Eating Late At Night Actually Won’t Ruin Your Diet
On the last crazy diet I did, I wasn’t supposed to eat anything after 7 p.m.
What I quickly realized was that having your last bite of food at 7 p.m. isn’t horrible… as long as you go to bed by 9 every night.
Not eating late at night is one of those old diet adages that goes right along with “drinking eight glasses of water a day” or “eating a big breakfast,” and it turns out that it’s total bullshit. Yay for more 3 a.m. slices of pizza!
Basically, the whole “you can’t eat shit after 6/7/8 at night” grew in popularity after being a rule for lots of fad diets, according to Vitals. Did it work? Yes. But this was also because people were already on diets and eating less, and because no normal people choose a salad as their midnight snack.
It’s not that eating late at night turns all calories into fat because you’re not burning them off, it’s really just that generally if you’re eating late at night, you’re eating junk. And you probably already ate enough during the day so you don’t really need that extra pint of ice cream at midnight.
Just like I realized during my last diet, eating your last bite at 7 p.m. is fine if you go to bed early af, but if you’re someone who works late into the night or starts their day late, your eating schedule could be totally shifted. I mean, we’ve all made the mistake of having a light, early dinner and then going out drinking until 5 a.m., and that probably didn’t work out that well for you, right?
Basically, the only reason you “need” to be curbing late night eats is if you have any type of digestive issues, because eating a few hours before bedtime could increase indigestion and heartburn. Or, of course, if there’s no way you can eat late-night without falling into a junk food k-hole.
Feel free to restrict your eating habits to before 8 p.m. if you can’t seem to break your habit of midnight munchies, but don’t ever feel guilty for housing an entire McDonald’s happy meal at 2 a.m. either. Sure, it might not be the healthiest thing you’ve ever done, but it won’t ruin your life, and the tummy wants what it wants.
