Last week I wrote about assigning changes you want to make to their own day of the week in order to make them easier to remember. Today I suggest a change to your eating habits that although not assigned to a particular day of the week, is not that hard to remember. It is also a change that can make a big difference in your overall health, quality of sleep, and how happy you are with your weight.
A couple of years ago, I realized that I had fallen into the routine of eating dinner pretty late in the evening. I was usually too busy, or often not even home, to eat dinner early enough to feel comfortable before I went to bed. I found that if I eat dinner less than 3 or 4 hours before going to sleep, not only do I sleep less well, the next morning I have a much more difficult time getting going. There is also a lot of evidence that eating a big dinner too close to going to bed is bad for your health, your sleep, and makes it more likely you will gain weight. Some people disagree with the weight gain claims, but they make sense to me. It is likely missing dinner and thereby missing a few calories helps control your weight. It also makes sense that eating a meal and then going to sleep within a few hours slows your digestion and allows you to absorb more of the calories in the food you ate. I discussed weight gain in relation to type of food and when it is eaten in this post.
Here is how I changed my dinner eating routine. First I set a goal to always eat dinner by 6:30 or 7:00 pm. That worked once in a while, but often was impossible to accomplish. As I usually prefer to prepare and eat my dinner at home, rather than at a restaurant, I can’t decide at 6pm that it is time for dinner and just pull in to the nearest eating establishment and grab something. If I don’t arrive home, or finish working until 6:30 or 7:00, it is too late to prepare and eat dinner in a time frame that meets my objective to not go to sleep on a full stomach.
The next step I took was to skip dinner if it became too late. I was not worried about any ill effects from this as I believe dinner is a much less important meal than breakfast or lunch. At first this was difficult and I let my hunger draw me to the refrigerator to graze on whatever was available. Eventually, I changed another eating routine that made the occasional missed dinner less of a challenge. I just stopped worrying about when I ate lunch. I used to feel it was a problem if I did not get to eat lunch until 2 or 3 pm as this was too close to dinner. Now I view a late lunch as making it easier to eat less at dinner. When I don’t get to dinner at all, the late lunch makes it much easier. Some days, when I know I have a commitment in the early evening that will interfere with dinner I will purposely eat a late lunch. In other words, I plan for and make it easier to miss dinner on those days. Often when I am at a meeting at dinner time, other people will mention the fact that they will be eating dinner when they get home at 8 or 9 pm. This is a big mistake. In a situation like that is better for your sleep, health, and weight to skip dinner and get to bed early.
Some days when I get into bed after no dinner, my stomach will be talking to me, full of complaints about being empty of food. Once asleep there is no feeling of hunger. Upon awakening the next morning I always feel great, ready to get up quickly to start the day. On the other hand if I had eaten dinner the night before, too soon before going to sleep, I will have a very sluggish start to the day.
By detailing all this, I am not recommending that skipping dinner be a regular event. Dinner is an important meal for lots of people, for many different reasons. Rather, what I am saying worked for me was to become more relaxed about having to eat dinner on those nights when it became a rushed, late evening meal. The added bonus is that I sleep better, and expend much less effort maintaining a healthy weight.
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Thats always a tough one for me and my partner.
For me alone it is less of an issue. I have a pretty consistent 8am to 4pm work schedule so I can get home in plenty of time to cook and eat several hours before my normal 11:00pm bed time. Brian on the other hand, works a four day week with very long shifts each day. In addition to the long shifts, his commute is roughly an hour each way. As a result, he often leaves the house at 6:00am and doesn’t arrive home until well after 7:00pm. Because of his long days and early start, he likes to be in bed by 10:30pm. This results in our eating dinner fairly close to our typical bedtimes.
I hadn’t really given the timing of dinner much thought. It might be interesting to make a point creating a larger gap between dinner and bed, at least on the three days Brian does not work and see if I notice a difference in how I sleep and how I wake up the next morning.
The other thing a long day and commute does is this: When your dinner is pushed to 7:30 or 8pm on a regular basis AND you ate lunch at 12 or 1pm, you are apt to be very hungry by 7:30. Then not only are you eating close to bedtime, you may be eating a lot!
Thats very true. It’s one of Brian’s biggest complaints that although he may be working from 7:00am until 7:00pm, the company sends him to lunch at noon.
i always dinner just a cup of cereal with milk one hour before i go to sleep, cause if not, i feel that my stomach is going to explode! also just after eating, i try to walk a little, and i feel better.
Hey Will excellent topic to get me going, lol. I would like to tell my side of the story. Few years ago I sign up for this voluntary weight loss program (like I needed lol), however, they called it a nutritional program. This is how it worked, through out the day I had to eat 6 portions of proteins, 6 portions of carbohydrates, 2 or unlimited veggies (greens, low in sugar), 8-10 glasses of water, and regular exercise 4-5 times a week about 1 hour/day. Portion was measure of my hand, or your hand size. It was point system so to achieve 6+6+2=14 points per day was excellent. We were allowed to break the rule one day of a week with sweets/junk food to satisfy cravings. The program was conducted for 8 weeks, and we had to record food intake into a sheet. So I think this was an excellent system to develop a solid discipline, and I did. I was fortunate to work from home full time at that time so I was able to fit all into my schedule. However, once I had to go out, preparing lunches and planning your food plan for a day was necessary. By the end of the program, my mind was trained so well that the sheet was not necessary. I didn’t loose weight, like I said I had nothing to loose, I actually gain more muscle, which was good. I also got lot of energy too. After that, my husband followed the same system for a while, and he was successful also, by loosing some weight and being. The trick was to write everything down, and he did. Writing it down really opens your eyes of how much unnecessary stuff you consume a day. Its been now few years and we have a system in place that works for us. Unfortunately, we have more work to do at work so sometimes its hard to fit in exercise task, but we make up on the weekends. Packing lunches and being in control help us to maintain our good food schedule, and that includes not eating at least 3 hours before bed. The biggest trick is that you need to be very and I mean very disciplined at the beginning to create this solid foundation, because no matter what happens eventually things get relaxed, like my big mac habit (don’t worry its been about 6 weeks w/o mac now).
So Will to answer your questions posted on my blog last week about me having more than 24 hours in a day. I wish I had more hours because the things I want to do I cannot possibly fit into my lifetime, but I will try. And yeah no kids yet, so will see how that will work out in the future…as always excellent topic.
Hi Anna! Thanks for the story. As usual it is a good one.
As far as the diet goes, I would reduce the 6 portions of protein, or at least make most of them plant proteins. I am not a vegetarian, but do try to limit my animal protein intake. There is more and more evidence that animal protein, in large amounts, can really have some adverse health effects. It’s not just the red meat, but dairy also.
-Will
I know what you mean about the meat proteins. I am trying to stay away from red meats, but it is hard during family events. When we go over to my parents in law, sometimes they put a steak in my dish a size of my two hands…I am putting stop on it. Fish and chicken now dominate in our house. Unfortunately, I love dairy and eggs, lol. Anna
Anna: Staying completely away from red meat is not easy for me either. I really don’t eat any kind of meat with most meals, but when I do, I don’t worry about it. One thing I have done is pay attention to where the meat comes from. Even if it costs more, I will choose humanely raised, hormone free, etc.
By the way Anna, I found your “story blob” and like it!
http://storyblob.blogspot.com/
I did post a comment there several days ago on the dividing bread post, but it has not shown up. Is there moderation or a spam filter that it might have been caught in? Let me know if I need to post it again.
Thanks!
Thanks Will. You are right, we should be looking into better quality meets, the worst is the supermarkets have sometimes good prices, but then is that good price good for your body. We actually will be looking into smaller butchers around to see if you can get something better, I guess if we don’t have to eat that much, then the price does not matter. The other issue is also fish, the mercury contamination and other contaminants due to farmed fish bother us a lot. Reluctant sometimes to eat salmon which I really like. I also love sushi, it was great when I was in Japan, but here my husband makes me think twice, because I just cannot think twice sometimes when I am hungry and I really like something, lol. But that is a topic for another day.
I am glad that you discovered the blob story, I did not wanted to mix too much of that stuff with photography. I find that there are people who don’t like to read so photo is good, and some like to read so I can offer both seperately. You should read the latest about what kind of food I used to eat when I was young. I am sorry, but something slipped through the crack, and not sure why didn’t go through, but yes if you could repost that will be great, if you wrote too much and don’t want to write again, that is fine with me, all it matters that you read and you enjoyed it. Thanks again, it is appreciated as always. Anna
Anna you are right about the fish. Did you see the couple of articles I did a while ago on that? Here is a link to one of them that talks about farmed fish and has a link to another story or two about salmon.
http://willtaft.com/health/tainted-farmed-fish/
I’ll re-read your story on dividing the bread and see if I can re-create my incredibly well written and witty comment!
-Will
Will thanks. I will definitely check your story after dinner, I think I know little about that issue, just aware of it. And thanks for the re-write, I feel bad – may be you shoud save it somewhere if it is long, that is what I do when my comments are long, write them in the other local editors and save them temporarily.
On the side note, just heard on the news about viagra causing deafness, and just now that cold and flu syrop may be harmful. I don’t know what people think and manufacturers think. Any medicine is equal to chemical, and that chemical is not like oiling hinges, it spreads over the whole body, and fixes something causing other problems.
Ha! Anna that’s funny. I just could not resist putting up a short post on that very subject. Then I see your comment and you say it better than I did. I think I’ll post a link to your comment here in the post I just did. Viagra and sudden deafness is bound to get a lot of attention. It sure caught my eye!
I dine with my boyfriend at 8pm, but whenever he’s not around, I dine with my housemate at 7pm, which I think is better. At home, we dine at about 6:30pm.
I think it is a problem for health is you eat too close to bedtime. If you eat at 8:00 pm and go to sleep at 1:00 am, that is OK. But if you eat at 7:00 pm and go to bed at 9:00, that may be a problem.
There is also a lot of new evidence that dining with anybody is a healthy habit in itself and that eating alone can be a problem. I guess that would depend who you eat with and how stressful they made eating!
I always seem to eat something just before going to bed.
Eating more than 3 hours before bed is good unless you don’t eat enough in which case you’ll be hungry again before you go to bed!
Then you end up eating so much more!
As I usually work late into nights up till the the wee hours of morning, I feel hungry before I go to sleep. But I generally take my dinner at 11 PM maximum, and then drink only water that too after a gap of an hour after the meals.
I eat six times a day even if it is close to bed time.It works for me.
I generally try to eat around 7 o’clock, a few hours after I get off work. It allows me to relax a little before I make anything to eat. After dinner (about 45 mins later) I walk about 1.5 miles.
I am glad that this works for you, but personally the later I eat, the easier I find it to fall asleep and stay asleep. If I eat dinner at 6pm, when I get in after work (and am starving) I will without a doubt be hungry again by 10pm. I usually go to bed at 11pm, so by then I am starving and can’t sleep.
However if I go to the gym and eat dinner at 8pm, then I won’t need to snack. So for me this is better for my weight managment as well as my sleep.
This is an interesting topic. I’m going to have to do some research. Someone in the nutrition field told me that people in general should eat every 3 – 4 hours (5-6 meals a day). He said that boosts your metabolism. I go to bed at 12. It sounds like you are advising me to not eat after 9 pm. However, that is the time that I get off from work. I’m really hungry in the evening even if I eat at 530. When I’m hungry I can’t sleep. Any suggestions?
I generally try to eat around 7 o’clock, a few hours after I get off work. It allows me to relax a little before I make anything to eat. After dinner (about 45 mins later) I walk about 1.5 miles. Naveen Sabharwall
I’m going to have to do some research. Someone in the nutrition field told me that people in general should eat every 3 – 4 hours (5-6 meals a day). He said that boosts your metabolism. I go to bed at 12. It sounds like you are advising me to not eat after 9 pm. However, that is the time that I get off from work. I’m really hungry in the evening even if I eat at 530. When I’m hungry I can’t sleep.After dinner (about 45 mins later) I walk about 1.5 miles.
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