Make it light at night
Sometimes when I talk with people who struggle with their weight, they’ll tell me that the reason they can’t lose weight is because they eat too much at night – “I eat,” they’ll say, “and then I just sit around and I don’t burn it off – that’s my problem”. While intuitively this might make sense, it doesn’t really work this way. Taking in too many calories – at any time of the day – is going to lead to weight gain.
The body just doesn’t micromanage calories that carefully. And here’s why: we evolved under conditions of food scarcity – in order to survive, we had to be able to store extra calories if we overate – whenever that might be – and then be able to call them up when we needed them. Our ancestors foraged for food all day long, and they needed to store (or use) all the calories they could get – whether they were eaten at dawn or around the fire at night.
The same thing is true for us today – it doesn’t matter if you eat your extra calories before the sun goes down or after – either way, your fat cells are more than happy to hang on to them for you to use later.
People probably think this way because they notice that they lose weight when they stop eating so much at night (or set some arbitrary rule, like “I won’t eat after 7 p.m.”). But it’s not the time of day that matters – if you were to eat your usual post-7 p.m. calories at 3 p.m. instead, you wouldn’t burn them off any faster.
A lot of people who overeat do the majority of their gorging late in the day and well into the evening. So when they stop eating at 7 PM, they cut out hundreds of calories that ordinarily would have consumed. They’re losing weight not because they stopped eating after a certain time – they’re losing weight because, well, they stopped eating.
One of the main reasons people overeat at night is, in fact, because they haven’t adequately fueled themselves during the day. Lots of people try to power through the day on very little food, then by the time they hit the door at night, they’re starving. And it’s easy to justify a bedtime binge if you tell yourself that you’ve “hardly eaten all day”.
There’s an old saying that you should eat ‘breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper’. It’s still great advice, and I often encourage people to ‘diet at night’. Start the day with a healthy, high protein breakfast (like a protein shake, a high protein cereal with milk and fruit, yogurt with fruit, or a veggie omelet), have a healthy lunch with plenty of protein and veggies, and then have a large snack – almost like another meal – in the middle of the afternoon, at around 3 or 4 o’clock. Then, you won’t be starving at dinner, and you can then get by with something light – like a small salad with a little protein in it or a bowl of soup.
Written by Susan Bowerman, MS, RD, CSSD. Susan is a paid consultant for Herbalife.
Tags: calories, diet, eating at night, Herbalife, late night eating, light, lose weight, night eating, Susan Bowerman, Weight Loss
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Ladies and gents. I began to eat according to the “breakfast like a king……” and have lost a total of 22lb in a year. which is great because it was gradual. I still ate what i loved but just changed the hours. Worked great for me…still working great for me..now im adding exercise.
Hi Judy,
Always consult your healthcare professional prior to starting a weight management program and incorporating dietary supplements.
Here are a few recommendations:
If you are preparing your Formula 1 shake with water, try it with milk. You will be adding more protein to your shake and that may help curb your hunger for longer. The shakes are designed to be used as meal replacements and using milk or Personalized Protein Powder will achieve this desired design.
You might also like to try adding Prolessa Duo to your dinner shake as it can really help keep hunger at bay but remember to stir it into your shake rather than blend.
Hi, I’m on the Herbalife diet, you said “have a large snack – almost like another meal – in the middle of the afternoon, at around 3 or 4 o’clock,” what would you recommend that large snack be? What would be a healthy large snack I mean? I have the same problem….I start off my day @ 7am, I do the shake, I eat my herbalife protein bar at 10 am for a snack, I eat at 12, like a Grilled Salad, then at around 3 another protein bar, and at 5pm I drink my shake, but later that night I’m starving, am I doing something wrong? Should I be eating more during my lunch hour? Or should I try eating larger snacks to avoid eating at night? Because when I get hungry at night I tend to be picking at food and stuff like that which I know is bad…
we have to see that our overall calaries should not exceed what we need daily this helps to store over calories in the body which leeds to health problems.
good information very useful to make world healthier of herbalife international
Thanks for your comment. Getting some activity in the evening is a great idea – taking a walk after dinner, for example, not only helps with digestion, but could keep you out of the kitchen and help you avoid evening snacking. But, in terms of weight management, the time of day that you ingest your calories – or, to your point, the time of day that you expend them through exercise – doesn’t really make any difference. It’s simply a matter of balancing your calorie intake with your calorie expenditure.
Sometimes we hear that we should ‘put calories in use’ straight after eating (what we normally don’t do if we eat in the evening). Is there any truth in that saying?