Few lifestyle choices come with as much cultural baggage as dinner time. There are all national stereotypes: Americans eat early, Italians eat late, Spanish eat late. Early dinner opens in the evening. A late dinner can be an event in itself.
But is there a healthier time to eat dinner? Kind of. Say what you definitely want to do Walter Longodirector of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, finish your food at least three hours before you plan to sleep. If your usual bedtime is midnight, for example, you have a deadline of 9 p.m.
This is because eating too late can disrupt circadian rhythms that govern how the body transitions from day to night and back again. “If you delay dinner for later, the message sent to your system will be: [that] “You need to stay active,” Longo says. “This can negatively impact your sleep (in the same way that exposure to bright light before bed will) and how efficiently you burn calories.”
Dinner time also determines the total time you fast between your last meal one day and your first meal the next day. This is the “time-restricted eating” type. Intermittent fasting This includes keeping all of your day’s meals in a window of 12 hours or less, he says Adam CollinsAssociate Professor of Nutrition at the University of Surrey. If you extend your fast overnight between dinner and breakfast, “you’re allowing your body to move into a more catabolic phase, where you switch to fat oxidation. You’re training your body to do what it’s designed to do: burn carbohydrates when you eat carbohydrates, and then burn fat when you don’t.” This can aid in weight loss and is generally beneficial for your metabolic health.
Should eating in a restricted window mean eating breakfast later or eating dinner earlier? “The consensus seems to be that you get more money if you restrict your calories earlier in the day,” Collins says. “This makes sense from a circadian perspective, because you are primed to handle food early in your active phase.”
Longo says the most common habit among centenarians is to eat a “light dinner” early enough to allow 12 hours before breakfast the next day. Eat smaller portions later in the day It seems Healthy, too, at least if we believe the old adage that commands us to “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”
This is not always realistic. “It’s very difficult to eat a big breakfast because you don’t feel hungry,” Collins says, partly because your body has “started exporting glucose into the blood” when you wake up, so your energy levels are already high. Considering that many people eat sandwiches for lunch – how many of us have cooked meals in the office? It is inevitable that most of us load up on calories in the evening.
Don’t stress about it, Collins says. Loading up on calories at night is fine as long as you give your body a “rest period” with a low-carb breakfast the next day. Eating dinner early is one thing, but it’s also important to make sure you don’t “sit in front of the TV and watch it.” [chips] “And chocolate and alcohol” after that. If an early-restricted eating window isn’t realistic, eating a later meal is still better than letting your meal times stretch over the entire day. And if you’re doing a lot of exercise during the day — especially the resistance-based kind, like weightlifting — eating a big dinner rich in carbohydrates and protein could be just the thing to help your muscles recover.
