There are a lot of people who are curious about the best time to consume a sizable meal. Is it okay to eat a 10-course dinner right before bed, or is it absolutely necessary to eat a healthy breakfast in the morning?
We all have a gut feeling that we already know the answers to these questions, but just in case, here’s a rundown of the specific reasons why eating right before bedtime isn’t exactly the most seductive practice. The daily grind of 9 to 5 is making you overweight and sick.
To put it another way… People have a tradition of eating one large meal per day, typically in the middle of the day. This tradition dates back hundreds of years. If you stuff your face with a large meal at lunch, you won’t be as likely to sleep through the rest of the day, even if you take a short nap afterward.
This is one of the advantages of eating during the middle of the day. The important thing is that you kept moving and gave your body the opportunity to burn off all of those calories that you had just consumed. One simple fact helped your digestion, and that was the fact that you stood the whole time. You did not have acid reflux, which is caused when acids from the stomach travel backwards through the esophagus into the food pipe.
Following that was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Hello 9 to 5. The majority of us began to forgo eating breakfast. Millions of people are fortunate enough to be able to sit in front of a screen for a few hours, shovel some processed, nutritionless slop into our mouths, and then pass out before the next work-a-day grind begins as our alarms blare out ungodly sounds before 7 in the morning. This causes some unfavorable outcomes.
When we consume the majority of our calories later in the day, our hormones are not regulated as effectively as when we consume the majority of our calories earlier in the day. Those who start their day with a nutritious meal have lower levels of the hormone ghrelin, which is responsible for the increased appetite it produces. And if we’ve just consumed a massive meal before going to bed, our bodies have to concentrate on digesting that meal rather than cleaning up the mess left behind from the meals and metabolic processes of the previous days. Is it then unhealthy to eat before going to bed?
Since the time before the Industrial Revolution, when workers were required to begin their shifts as early in the morning as possible and endured a monotonous routine, the concept of lunch has been around. Why not give it a shot?