snack after midnight-to which day do you add calories?

After reviewing these comments and doing some of my own thinking along with personal expierience I have come to a consensous. Im sure we can all agree that what ever we do we want to set our self up for success not failure. If we cut our daily calories because of what we ate at midnight we will become more hungry than usual, especially if we are already consuming the minimum calorie requirement, by the end of the day we may have the tendancy to over eat or even feel like we are starving and tortouring ourselves which can cause our diet routine to fail because we have made dieting more of an unobtainable chore. So in saying this. Start the day fresh from zero and tell yourself, I will stay within my goal today, shove the calories to yesterday if you must count for them and try not to eat past a certian time if you can so the body does not store the calories while you sleep.

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Jus' sayin...@copelandjr

I have been counting it as the next day but I’m going to stop and just count a day as awake to sleep. It messes with me mentally to know I’m starting my day with 2-300 calories already gone

sierrajade2012 wrote: »

Why would it make any difference?

it would make a difference in how many calories you have had in a day or how many calories you are allowed for the next.

I think the intent is to say that it matters what our cumulative calories over a period of time are, but it doesn't matter whether we eat them before or after midnight, or log them on one day vs. the next.

Bodyweight is kind of like a checking account: You put calories in, you take calories out. Your calorie balance is your bodyweight. (Yeah, that's oversimplified, but it's basically true). If I eat 1400 calories today, and 1200 tomorrow, it has essentially the same effect as if I ate 1300 both days. Still true if I ate 2500 one day, and 100 the next (which would be kind of dumb for other reasons, in my case).

Like the checking acount, calories eaten add to your calorie balance, and doing stuff (breathing/heartbeat/etc., daily life chores, job exercise) subtracts from it. If your calorie balance goes down, over some period of time, by about 3500 calories, you lose a pound. That's generally true (though oversimplified) whether the time period is a day, week, month.

I've joked that I "calorie banked" for 30 years, by getting obese, then later averaged that out via a calorie deficit to a sensible average daily calorie level (by losing back to a healthy weight and staying there for several years since).

Clearly, using that long a time period is silly, but it's fine to average calories over a week. If someone wants to balance exactly each and every day for personal preference reasons, that's fine . . . but it really doesn't make a significant difference in the body.

windycitycupcake wrote: »

i just add things to my calendar as i eat them, sometimes it falls under the next day. It just messes me up a little because i'm still new at this and keeping track of every little thing. i just wanted to know what other people do. also, if you are supposed to eat 1200 calories per day, do you count the snack you ate at 2am into your total?

I'm in maintenance now, and "calorie bank" (eat just a little under calorie goal most days), in order to save some calories for an indulgent meal or day now and then.

While losing, I stayed a little closer to my goal day to day, but if I knew I had a special occasion coming up, I'd eat a little under goal (like maybe 100 calories, nothing big) for a few days ahead of time to have extra calories for the occasion, maybe get a bit extra exercise on the day, eat lightly before the event, then eat back the shortfall (approximately) at the event.

On the flip side, if I had an unplanned over-goal day, I'd just get back to my routine the next day, not try to "make up for it" after. Like I said, it takes about a cumulative 3500 calories over maintenance calories (not just over weight-loss calorie goal) to gain a pound.

If I've been losing a pound a week (500 calorie daily deficit), and have a special meal that puts me 1000 calories over my weight-loss calorie goal for the day, I've basically delayed reaching ultimate goal weight by 2 days: I ate up my planned deficit that day, and ate the next day's deficit besides. Sometimes, that was worth it to me. And it doesn't prevent weight loss, as long as it's rare. It just delays goal weight a little.

I found that if I tried to "make up for" an unplanned over-goal day, after it happened, that seemed likely to set up a repeated "deprive then over-eat" cycle, not a good thing, so it worked better just to go back to my regular weight-loss routine after the unplanned over day. In the case of a planned event, the special occasion eating stood in for the "over-eat", and balanced the books, so I wasn't setting up a bad cycle.

So, yeah, absolutely add your snack, but there's no big reason to worry about exact balance every day, unless that's your personal preference. If you're using the phone app, you can look at your average calories for the week, and balance that way, if you like. It's under Nutrients/Calories/Week View. If you're at goal over the course of a week (or so), a little variation from day to day is irrelevant to weight loss.

If it's easier to balance close every day, that's fine, too. You can "reset" your day for logging purposes at midnight, or when you go to sleep, whether balancing daily or weekly or whatever. I usually log wake-up to bed-time, the latter of which is usually after midnight (and yes, I do eat right before bed sometimes - doesn't matter).

Best wishes!