mealtime with family though.

Hungry - Yes
Hangry - NO

I have a really small snack (1 T. peanut butter with rice cake or couple of crackers) maybe 2 1/2 hours before heading off so going to bed hungry doesn't happen to me. I cannot sleep otherwise.

I generally lose appetite after 6 pm, so that's when I have my last meal. It's rarely I'm hungry right before bed, but lately I have been acquiring the habit of snacking on fruits before bedtime because the family would sit together watching tv or doing some kind of activity with a bowl of fruit in the middle. I have not noticed any difference in weight loss between being an early eater and a late eater.