CHAPTER 25: DON’T GO TO BED HUNGRY, BUT AVOID LATE DINNERS

By DARIUS CREED

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You may have repeatedly heard that your largest meal should be your morning breakfast, and your smallest meal should be your evening dinner. You know the saying. Something about eating breakfast like a King and dinner like a bum.

Nonsense. I suggest that you do the reverse.

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Large Breakfasts Start Your Day Sleepy (Not Ideal)

First of all, if you consume your largest meal first thing in the morning, all you’ll do is send your body’s energy toward digestion. And what happens after you eat a large meal? That’s right. You want to go to sleep.

Why start the day feeling sleepy? I personally fast for most of the day, which energizes me all day long. And there are countless health advantages to fasting beyond energy.

But if fasting “ain't your bag” (and for most people, it’s not), you can opt to consume your lightest meal for morning breakfast instead. You’ll still have more energy for the day. And, as we all agree, whenever you consume your largest meal, it’s difficult to stay awake. Lightbulb!

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Defeat Insomnia with Hearty Dinners

Now that I’ve explained why having a large breakfast first thing in the morning isn’t the brightest idea for energizing the day, let’s pivot toward the topic of dinner. If insomnia is a problem for you, I suggest you examine what time you usually have that dinner and how large it is. If your last meal of the day is a tiny snack-sized “dinner,” or if you’re regularly going to sleep on an empty stomach from having digested your last meal eight or nine hours prior, you may run into some sleep challenges.

You see, if you go to sleep on an empty stomach, you are in a fasted state. Whenever you fast, you activate ghrelin, a hunger hormone (Mifune et al., 2020). Fasting for extended periods also activates orexin-A, a neurotransmitter that stimulates wakefulness (Almeneessier et al., 2018). The combination of being hungry and alert is not the smartest strategy before going to bed.

Now, you might be concerned that eating too late could cause you to gain weight. And you would be right if the rest of your meals were equally as large (or if you consume garbage). But if instead you are eating your smallest meals earlier or if you’re fasting for the first few hours of your day, then you would have burned a significant number of calories during this high-energy period, and you needn’t be too concerned with getting fat from a larger dinner.

Having your largest meal for dinner will trigger the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS), which delivers the sensation of relaxation and sleepiness (Steffens et al., 1986). That’s what you want to experience if you are looking to get some much-needed sleep.

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Don’t Eat Too Late

Before you start gorging on dinner to get yourself into a post-meal coma, there is a smart way and a dumb way to go about it. There’s been a lot of research that has recently come out revealing that late-evening meals too close to bedtime isn’t the best strategy. In fact, research has found that eating within two hours of bedtime may actually disrupt sleep (Chung et al., 2020; Gupta et al., 2022; Iao et al., 2021). That’s correct. The very strategy that can easily get you to sleep may end up interfering with your sleep sometime during the night.

It has also been shown that high-fat dinners impair mitochondrial biogenesis (Breininger et al., 2019). The same thing can be said of excess sugar (Cioffi et al., 2017). Mitochondria are not only considered the energy components of the cell but they have also been shown to influence the circadian rhythm (de Goede et al., 2018). If the circadian rhythm is out of sync, sleep will also be off.??

A couple of more things to keep in mind: When it’s late at night, your body does not metabolize glucose as effectively, so late-dinner calories tend to get stored more easily (Nakamura et al., 2021). Moreover, sleeping right after dinner could end up leading to acid reflux (Fujiwara et al., 2005).

Bottom line: I would not normally suggest finishing your dinner right before going to sleep. Yes, the sleep may come easily, but if you do this often enough, you might end up having new problems.

Does this mean that I no longer recommend having a large dinner? No. To avoid running into issues, you can still have your largest meal for dinner, but you’ll simply need to cut it off by a certain time before going to sleep.

I recommend having your dinner around three to four hours before sleep. Your insulin will still be functioning close enough to normal, and you will only need to wait a few hours before bedtime, which will still allow what’s left of the meal to promote the drowsiness needed for a good night’s rest. Since the food will not have to go through extensive digestion for most of the night, it should not interfere with sleep quality. Best of both worlds.

So, if, for example, you were planning on going to sleep by 11 p.m., eat dinner by 7 or 8 p.m. This will be much better than eating a tiny meal or skipping dinner entirely and going to sleep hungry, which could lead to insomnia.

Keep in mind, if you can’t get yourself to eat a large enough meal for dinner, you may still hit the sack hungry with enough energy to interrupt your sleep before your target wake-up time. The key is eating less during the day so you can eat more for dinner. But if, for whatever reason, you just don’t have it in you to eat enough during your evening meal, having your modest-sized dinner three hours prior to sleep would probably be more ideal for you than four.

Is it Ever OK to Eat a Late-Night Meal?

One more thing to consider before this chapter concludes: If you have been so severely sleep-deprived from chronic insomnia that you are desperately in need of some much-needed rest, then, instead of waiting three to four hours, you may want to allow yourself to make the occasional exception and go to sleep as soon as your post-dinner lethargy kicks in. Why fight it? It could be your opportunity to finally reset your bedtime and get you accustomed to going to sleep earlier.

You’re not going to suddenly wake up 20 pounds fatter the next day, nor will acid reflux be an immediate threat from such a random occasion. And the possible sleep disruption I mentioned earlier might be overshadowed by the benefit of going to sleep earlier and resetting your circadian clock.

This may not be what most experts would recommend, but sometimes you’ve got to exchange a greater harm for a lesser harm. Just don’t make it a habit. This is not medical advice. It’s simply what I would do if I felt a strong enough need.

Keep in mind, there are other dietary factors that can interfere with sleep besides how late one eats dinner. As Chapter 5 explains, the typical Western diet that most late-night eaters indulge in is frequently loaded with inflammatory processed ingredients and stimulants that are known sleep disruptors (Basdeki et al., 2022). In the next chapter, Dr. D discusses some dietary options that can help you sleep more easily.

NOTE

What you are reading is a small portion of a book I put together with Dr. Catherine Divingian. Most chapters were written by me, while other chapters were written by her. Some of the material was written by both of us.

I originally wanted to post the entire ebook at once, but given its size, I came to realize that is not practical. There are four main parts to this book, each with its corresponding chapter/s. Every day, I will post a chapter until the entire book has been fully posted into LinkedIn. The first day will be the book Title, Medical Disclaimer, Table of Contents, Preface, How to Use This Book, and Introduction. The next day forward will be all the Part intros and the chapters, one per day.

Most of the chapters are fairly short. No long stories. We make it a point to get to the point. This is deliberate. We wanted to keep the chapters short so you can make the most of the information without burning up too much of your time doing so. For busy professionals this is a good thing.

Anyone who wants a copy of the ebook—in its entirety—is free to DM me. We will be happy to send you a digital copy as our gift to you.

Rest well.

Darius Creed (& Dr. D)

SOURCES

Almeneessier, A. S., Alzoghaibi, M., BaHammam, A. A., Ibrahim, M. G., Olaish, A. H., Nashwan, S. Z., & BaHammam, A. S. (2018). The effects of diurnal intermittent fasting on the wake-promoting neurotransmitter orexin-A. Annals of Thoracic Medicine, 13(1), 48–54. https://doi.org/10.4103/atm.atm_181_17

Basdeki, E. D., Koumi, K., Tsirimiagkou, C., Argyris, A., Chrysostomou, S., Sfikakis, P. P., Protogerou, A. D., & Karatzi, K. (2022). Late-Night overeating or low-quality food choices late at night are associated with subclinical vascular damage in patients at increased cardiovascular risk. Nutrients, 14(3), 470. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu14030470

Breininger, S. P., Malcomson, F. C., Afshar, S., Turnbull, D. M., Greaves, L., & Mathers, J. C. (2019). Effects of obesity and weight loss on mitochondrial structure and function and implications for colorectal cancer risk. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 78(3), 426–437. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0029665119000533

Chung, N., Bin, Y. S., Cistulli, P. A., & Chow, C. M. (2020). Does the proximity of meals to bedtime influence the sleep of young adults? A cross-sectional survey of university students. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(8), 2677. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17082677

Cioffi, F., Senese, R., Lasala, P., Ziello, A., Mazzoli, A., Crescenzo, R., Liverini, G., Lanni, A., Goglia, F., & Iossa, S. (2017). Fructose-Rich diet affects mitochondrial DNA damage and repair in rats. Nutrients, 9(4), 323. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu9040323

de Goede, P., Wefers, J., Brombacher, E. C., Schrauwen, P., & Kalsbeek, A. (2018). Circadian rhythms in mitochondrial respiration. Journal of Molecular Endocrinology, 60(3), R115–R130. https://doi.org/10.1530/jme-17-0196

Fujiwara, Y., Machida, A., Watanabe, Y., Shiba, M., Tominaga, K., Watanabe, T., Oshitani, N., Higuchi, K., & Arakawa, T. (2005). Association between dinner-to-bed time and gastro-esophageal reflux disease. The American Journal of Gastroenterology, 100(12), 2633–2636. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1572-0241.2005.00354.x

Gupta, C. C., Vincent, G. E., Coates, A. M., Khalesi, S., Irwin, C., Dorrian, J., & Ferguson, S. A. (2022). A time to rest, a time to dine: Sleep, time-restricted eating, and cardiometabolic health. Nutrients, 14(3), 420. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu14030420

Iao, S. I., Jansen, E. C., Shedden, K., O’Brien, L. M., Chervin, R. D., Knutson, K. L., & Dunietz, G. L. (2021). Associations between bedtime eating or drinking, sleep duration and wake after sleep onset: Findings from the American time use survey. British Journal of Nutrition, 127(12), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007114521003597

Mifune, H., Tajiri, Y., Sakai, Y., Kawahara, Y., Hara, K., Sato, T., Nishi, Y., Nishi, A., Mitsuzono, R., Kakuma, T., & Kojima, M. (2020). Voluntary exercise is motivated by ghrelin, possibly related to the central reward circuit. Journal of Endocrinology, 244(1), 123–132. https://doi.org/10.1530/JOE-19-0213

Nakamura, K., Tajiri, E., Hatamoto, Y., Ando, T., Shimoda, S., & Yoshimura, E. (2021). Eating dinner early improves 24-h blood glucose levels and boosts lipid metabolism after breakfast the next day: A randomized cross-over trial. Nutrients, 13(7), 2424. https://doi.org/10 .3390/nu13072424

Steffens, A. B., Van der Gugten , J., G?deke, J., Luiten, P. G. M., & Strubbe, J. H. (1986). Meal-induced increases in parasympathetic and sympathetic activity elicit simultaneous rises in plasma insulin and free fatty acids. Physiology & Behavior, 37(1), 119–122. https://doi .org/10.1016/0031-9384(86)90393-8

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